Apart from this fiscal reform and ongoing privatization, the first years of Vladimir Putin’s presidency were marked by an introduction of the Land Code, which secured private property rights on land, and of the Labour Code favorable to employers. The introduction of these legislative enactments was directly connected with the novel arrangement of political power: the President’s administration did not conceal from the public that the main reason why similar legislative acts had not been adopted in the previous decade was “the opposition of the parliamentary majority” to it.
It was the monetization of social benefits that became the apogee of neoliberal reforms during the first presidential term of Vladimir Putin. According to researcher Julie Hemment, this monetization reform continued the logic of social transformations of the Yeltsin period, which in their turn had been based on the World Bank models. The reform unleashed widespread protests across the entire country, which in a way resulted in a curtailment of neoliberal reforms during the second presidency. Nevertheless, external shocks like the crisis of 2008 forced the powers that be to regularly return to the practices of “optimization,” social expenditure cuts, and deregulation. Year after year Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev repeated in their speeches that it was necessary to “end business ‘nightmares,’” reduce the government apparatus, and continue privatization. All of this was conjoined with the rhetoric of heightening the social responsibilities of the state, with “May decrees,” etc. Political scientist Ilya Matveev believes that, despite the “hybrid” nature of Russian neoliberalism, which finds itself modified, on the one hand, by the government security services interested in the consolidation of the patrimonial character of the political regime and, on the other hand, by the social rhetoric that serves as a means of its legitimation, “on a more fundamental level, Putin’s economic and social model is an organic part of the global neoliberal turn, the key characteristic of which consists in the restructuring of the relations between the public and the private sectors, in the reinvention of ‘public’ as it is.”
A sharp increase in the number of Russian dollar billionaires serves as a good indicator of this process. If in the 1990s they could be counted on the fingers of one hand, their number went well over 100 at the beginning of the 2000s. These numbers do not go very well with the common belief that Putin did away with the oligarchs. Rather, the power of big capital has become structural in the last 20 years, while its opportunities for lobbying have sharply increased. However, this does not prevent the government from occasionally participating in “the public bashings” like the Yukos affair or the arrest of the Magomedov brothers. Elisabeth Schimpfössl explains this contradiction as follows:
“Although there are parliamentary and presidential elections in Russia, the vertical organization of power means that the bourgeoisie, evading social control, is protected only by the Kremlin. When it is in his interest, Putin can use the Russians’ negative attitude toward the wealthy elites for his own purposes. Otherwise, however, he secures the dominant position of the elites and uses his power to protect their property rights.”
However, it is the depoliticization and atomization of Russian society that likely turned out to be the most important effect of neoliberalism on the formation of the current political regime. Despite the widespread image of the Russians, they primarily rely on themselves, rather than on collective action, and in some sense represent the ideal of “homo economicus” that maximizes his profits and minimizes costs in accordance with market logic.
Under these conditions, the authoritarian turn of the 2000s implied the continuation of neoliberalization rather than its curtailment. As Lilia Schevtsova suggested, “economic liberalism . . . served as Viagra for Russian authoritarianism.” It is telling that Putin’s criticism of “the neoliberal system” is often related to the failure of “Western partners” to abide consistently by the neoliberal principles of free trade and “depoliticization”. In this, Putin does in fact emerge as “the last neoliberal of Europe.”
It is not coincidental that the public discussion of neoliberalism became particularly relevant after the 24th of February. It seems that it can not only help us explain the reasons behind the tragedy (for instance, the depoliticization and atomization of the Russian society, the political strategies underpinning “actually existing neoliberalisms” in different parts of the world, the character of the Russian political regime, etc.) but also contribute to the discussion concerning the future, in which we want to live: the conflict exposed so many contradictions both in Russia and the rest of the world that placing our hopes on the advent of the “Beautiful Russia of the Future” with its independent legal system, competitive elections, and freedom of speech does not seem either realistic or sufficient anymore.
Translation: Vladlena Zabolotskaya
Editing: September collective