OPINION:
Vladimir Putin never sleeps, unlike his most famous counterpart elsewhere. He has refigured the Russian domestic scene in the Soviet image, one that gladdens the hearts of the remaining Soviets who never thought they would see his like again. What Mr. Putin and his supporters have done at home may be more important than his aggression against Ukraine, his support of the crumbling Bashar regime in Syria, his feints at the Baltic states.
There are, of course, important differences between now and Soviet times. There is no Communist Party, with its monopoly of power and its tentacles growing throughout the world. But Mr. Putin has all but eliminated organized opposition to the work of his one-man coterie and the hangers-on, his old colleagues in the KGB, and profiteers of Russia’s new state capitalism. Russia no longer pretends to an oligarchic Soviet economy.
With 40 percent of that economy dependent on oil and gas exports to Europe, Mr. Putin’s No. 1 problem is Western sanctions and the effect of American shale gas and oil technology on world energy prices. Supplying one-third of the European Union’s energy imports, Mr. Putin, despite the fall in world energy prices and the sanctions imposed on his friends as a rebuke of his efforts to take over Ukraine and Byelorussia, is desperate to hang on to those ties. Gazprom, the world’s largest gas distribution network, is trying to expand its line down to the Baltic Sea. A state-controlled company, having squeezed out competitors and seized stakes of foreign oil companies in new fields in Sakhalin in the Far East, is trying now to dominate European distribution networks.
Mr. Putin’s reversion to and dependence on a government elite, which leeches off the economy like the old nomenclatura, the Soviet bureaucracy, is all too familiar. In fact, Gennady Gudkov, a prominent businessman and one of the vanishing Putin critics, says “there are now five to six times more bureaucrats in a Russia with 140 million population, than in the entire USSR with its 286 million residents.” Mr. Gudkov, a onetime member of the Duma, the parliament, has watched his business interests wither as the Putin government stalks him and threatens his interests.
Furthermore, the bureaucracy, led by Mr. Putin himself, is acquiring more and more power. Even trimmings of the Soviet system have been abandoned, such as the fraudulent elections for regional governors. The billionaires who profit from their connections with the bureaucracy can fall quickly from favor. Several have gone to the purgatory of disfavor, if not exile or prison.
Mr. Putin’s Russia resembles more a banana republic, with little or no hint of ideology, than a mighty Marxist power. He gets friendly cooperation from the Russian Orthodox Church, just as the czars did for centuries. But he continues to cultivate the Communist past, for example the re-enshrinement of Feliz Dzerzhinsky, the archleader of Soviet internal repression. Mr. Putin once decried the fall of the Soviet Union as the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.
What characterizes his strategy now is bullying on the international stage. It was inevitable that American policy, which under former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton searched in vain for the “reset” button to transform U.S.-Russian relations, would fail. Redeeming ancient glory is his only strategy, and for that he needs an American enemy.
Just as in the old Soviet Union, the economic underbelly of the Putin regime is soft and vulnerable. Nothing makes more sense for the United States than to reverse Obama administration policy and permit the exporting of gas and perhaps oil from the American abundance. This would continue the disintegration of Russian markets, and reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian petroleum, and that would be all to the good.
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