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The July-August issue of the New Left Review features a magisterial essay on Russia by Perry Anderson, the prominent British Marxist and editor of NLR. The essay examines Russia’s increasingly influential role in geopolitics and it’s renewed bid for “Great Power” status. Here’s an excerpt:
Ideologically speaking, the outbreak of conflict over Ukraine has released a reversion to the atmospherics of the Cold War. At home, delivery of the standard package by Russia might be halting or held up for a time, but still be moving in the right direction, and the West could take a long view and wait. Failure to comply with its instructions abroad was another matter. There, the international community brooked no license. Once Russia took over the Crimea, the tolerance of even the most sanguine students of Putin’s rule snapped. In setting off the ‘most dangerous crisis Europe has seen this century’, Treisman decided, ‘Putin has abandoned the strategy that has underwritten his political dominance for the last fourteen years’. That had rested on rising living standards for the population, benefiting from windfall energy prices, but involving ‘cordial relations with Western business circles’, entry into the WTO and OECD too. Falling growth rates since 2009 had required deficit financing to protect consumers from the effects of economic crisis. In these conditions, to affront the international community with a reckless foreign adventure risked a debacle—‘he has bet the throne on an approach that is likely to fail’. Losing the web-savvy middle class was a danger signal, but so long as the masses below them were looked after, the regime could persist. Losing the country’s bankers and big businessmen, on whom its economic cohesion depended, was another matter: their support was a pivot of the political system. There was no way elites such as these could regard sanctions with equanimity: their fortunes were at risk from any disruption of ties with the West. Could Putin seriously afford to alienate them?
To all appearances, here he is caught in a fork. For with the recovery of Crimea and the civil war in the Donbas, the ideological engine behind his return to the presidency has gone into overdrive, beyond his control of it. Having mobilized popular emotions of Russian nationalism for his re-election, and intensified them with his defiance of the West over Ukraine, can Putin afford to mortify them by climbing down in the face of sanctions? For the regime to weather even a milder version of an Iranian-style blockade, it would have to move in an autarkic direction, closer to a command economy of Soviet stamp. For it to accept the tutelage of the US and EU in Ukraine, and give up the Crimea, it would have to underwrite a modern Brest-Litovsk. Regression or humiliation: such, in terms of the system Putin has built, appear to be the alternatives. The regime will no doubt seek to evade them by combining sub rosa conciliation of the West—minimizing reprisals for the sanctions against it; continuing to cooperate with the quarantine of Iran; helping counter-insurgency in Afghanistan—with rhetorical bluster of national valiance for domestic consumption. How likely such a course is to maintain its credibility at home remains to be seen. Bluff can work in politics, as in war; rarely, however, for long.
Image of Vladimir Putin via The Independent