Khodorkovsky: Putin needs war to justify state-monopoly capitalism
Moscow – Kyiv, February 27 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Stamm) – Under the guise of patriotism and preserving the country's territorial integrity, Putin has imposed a monstrously ineffective system of governance on the country. This is what Mikhail Khodorkovsky, founder of the Open Russia Foundation and billionaire and political émigré, writes in an article published today by Vedomosti . According to him, within the next 10 years, Putin will still be replaced by "effective managers" from the 90s, like himself.
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“War is a natural result of the development of the economic system that Vladimir Putin has been building over the past 10 years,” writes Khodorkovsky.
He recalls how, in the 15th year of Brezhnev’s rule, he sent troops into Afghanistan, sarcastically noting that “fifteen years is apparently a magic period. When people have been in power for so long, when all restraining forces within the country have been destroyed, they begin to cross all boundaries - the boundaries of common sense and the boundaries of neighboring states.”
“The most ardent supporters of the Russian government will say that the war in Donbass is a bad decision, but there was no other choice. I will object. War is not a solution at all. It's not even a dead end. War is a portal to hell. From which problems will arise for a long time - financial, ethnic, political, territorial,” continues Khodorkovsky.
“In Ukraine, volunteers and those who pretend to be them “protect Russians,” says the disgraced billionaire. – This is an absurd idea when we are talking about a region with such an ethnic and linguistic structure as Donbass. If a third of your population wants to go to Russia, a third wants to go to Ukraine, and a third wants autonomy within Ukraine, but at the same time everyone is geographically mixed with each other (even within families) and distributed throughout the region, where to draw the line?”
“The pre-war Donbass had many problems,” he further recalls. – Can we say that the war decided at least one of them? No. Because initially I couldn’t. If war does not solve, but only aggravates, the problems of the region, then who needs it? What is the result of? The answer is quite simple. The war is the result of the development of the economic system that Vladimir Putin built.”
“Simply put, he did three things: increased the role of the state, increased monopolization and concentrated the levers of control in the hands of a narrow circle of friends and colleagues. He built the same state-monopoly (imperialist) capitalism (GMC) that Lenin wrote about in 1916,” says Khodorkovsky.
“Under the guise of patriotism and preserving the territorial integrity of the country, Putin imposed a monstrously ineffective system of governance on the country. All of Putin’s big construction projects turned into burying enormous financial and human potential,” he writes. “All oil exporting countries create funds in which they accumulate excess profits from the sale of resources, and Russia manages to spend this fund not on future generations, but on helping the state oil company.”
According to him, “the price of Crimea and Donbass is enormous: thousands of human lives, a double devaluation of the ruble, sanctions, the damage from which, even according to the Ministry of Finance, exceeded $200 billion. In reality, the damage is greater.”
To avoid such disasters in the future, Russia needs to change its management system as quickly as possible, returning to the 90s. Khodorkovsky, asserting this, writes that “society was ripe for this transition several years ago,” and this transition will inevitably occur. “From a historical perspective, pretty soon—within 10 years.”
Khodorkovsky : Putin Needs War to Justify State-Monopoly Capitalism