Russia's Oligarchs, Middle Class Created Putin, Says Analyst

Russian liberals often claim Vladimir Putin has his base in the “vatniki,” the uneducated lower classes. But his rise didn’t owe to the “brainless masses” — it’s the result of the social Darwinism that gripped Russia in its shock transition to capitalism, Vadim Nikitin wrote in an analysis for Jacobin magazine’s August 2022 issue.

Photo Insert: “For all Putin’s rhetoric of Soviet nostalgia, he is a man of the ’90s, the heir to [Russian president Boris] Yeltsin.”

“The Russian intelligentsia traditionally blames the lower classes for their alleged naiveté and tendency to be influenced by propaganda,” says Natalia Kalfics-Mamonova, an expert on grassroots politics in the former Soviet Union at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.

“However, the true picture is much more nuanced than that.” She notes that in an authoritarian context, it is probably impossible to know the extent of popular support for the war.

According to her, even among regime functionaries and members of the security services, “financial reasons often trump ideology and Soviet nostalgia” when it comes to people’s willingness to tolerate the war and other excesses.

However grotesque it has become, Putinism remains at heart a neoliberal phenomenon.

That is a point made in a recent essay by prominent sociologist and Putin critic Grigory Yudin. The social order Putin built in Russia, he writes in the opposition outlet Meduza, is a “radical version of modern neoliberal capitalism, in which greed rules, the ultimate aspiration is individual comfort, and cynicism, irony, and nihilism provide a cosseting feeling of easy superiority.”

Yudin’s contention contradicts a central mainstream shibboleth about Putin’s Russia — that, whatever its problems or merits, Russia’s current system has fundamentally broken with the post-Soviet Russia built in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin.

Depending on who you ask, those years were either a time of imperfect but blossoming democracy or chaos, humiliation and degradation. Yet as Tony Wood, a member of the New Left Review editorial board, argued in his 2018 book, Russia Without Putin, “The system that prevailed in the 2000s was not a perversion of Yeltsinism but its maturation.”

It remains underpinned by a commitment to insider capitalism at home and postimperial denial abroad, with rampant inequality whose effects are papered over by commodity booms and the tattered remnants of the Soviet welfare state. The poet and activist Kirill Medvedev concurs.

“For all Putin’s rhetoric of Soviet nostalgia, he is a man of the ’90s, the heir to [Russian president Boris] Yeltsin,” he said. And just as the 1990s oligarchs were deeply entangled with the state, so the “siloviki” (securocrats) who have replaced them as the arbiters of political power under Putin are embedded in the capitalist system.

For all their superficial differences, both groups turned the apparatus of the state into an instrument for individual enrichment. As business and mafia groups were gradually brought under the control of the security services, the state absorbed and internalized their profit-driven ideology and modi operandi.

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