by Sara Flounders
Workers World
posted on February 17, 2021
https://www.workers.org/2021/02/54546/
At the very time Democrats in Congress were attempting to impeach Trump for the Jan. 6 fascist rampage, President Joe Biden expressed support for a Russian political leader allied with a gang comparable to the Proud Boys. In his first contact with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin as U.S. president, Biden immediately pressed for the release of anti-Putin candidate Alexei Navalny.
Navalny’s notorious record is well-known in Russia. U.S. and German officials, who describe him as a dissident journalist, investigative blogger or anti-corruption activist, are being deceptive.
Why not Assange or Mumia?
There is an international campaign for the release of a far more prominent investigative journalist from Australia — Julian Assange. Assange exposed U.S. government corruption, surveillance and war crimes. Biden could have sent an encouraging human rights message by dropping U.S. demands for the extradition of Assange.
There is a 40-year campaign for the release of another investigative journalist, an acclaimed Black author who exposed racist police brutality in Philadelphia — Mumia Abu-Jamal. If Biden called for his release, it could send a message to the Black Lives Matter movement that the U.S. is addressing systemic racism. Instead, he has focused his “human rights” attention on a right-wing Russian national chauvinist!
The difference is that Assange and Abu-Jamal challenged the power of the U.S. ruling class. Navalny embraces it.
A well-known racist
Navalny is not a political unknown. For many years he has been in the limelight, in the media, on video and in the streets in fascist mobilizations that call for expelling all non-Russian peoples from Russia. Navalny was a driving force in the annual anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant “Russian March” in Moscow. Its central themes are “Take Back Russia,” “Russia for Russians” and “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” — the latter a demand to end federal subsidies to poorer, less-developed, largely Muslim regions of Russia.
The Russian March rallies were gatherings of Nazi elements, monarchists and religious Orthodox groups. On display were swastikas, confederate flags, religious insignia and calls for “white revenge.” These ultranationalist rallies were countered most years by left-wing demonstrations led by Russian Anti-Fascist Front, progressive street activists and young communists.
Navalny is the organizer of the “Movement Against Illegal Immigrants” and “Great Russia,” and he has called for the breakup of Russia. He has demanded the expulsion of all peoples from the Caucasus and Asia, whether they are citizens living in what is still part of the Russian Federation or are from surrounding Central Asian republics, which were severed after the Soviet Union collapsed. On video Navalny has whipped up sectarian violence by labeling people of the Caucasus “rotten teeth, to be extracted” and “cockroaches that must be exterminated.”
Navalny calls for aggressive privatization of more Russian industries, cuts in public spending, total freedom for businesses and a dramatic reversal of social guarantees that still remain from the Soviet Union. Navalny boasts that if he were president, there would be very friendly relations with the U.S. and the European Union.
Anti-corruption activist?
Navalny has been arrested numerous times on corruption and embezzlement charges, coming from former collaborators. Many charges are based on his looting of organizations he himself formed. But this has not stopped Russian oligarchs and Western agencies from funding his Anti-Corruption Foundation or aiding him in maintaining offices and staff in 43 cities across the country. It has not stopped the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy from providing $5 million funding for Navalny and other phony anti-corruption campaigns.
But as with Bolsonaro in Brazil or Trump in the U.S., his reactionary views are masked as a campaign against corruption.
Of course there is corruption in Russia. Capitalism, an economic system based on the theft of human labor and the private expropriation of public resources, is by its very nature corrupt.
So-called anti-corruption campaigns can have appeal to people enraged at the system’s glaring inequality. But, intentionally, such campaigns have no program for the masses beyond replacing the current politicians in office.
Now Navalny has tried to refashion himself by opposing new pension regulations that raise retirement age. This is a completely opportunist reversal of the position he and his Party of Progress held for years: to raise the retirement age and liquidate the government pension fund.
The proposed increase in the retirement age, from 60 to 65 years for men by 2028 and from 55 to 63 years for women by 2034, was met with outrage across Russia; it took major protests to force a retreat on some aspects of the plan. Russia’s retirees — old enough to remember pension guarantees under the Soviet Union — are not likely to be fooled by Navalny’s phony about-face on pensions.
Free market neoliberalism
All of Navalny’s ugly history is glossed over by the western corporate media. He is consistently called a “liberal” dissident. This implies he is progressive.
“Liberal” has a very different meaning in Russia than it has on the U.S. political spectrum. It does not mean a vague call for increased social programs, greater inclusion or liberalizing reactionary laws on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
Being a liberal in Russia means supporting “liberalization,” i.e., neoliberal policies and free market economics. A more accurate term is market liberals, who advocate greater freedom for capitalist markets. Liberalization means an “opening up” of trade and an easing of government regulations that restrict profiteering by corporations.
When financial publications in Russia, the U.S. and EU applaud Navalny as being the “best hope for the liberalization of Russia,” they are looking for a return to the open looting of industry and resources by western capitalists during the Boris Yeltsin years of 1991-2000.
The Yeltsin years and free markets
The forced dismantling of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991, under President Yeltsin, was a break with a planned socialist economy and total state ownership of industry. The introduction of a capitalist market economy led to the looting of almost every sector of the economy, especially manufacturing, energy and banking. State farms were broken up without a plan, and government subsidies to industries and agriculture were cut. Price controls ended. In two years, more than 15,000 firms were transferred from the state to private hands.
A surge of U.S., German and other European Union capital into Russia — to buy up public assets and resources at bargain-basement prices — led to a chaotic free-for-all, followed by economic depression, hyperinflation and mass unemployment. The national health system and social programs were all but eliminated; life expectancy plummeted and infant mortality soared.
This “liberalization” — economic shock therapy for the masses — has been called the most cataclysmic economic collapse in peacetime of an industrialized country.
Towards a Market Economy
From the reviewing stand in Moscow’s Red Square, visitors can now gaze across the cobblestones, where Soviet tanks and missiles once rumbled by during the Cold War, and see a new row of privately-owned shops. The once-sleepy downtown of Vilnius, Lithuania, is bustling with commercial activity. In Sofia, Bulgaria, young stockbrokers are making trades on the new stock exchange, where listings went from one company to 31 in its first year.
From Poland and Slovenia in the west, to Kazakhstan and Russian Siberia in the east, the economic changes in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia during the 1990s were profound and, in some cases, astonishing. In 1989, the state controlled almost every aspect of economic activity—bureaucrats set prices, established production quotas for factories and farms, decided which companies got credit and how much, and determined wages and working conditions.
Governments owned not only utilities and public transportation, but almost every other economic enterprise as well. Private businesses were banned or severely limited. The region was filled with factories employing thousands of workers they didn't need, to produce shoddy goods that no one wanted. For years, the whole system was propped up by subsidies and noncommercial trading relationships and sustained by wasteful use of energy that polluted the land, air and water.
That system crumbled when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union imploded. Today, the countries of the region are moving—some quickly, and some far too slowly—toward open, market-driven economies. Prices have been freed. State-owned enterprises have been sold to private owners. New economic institutions are leading to improved economic policies and management. A commercial law framework is being put in place and enforced. Sound banking systems and practices are beginning to emerge. Commercial lending to productive private enterprises is growing. Governments are encouraging small and medium enterprises by reducing red tape and improving their tax policies....
‘The land belongs to me’
In the former Soviet Union, agriculture was dominated by huge collective farms, where farmers worked as employees of the state. USAID helped Moldova's government break up these collectives, transforming them into smaller farms owned by the people who once labored on the massive, state-owned farms. Eighty-nine percent of the former collective farms were broken up, and today, 730,000 Moldovan farmers are the proud owners of two million individual land parcels. The success of this program was replicated by USAID in Georgia, where all the collective farms are now gone. USAID followed up by helping to register some one million agricultural land parcels, prompting one Georgian land owner to remark, “From now on the land belongs to me. I have five children and six grandchildren. They work the land, and it will provide for us now.”...
Metering Natural Gas for Conservation
During the Soviet period, the price of natural gas was kept so artificially low that Russians joked it was cheaper to leave a gas stove on all the time than to waste matches lighting it. The result, of course, was that huge amounts of natural gas were wasted. Although the wholesale price of gas rose after 1991, consumers did not conserve, mainly because most Russian apartments do not have individual gas meters. A USAID program that links a U.S. utility and Russian counterpart is helping to change that. Vladmiroblgaz and Brooklyn Union Gas have conducted a pilot residential metering project designed to determine how best to improve revenue collection and conserve energy. With USAID financing, 500 meters were purchased and installed in apartments just east of Moscow. Natural gas consumption dropped dramatically. Since then, the pilot program has been expanded. The Vladmiroblgaz-Brooklyn Union Gas program and others like it are now helping conserve natural resources in cities across Russia....
Helping People In Need
Creating market economies and establishing democracy offer the people of Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia the best long-term hope for higher living standards and a better quality of life. In the short and medium term, however, the weight of change has taken a heavy toll on social services and benefits and caused unemployment and poverty to rise. At the same time, the region has been torn by armed conflicts, causing complex emergencies in the former Yugoslavia and its neighbors, as well as in Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan.
Health, education, and social protection systems—of mediocre quality and largely bankrupt even in 1989—have continued to deteriorate as governments in the region balance competing demands on tight budgetary resources. The transition from a state-controlled system based on broad consumer subsidies to a market economy has resulted in economic and social pain. Inadequate social services and benefits have emerged as serious issues. Only the Northern Tier countries have recovered and exceeded the standards of living in place at the end of the 1980s, although some of their population groups remain vulnerable without some form of help. Many citizens in Southern Tier and Eurasia countries continue to suffer as living standards remain below 1989 levels as a result of incomplete reform....
RESTRUCTURING SOCIAL BENEFITS
A hallmark of the old socialist system was the provision of a basic level of social protection to all its citizens, including universal subsidies for housing, utilities, and social services, and income after retirement, irrespective of need. By 1989, central and local governments could no longer afford to subsidize populations to the same degree as before. During the past decade, USAID has worked with several countries to improve pension system design, financing, and administration and to meet the near-term needs of people through the development of targeted subsidy programs....
Targeted Subsidies in Ukraine
Early in the decade, the Ukrainian Government recognized that it had to take a close look at government spending levels and begin to tackle the issue of universal subsidies. In close coordination with local governments, Ukraine initiated a policy which introduced the recovery of real costs for housing and utilities while also protecting the neediest. Universal subsidies for communal services were replaced with financial assistance targeted to help the poor. USAID provided technical expertise to help the municipalities conduct income surveys and objectively determine cut-off points for government aid. Three months after enactment of the enabling legislation, the national housing subsidy program opened 750 offices across the country. As many families started to pay for housing and related services, those in the low income brackets received subsidies. By 1999, over four million families were being helped with targeted subsidies and the government was realizing a net budget savings of $1.2 billion. The success of this program demonstrated that economic reform could be compatible with social protection and laid the groundwork for other targeted social assistance programs in the region....
The Challenges of the Next Decade
The world is a different place ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Each of the former Soviet bloc countries are now going in their own direction and changing at widely varying paces. The initial exuberance that once led people to dance in the streets of Berlin has been tempered by the reality of change. The path to achieving strong, market-oriented economies and open, democratic societies—where the majority have access to adequate housing, nutrition, health care and education—cannot be traversed quickly or without setbacks.
Throughout the 1990s, the many organizations and individuals that worked on USAID’s behalf have shared in the determination of the people of the region to meet the challenges of reform. This hard work has paid off. By the end of 2000, USAID will have closed bilateral assistance missions in eight of the 27 countries, all in the Northern Tier: Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The wide-ranging reforms implemented by these countries have generated solid economic growth and achieved significant democratic freedoms. Their success sustains the belief that it is possible to achieve lasting reform in this part of the world.
Progress in the rest of the region is mixed. While promising changes have occurred, reform is far from complete. Key economic and political institutions are still being developed and corruption is a widespread problem. Years of ethnic violence have threatened stability and slowed the transition to democracy and private sector growth, particularly in Europe’s Southern Tier. Many of the nations in Eurasia remain tied to the past without sufficient will or momentum to move forward. It will take a lot longer than originally thought for these countries to join the global economy.
A large and stable middle class -- a keystone to enduring democratic systems and dynamic private economies -- still needs to develop. In too many cases, these societies are polarized between a few very wealthy beneficiaries of change and a great number of people who have been unable to access the benefits of reform. At the same time, social services are woefully insufficient, adding to the burden of the common citizen. Toward the end of the decade, one-half of Eurasia’s population and one-quarter of Southern Tier citizens were living in poverty. The turmoil and pain resulting from incomplete reforms have discouraged citizens and led many to long for the certainty of the old Soviet days.
-- A Decade of Change: Profiles of USAID Assistance to Europe and Eurasia, by USAID, 2000
At the same time, a small handful of business oligarchs, tycoons and outright pirates became billionaires and moved as much of their stolen wealth to western banks and offshore accounts as they could. None of this stolen wealth was reinvested in modernizing Russian industry.
Sectarian wars broke out in Chechnya, Georgia and Azerbaijan, all driven by competition for control of now-privatized resources.
Yeltsin was completely compliant with U.S. and European capitalist demands. As the Soviet Union collapsed as a world power, the same brutal “free market” unfolded across Eastern Europe. The U.S.-commanded NATO military alliance expanded through Eastern Europe in the 1990s — this reconquest of a vast region was a ruthless process.
Russia ended its trade and military alliances with East European countries, the DPRK, Cuba and developing countries in West Asia and Africa. This allowed a surge of U.S. wars of recolonization in the Arab and Muslim world, including Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the war that forcibly dismantled Yugoslavia.
Sanctions on Russia
A wave of mass anger and a second impeachment attempt for corruption led to Yeltsin’s sudden resignation on Dec. 31, 1999, in exchange for immunity. This left Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as acting president.
Putin did not reverse capitalist ownership in Russia. Nor did he knit the Soviet Union back together. But he did begin to reorganize Russian industry, impose controls on western capitalists’ open looting and renationalize some essential industries. Hyperinflation was reined in.
Russia’s economy today is smaller than Brazil’s. Raw materials in oil, gas, minerals, grains and lumber are its primary exports. Russia’s industrial capacity is gutted; it is no longer the superpower of 30 years ago.
But imperialists are never satisfied. They want it all.
In 2014, during the Obama/Biden Administration, the U.S. financed a fascist coup in Ukraine, formerly part of the Soviet Union. This brought about the first resistance to 15 years of U.S./NATO expansion. Putin supported the uprising against fascism in the heavily industrialized Lugansk and Donetsk regions of eastern Ukraine. He blocked NATO seizure of the Crimea, the location of Sevastopol Naval Base and Russia’s only warm water port.
For this resistance — to prevent Russia’s total disintegration as a country — the U.S. and the EU imposed a series of economic sanctions on Russia. The hope of Wall Street was that the resulting economic dislocation and inflation would pressure the oligarchs to push Putin out.
Further sanctions were imposed when Russia came to Syria’s aid in 2015. Russia intervened after four years of U.S. regime-change operations — the financing of tens of thousands of mercenary forces and coordinated bombing that displaced 25% of Syria’s people.
To Washington’s ire, Russia’s military industries are part of national defense and were never privatized. Russian diplomacy and arms sales provide some protection against aggressive U.S. operations from Iran to Venezuela. Closer trade agreements with China have helped Russia get around the strangling web of sanctions.
Russian oligarchs, whose obscene wealth is housed in Western banks, are threatened by all this. They are looking for new relations with imperialism. Growing alliances of Russia with China and the former Soviet Republics are not in their interests.
This is Navalny’s base.
Navalny has little support in Russia. After an alleged poisoning by Putin forces last fall, his approval rating peaked at 20%. One poll now shows only 2% favor him as a candidate! But Navalny is dangerous because he has powerful supporters in the West and among Russian oligarchs.
Progressives should not be tricked into supporting this pro-fascist neoliberal.