Vol. 80/No. 39 October 17, 2016
United Russia party victory masks
workers’ discontent
A closer look reveals a different picture. Workers and farmers in Russia are being battered by the effects of the worldwide capitalist economic crisis there and are increasingly discontented. Labor protests are becoming more common and turnout in the elections hit a record low.
The Russian economy has been in a recession for more than a year and a half. The effects of the world slowdown in trade and production, and the plunge in the price of oil, a major Russian export, are exacerbated by sanctions imposed by Washington and other imperialist powers following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Manufacturing production has shrunk, and construction contracted by 10 percent in the first half of 2016 to a lower level than during the 2009 recession. Russian workers’ real wages fell roughly 10 percent last year. Sixty-three percent of families now spend more than half their income just on rent and utilities, up from 55 percent in 2009.
Seventeen percent of workers report problems getting paid on time, the Russian paper Kommersant said Sept. 26. This has been a major cause of an uptick in labor actions.
Miners from Gukovo, in southwestern Russia, have been demonstrating since May under the slogan, “We are not slaves.” They’re demanding a year’s worth of back wages owed by King Coal, their now-bankrupt employer. After a hunger strike in August drew national media attention, they finally received part of what they’re owed. But “now they’re saying there’s no more money,” Dmitry Kovalenko, one of the miners, told the press.
Farmers from the southern region of Krasnodar Krai set out in a tractor convoy Aug. 22, planning to bring to Moscow their complaint that local officials were illegally redistributing land to big companies. Some of the organizers were arrested and charged with staging an “unsanctioned protest.”
Nationwide turnout for the Sept. 18 election was less than 48 percent, down from 60 percent five years ago. In Moscow, St. Petersburg and other major cities less than 30 percent of those eligible voted. In Irkutsk in southern Siberia, a region where work stoppages are on the rise, just 28 percent voted.
Officials in Chechnya, where the brutal regime of Ramzan Kadyrov was installed by Putin as part of crushing the second war for independence, claimed much higher participation. They said 95 percent came to the polls, and 96 percent voted for Putin’s United Russia party.
Putin, the former head of Moscow’s FSB secret police agency, has run the government since being appointed prime minister in 1999. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, former Soviet bureaucrats used their privileged positions to assemble fortunes as chunks of the Russian economy were privatized. A layer of U.S. “advisers” from Harvard, along with associated bankers and hedge fund managers, got in on the plunder in the name of helping to implement “market reform.”
Representing the Russian capitalists who emerged from this orgy of pillage, Putin has sought to use strictly managed news to boost patriotism and identification with his regime, downplaying depression conditions there. He highlights Moscow’s foreign interventions and military actions abroad, from Ukraine to Syria.
Putin relies on a strategy that dates back to czardom, seeking to maintain a defensive buffer zone in Moscow’s “near abroad” to make interference from European imperialist powers and Washington more difficult. The U.S. government and its NATO allies have been pressing Moscow, stationing troops and weaponry in some of the eastern European countries that became independent after the fall of the Soviet Union.
This is behind Moscow’s seizure of Crimea and ongoing intervention in eastern Ukraine since workers in that country mobilized in what became known as the Maidan there in 2014, overthrowing the vassal regime of Viktor Yanukovych.
Putin’s approval rating soared at home after Moscow’s occupation and annexation of Crimea, which he presented as a historic restoration of Russian territory.
The Crimean Tatars, who were the peninsula’s primary inhabitants for centuries, don’t see it that way. The Tatars faced discrimination and oppression under both the Russian czars and then under Stalinism. The brief exception was during the revolutionary leadership of V.I. Lenin following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
Today the Crimean Tatars, who overwhelmingly opposed Moscow’s annexation and make up about 12 percent of the population, face growing repression. On Sept. 29 the Russian Supreme Court upheld a ban on the Mejlis, the Tatars’ elected self-governing body.
The Russian government had already banned historic Tatar leaders from entering Crimea, including Mustafa Dzhemilev. It is stepping up arrests, disappearances and frame-up trials against members of the Mejlis and other Tatars for expressing opposition to Moscow’s rule.
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