Vol. 72/No. 42      October 27, 2008

Since the fall of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union in 1991, Moscow has accelerated the opening of Russia to the world capitalist market.

The bureaucratic caste that rules there no longer puts forward the false claim that it is communist or for revolution. Russian president Dmitry Medvedev says the government’s priority is to guarantee “stability and prosperity to private businesses.”

The bureaucratic caste does not represent a new capitalist class. Instead it derives its material privileges from the state property foundations of the workers state. Most of them don’t own companies they can sell or their families can inherit. While they ape bourgeois life styles and promote bourgeois values, they cannot be sure which of them, if any, will become the owners if state property is replaced by capitalist property. Thus the Militant sometimes refers to them as “wannabe capitalists.”

Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and now Medvedev, have accelerated the use of capitalist methods, the penetration of the capitalist market, and the conversion of many state enterprises into capitalist-owned companies.

By the end of 1999 more than 140,000 former state-owned companies were sold off or converted into private enterprises. Some of the new owners were part of the old Stalinist apparatus.

This process is continuing. The state-owned Unified Energy System, which produces more than 70 percent of Russia’s electricity, is currently being broken up and sold off to private investors.

Russia now has 101 billionaires—more than any other country in the world, except for the United States—and 88,000 millionaires. Many of them gained their wealth not through investing in factories or the exploitation of natural resources, but speculation in real estate and the stock market or ties to the bureaucracy.

While there are many capitalist-owned companies, the largest, most important sectors of the Russian economy—oil, natural gas, and aerospace—are still in state hands.

Some 11.5 percent of the state-controlled Gazprom, which produces and sells natural gas and operates as a joint stock company, is held by foreign investors.

After years of decline following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Russian economy had begun to grow again, in large part due to the rising price of oil. Russia’s international currency reserves are now the world’s third largest. And Russia is the world’s biggest oil producer and the largest oil exporter outside of OPEC.

But this seeming strength is actually a reflection of its weakness. The Russian state is dependent on oil and gas, which accounted for two-thirds of export revenues last year and nearly half of the federal budget—risky business in an era of widely swinging commodity prices in the opening stages of a world-wide depression. It imports more than $260 billion a year, mostly in machinery, medicine, meat, and sugar, and more than 40 percent of its food.

This integration into the world capitalist market has another side to it: working people, who had been driven out of politics by the Stalinists, can no longer be kept out. They are part of the world and able to join the resistance that is already developing to the international capitalist economic crisis.

In September 1,000 truck drivers protested in Moscow against the high price of fuel. Russian trade unions say that 470,000 workers were involved in “labor disputes” in 2007, according to the Interfax news agency.

This bodes well for building an international movement of workers that can take power out of the hands of the capitalists and kick out the bureaucratic regimes that seek to emulate them.  
 
 
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