When Vladimir Putin reviewed his troops during Russia’s Victory Day parade there was more than one ironic twist in the air. Aside from the threat of Ukrainian drone attacks, hanging over Moscow was the reality that Russia’s vaunted military power is a mirage. The showcase of modern Russian firepower and rallying support masks the fact that Putin’s special military operations in Ukraine has been a disaster. Actual facts expose Russia as a mere regional actor rather than a global power. Obama described Russia’s incursions into Ukraine in 2014 as actions born “not out of strength, but out of weakness”. His comment proved foretelling.
Victory Day, corruption and barbarity
Since the beginning a pattern of incompetency, disorganization, corruption, hubris, and barbarity has defined the conduct and mismanagement of the war. Overstretched supply lines, shortages, inadequate situational awareness and supplies, poor tactical planning, ineffective command and control systems and low troop readiness and morale have contributed to over 800,000 casualties.
The kleptocracy that flourished prior to the war has militarized. Assets of foreign companies exiting the Russian market are re-distributed to business elites with Kremlin connections. Russian elites have taken advantage of the surge in defense spending, which consumes 40% of the federal budget. Sanctions have triggered import substitution policies and created more market opportunities for domestic enterprises to exploit. Subsidies and tariff protection laws have introduced new levels of corruption and rent-seeking.
The price for a share in the new economic ordering is loyalty. Those who resist face fabricated legal charges, property forfeiture, and far worse. Cases of “sudden Russian death syndrome” began appearing in early 2022. Oligarchs who criticize the war or broke the seal of secrecy died under circumstances deemed suspicious. Whether these deaths were the result of assassination or happenstance was never fully determined. However, their messaging was enough to enforce suppression and coerce fealty among surviving business elites.
Victory Day and special military operation
The cost to Russian society is a deteriorating economy. Despite the infusion of cash to subsidize strategic economic sectors vital to the war effort and through bonuses in the defense industry and the military, there remains a day of macroeconomic reckoning. While a monetary overhang looms, Russia’s labor pool and foreign reserves have shrunk. Oil prices have fallen. The budget deficit has risen. The ruble has depreciated and remains unconvertable. Interest rates are between 21-23% and the cost of money has negated growth.
An additional paradox is while claiming that the aim of his special military operation is the denazification of Ukraine, Putin has created a similar statist economy and society his father’s generation helped vanquish. The display at Moscow’s 80th anniversary of the victory over Germany and Nazi oppression borders on self-contradiction. By both default and design, the same deforming nature of Hitler’s regime that made war the central organizing force for the Third Reich is shaping Putin’s Russia. A reliance on anti-democratic and ultra-nationalist movements is another strand of connective tissue that binds his present with the past.
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Victory Day and nazis in today’s Russia
Nazism was a closed economic system meant to wage war and designed for conquest. It created an autarchy that distinguished itself by corruption, extortion, expropriation, and categorical thievery. As with other fascist economies, the system lacked any meaningful theoretical basis. Stuart Woolf analyzed this ilk of political economy as nothing more “than a series of improvisations, of responses to particular and immediate problems”. Putin’s desperate attempts to evade sanctions, sustain living standards, maintain macroeconomic stability, and prosecute an unwinnable war have made him adapt the same fascist economic policies and thought. Russia would be another case study in fascism by Woolf’s assessment.
Hitler wrote, “economic issues were problems to be overcome by political will.” The words might have rung in Putin’s ears if he was familiar with them. From his actions and manipulations, we at least know that he lives by them. From the viewing stands in Red Square Putin’s chest may have swelled as he watched over 180 military vehicles, 11,500 troops from Russian and foreign armies march by, and a flyover of fighter jets. But, in the long term, no economy can be maintained by war.
The Russian word derzhava refers to a great power and inculcates a duty to protect the motherland from foreign threats. It is found in the opening line of the Russian Federation’s national anthem and evokes feelings of patriotism and destiny. It is the obverse notion to Hitler’s doctrine of lebensraum. Both national myths require that control and repression be a core tenet and war is central to the existence of the state.
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Victory Day for holy Russia
The Soviet Union’s defeat of Germany has always been part of Russia’s history and the Kremlin’s mindset of a besieged fortress. The country’s vastness and resilience, which exhausted Hitler (and Napoleon), gave assurances to its people that “Holy Russia” was indomitable. However, it is not Russia being invaded this time. It is she who is the invader and it is Russia whose economy, treasury, and people who are being exhausted.
A question for Putin, as well as the more than 20 foreign leaders that joined him on the reviewing stand, and the Russian people is – “In the globalized world, can his closed economy ultimately be maintained mainly through conquest?”
The spectacle against the backdrop of the Kremlin’s walls must have been inspiring for Putin and his fellow derzhavniki. But, it blinds him from the harder facts and ghosts of a previous eras.
