Today’s Russian Federation is the privatized Soviet Union with reduced borders of the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Socialist Federative Republic). Its nature is that of a privatized state, a system in which the state remains but its benefits and access to the national assets are given, often informally, to a select group of people that I label as the Thieving Class. The Thieving Class is the Russian Federation’s aristocracy and haut bourgeoisie. Not really, but I’ll get to them also later on.
Despite claims to the contrary, the Soviet system had estates (remember estates, like the peasantry or clergy), an example of a Soviet estate is the nomenklatura (the subject I’d address later on because it is essential to understanding how the Russian Federation works and how it is governed) or the Soviet governing estate.
Russia’s Thieving Class, the people who had privatized Soviet assets and who run the country collectively through their informal deputies (and no, Putin is not a dictator and he doesn’t run Russia), is made up of
- The Soviet nomenklatura (primarily one of the middle level, this is the ruling Communist “management” class of the USSR)
- The Jewish diaspora as a single element (through their relationship with Bolshevism and their continuing maintenance of a bridge with the outside branches of the diaspora, primarily in the United States). Members of the Jewish diaspora and their connections were instrumental in converting some of Soviet assets and wealth into the nomenklatura’s private wealth.
- Privileged ethnic diasporas and national minorities (in the Soviet, not in the disadvantaged American sense)
- Secret services (the KGB, that’s right)
- The criminal layer of the society (which also accumulated vast wealth and a web of connections by the end of the Soviet era).
Sometimes, top members of Russia’s Thieving Class represent a number of those estates and layers rolled in one, like Alisher Usmanov, who is from the Soviet nomenklatura, a member of the diaspora, a national minority, as well as a criminal.
Those individuals “own” or rather have usurped over 90% of Russia’s wealth, ironically making post-Communist Russia the most unjust country from the perspective of wealth distribution in human history and they own the government because they must. Without the continuation of this government and this mode of governance they become nobodies that they are or worse.
And Putin was made the guarantor of this system’s continuing existence. At least for the time being.
But even that’s not that bad or tragic. Now we come to the tragic part – of course from the Russian nation’s perspective.
To be continued
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