Frederik Haber
There is a cynical old joke “If elections changed anything they would be banned”. Certainly there was no need to ban the Presidential election in the Russian Federation. Everything was done to make the outcome inevitable. Whether the result was really 88.5% does not change anything, nor do the figures for Putin’s competitors. But the elections do reveal something about the Putin system that is of interest to all those hoping, or working, for change within the Russian Federation. These are very different forces with very different goals. Revolutionary Socialists are among them, but so are the leaders of the Western imperialist states, our greatest enemies.
The “Putin system”
Despite what most observers think, a high approval rating in the election was very important to Putin. Even though he is often referred to as a “dictator” – he cannot do as Zelensky did and simply suspend elections. Rather, he shows that, unlike the latter, he can afford them.
Unlike many dictators, Putin did not achieve his rule through a military coup or something similar, but by winning elections. The system of government with a strong president was not invented by him. It goes back primarily to Boris Yeltsin who, as president thirty years ago, used tanks to open fire on the” White House” where the Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Council were sitting, forcing it to surrender. He then dissolved it and introduced a very powerful presidential system, which he used to drive through the neoliberal shock therapy, with catastrophic results for the living standards of the country’s workers.
Putin came to power as Yeltsin’s chosen successor at the end of the 1990s, when the country was in a very precarious situation. Under Yeltsin, the radical liberalisers had smashed everything that was reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s planned economy or collective property and handed the country’s wealth to the newly created bourgeoisie. At the end of the 1990s, the country was in a deep economic crisis, with mass poverty and hunger. The working class began to fight back with large-scale strikes, while the new bourgeoisie moved their plundered billions out of the country.
In this situation, a single leader was able to rise above the struggling classes and their factions and, under the slogan of “uniting the country”, indicate a path he claimed would serve everyone. Putin was the person who was best able to fulfil this role and he succeeded in establishing a system in the Russian Federation that Marxists call “Bonapartism” after Napoleon’s post-1799 rule.
It was this historical situation, with a fluctuating, uncertain balance of power, that called for a Putin for the new ruling class. In addition, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the entire new bourgeoisie had already smashed the degenerated workers’ state of the USSR and restored capitalism. They were aided in this by the fact that in the 1920s the Stalinist bureaucracy had already begun to disempower the working class and to destroy the working class character of the Bolshevik Party. But Yeltsin and Co had not tackled the problem of where this country would fit back into the imperialist world system. Would it become economically and politically subordinated to the West (the USA and the EU, i.e what Marxists call a semi-colony)? Or could it become a new imperialist power, dominating the former territories of the Soviet Union and, once more, play the role of a “great power” on the word stage.
Setting the course
In the first 10 – 15 years of his rule, Putin set the course for Russia to avoid becoming an ultimately subordinate power as envisaged by the Western imperialists, or – as in tsarist times – a weak imperialist state, heavily dependent on loans and technology from European countries. At first, he tried to work in alliance with the USA, supporting it in the UN Security Council, and practically aiding its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In return, the West supported Putin’s bloody war in Chechnya. But Washington made it clear by 2008 that it would not support Russian re-assertion of its ‘empire’ over Georgia or Ukraine or its role in world politics (Syria, Libya).
From 2008 onwards, therefore, it became clear that Putin’s goal was for Russia to become a new imperialist state, based on the economic and military legacy of the Soviet Union, and its plentiful and coveted natural resources. These gave it the economic and military resources to act as a spoiler for the plans of the world hegemon, the USA. Together with the rise of China to the position of an immensely productive imperialist economy, this set the scene for a new period of struggle for the redivision of the world.
Putin’s attempt to give Russia a place among the leading imperialist nations has certainly proved successful, though in a very different way from China’s. However, this policy also demands sacrifices in order to finance the military and interventions. In a bourgeois state, these costs are always passed on to the working classes – just as the workers and farmers in Germany are currently experiencing, although to a much lesser extent than their fellow sufferers in the Russian Federation.
The constellation of forces that once allowed Putin to rise to power no longer exists in the same form. The working class has lost its fighting power and the bourgeoisie is no longer the rapacious but politically mindless “oligarchs” of the 1990s. However, it has consolidated its rule – not by more or less openly fighting out the interests of the various factions of capitalists (which is an essential function of bourgeois democracy), but through the regulatory hand of the state, personified by Putin as Bonaparte.
In recent years, he has been less and less able to appear to act on behalf of the “whole people” because he increasingly acts for the bourgeoisie. The more sacrifices he demands from the working population, the more privatisation and deterioration of education, health, pensions etc. he imposes, the more clearly his popularity must now be stage managed. After all, Bonapartism requires a variety of populism. So, even if Putin tries to polish up his “social” credentials with privileges for war veterans, high pay outs to frontline fighters as well as tax increases for the rich in the war industries, his real reputation amongst the millions must be uncertain to him, since he dare not test it by allowing any serious opposition candidates to stand and by murdering any rivals either on the right or the left.
Of course, the increasing Cold and Hot wars in particular allow for an additional re-forging of the “unity of the nation”. But this is a risky game: losing wars is probably the most unpopular thing for any government.
The election
The elections in Russia were therefore intended to act as a huge plebiscite. Putin ran in the election as an “independent” candidate, not for his party “United Russia”. He therefore also collected (or rather had supporters collect) signatures, which he would not have needed to do as the candidate of his party. But a plebiscite also looks much better when there are opposing candidates, as long as it is guaranteed that they have no chance of winning. The dangerous ones are not admitted, like Boris Nadezhdin, or removed, like Alexei Navalny. A total of eleven other people had announced their intention to run, but then “voluntarily” withdrew some of their candidacies. The “liberal” Vladislav Davankov, Nikolai Kharitonov for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) and Leonid Sluzki for the right-wing nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) were admitted. The LDPR and KPRF are the parties that have reliably supported the Kremlin’s policies for decades, especially its foreign and war policies, but also its repression at home.
The KPRF goes so far as to allow well-known left-wing figures to stand on its lists, such as Duma deputy Anastasia Udaltsova, but then do not raise the slightest protest when her husband, Sergei Udaltsov, is arrested, as happened recently. Not a word of solidarity with the convicted Boris Kargalitsky, who had often been invited to speak at KPRF events in the past, but the justification for his arrest was that he was a “Trotskyist” and was financed from abroad (he had received fees for articles in left-wing newspapers).
The third “opposing candidate” for Putin was the fairly newly emerged Vladislav Davankov, who was supposed to embody the role of the “liberal”, with the “New People” party which was also quite visibly founded “from above”. They all could and should only serve to cover up the absence of “dangerous” candidates and to decorate Putin’s victory.
The result
Vladimir Putin (non-party): 88.5 %; Nikolai Kharitonov (KPRF): 4.4 %; Vladislav Davankov (New People): 3.9 %; Leonid Slutsky (LDPR): 3.2 %.
In addition to the pre-selection of candidates by the Central Election Commission, there are other ways of organising the election. Mobilisation by the state bureaucracy is probably specific to the Russian Federation: state employees are asked by their superiors to vote, if necessary, collectively. For their part, the superiors are held responsible for a high voter turnout and the number of Putin votes – perhaps comparable to the custom practised in Bavaria, for example, of going together to vote for the Christian Social Union after church with a corresponding priestly recommendation.
The most interesting result under these election conditions remains the number of invalid votes. The electoral law of the Russian Federation ignores remarks, insults, or the writing in of other names. A vote is invalid if more than one box is ticked. And that is exactly what 1.37 million more or less consciously did. The opposition coalition “Sprawedliwyj mir” (“Make the world”) had also called for this.
Western democracy
As revolutionary communists, we criticise the elections and the Bonapartist system behind them because, according to our analysis, it is obvious what Putin’s autocracy is based on politically, and how he secures it institutionally.
This has nothing to do with the polemics of Western demagogues, whose aim is to seek an ideological justification for their Cold War against Russia, while they prepare themselves for the possibility that it turns into a hot one: Democracy versus dictatorship; free elections versus sham elections. This demagogy – like Putin’s – also serves primarily to keep their own population and perhaps their respective allies in line.
When looking objectively at the US presidential election system, it is clear that it also bears only a semblance of democracy: an electoral system that requires voters to register themselves but allows arbitrary removal from the register by local electoral commissions and thus excludes 20-30% of those eligible to vote – especially from the social underclasses and the oppressed; an electoral system that requires hundreds of millions of dollars just to run for office, limiting candidates to people who have at least a significant portion of capitalists behind them; an electoral system in which you can win with fewer votes than your competitors – all of this by no means expresses the will of the majority, whether or not there is also falsification. The American president legitimises himself through a competition that is a real one among factions of big business but is presented to the electorate as a staging of “values” and “lifestyle”, precisely because this president is always a candidate of big business – i.e. of a tiny minority of the population.
The way in which the elections were held in the Russian Federation and the character of Putin’s Bonapartism show, on the one hand, that he still controls the state apparatus in such a way that elections cannot be the means by which this system can change. On the other hand, the necessary stage management of Putin’s popularity proves that this Bonapartism is hollowed out if he has to engage in such an obvious farce. The potential for an opposition from the left, which could be based on the working class, is difficult to see from these elections. There is a small hint in parts of the 4.4% in favour of the KPRF candidate, but above all in the 1.37 million invalid votes. A rejection of the war could also play a role in some of the 3.8% of votes in favour of Davankov.
Even if we can only speculate about the size of these potentials, they are definitely greater than what an anti-war movement can currently bring to the streets, which is suffering the harshest repression anyway, and more than what left-wing groups can currently organise. But political activists can and must prepare themselves today for the fact that the system will collapse at the latest when Bonaparte falls. Even a designated successor would never have come to power through the actual or supposed “will of the people”, but would have to rely even more heavily on state repression. The situation could then quickly take on crisis-like developments and allow the working class, the nationally, racially or gender oppressed, the left and anti-war activists to speak out more openly. But right-wing, nationalist and even fascist forces will also enter the field.
Tasks for the left
Of course, repression must not simply be accepted, and its victims must be defended. At the moment, women’s and LGBTIA organisations in particular, are once again under attack, as is any sexual expression that goes beyond heteronomy. Racism against Muslims and all labour migrants is on the rise.
Nonetheless, there is still resistance from below, which must be supported and expanded, whether it is trade union activities or anti-war protests, such as in the “Women of the Mobilised” movement.
But the most important task currently facing the organised left in the Russian Federation is to develop a Marxist understanding of the situation and, building on this, a programme that provides revolutionary answers to existing and future conflicts.
Both emigrants and the international left can help with this. The more the political and military tensions between Russia, China and the other imperialists increase, the more important such connections become, for political exchanges and practical action.