 History, I will deal here, try to deal a little bit with history here. And I think this is important because a lot of us are very ignorant about Russian history. We studied the Russian Revolution quite a bit, and even maybe the bit that comes immediately after, but very rarely do we actually discuss the period that comes at the very end of this process, the dissolution of USSR and how it took place, and whether it was inevitable is maybe another question that needs to be raised as well. Typically historians would say that the interest in history should be studied in order to understand why something happened. We shouldn't study, it's not an interesting question to ask why, if something could have happened differently. But I think for our point of view, we want to understand yes, why something happened, but also if there was an alternative, and why that alternative was not posed if it did exist. And so that's what I'm trying to try to explain. I think also in order to understand Russian society today and the regime that Putin is, or the people around him, to understand Russia today, you really have to understand how this USSR, the Soviet Union, how it collapsed, and how Putin came to power, because that really explains quite a lot of the dynamics of that regime also today. Because it is not like a regime in the West, as you probably have noticed yourself. So we'll have to start, I'm afraid, in 1917 with the Russian Revolution, because this was after all what created the Soviet Union. And the Russian Revolution, it raised the hopes of millions, hundreds of millions of workers all around the world, and poor and oppressed. And it was like a beacon for the world revolution, for the whole of the world, a proletariat of that actually workers could not just fight for power, they could actually take power and they could hold on to it. And that's what they did. The Paris commune, they took power, but they failed to hold on to it except for a few months. And here is the first time the workers took power and held on to it. We can discuss exactly how long they held on to it, but for some time anyway, for some years. They were faced with not insurmountable obstacles, but a tremendous opposition from internally, from the sabotage, from the old ruling class, but also they were invaded by 21 armies. They had a country, they inherited a country that was devastated by war. But in spite of this, the workers, they rebuilt the country and by the time of 1941, when Germany invaded, they did not just defend themselves against Hitler's armies, but they actually fought them back and defeated Hitler. And if you look at the statistics of casualties and amount of tanks destroyed and whatnot, you'll find that it is on the Eastern Front, as it's called in Europe. That Hitler was defeated and not at the day or something like that, which is more in Africa, which the British probably would like to think. But this period here, when we talk about the period from 1921 to 1941, it's something else happened, which was a much more tragical character, which was that the working class was dispossessed of its political power. It lost control of its state apparatus, which had taken the new worker state and lost control of its worker state to the state bureaucracy. And this consisted, this bureaucracy consisted not of the revolutionaries of 1917 or 1905, but of the old Menshiviks who had the opposed revolution and the Tsarist officials and so on, who had also been opposed to revolution, all kinds of cadets and liberals and so on. They formed the new, they became part of the state machinery and also became the members of the Communist Party. And this was a deliberate policy on the part of Stalin to get these people into the party. And they diluted the revolution in a constant part. Combined that with the defeat of the International Revolution and the economic hardships that existed at the time, it meant that the workers had to work really long hours and weren't able to participate in the running of society. This was the defeat of the workers that they lost control of the state. Instead you have this bureaucratic caste, which develops all kinds of privileges. So for example, they had special shops for party members and the top bureaucrats had themselves special shops just for the top bureaucrats. And this kind of situation where you had this, where party membership was not something you sacrificed for, something you fought for and something where the most politically conscious workers were involved, but rather it was where it was a career ladder basically, a bit like Labour Party is today if you want to compare it to a slightly different thing. It's like the Labour Party and the Tory Party put together maybe. But still they managed this growth rate in the 1920s and 30s and the 30s reached about 6%, so it was a substantial growth of the economy. They recovered after the war in the 1940s, it was a massive disaster economically, so they recovered and they had a steady growth throughout the 50s and the 60s around 6%, which is the best or what the capitalist countries achieved at the same time and that was the height of the capitalist boom. But then things took a turn for the worse in the 1970s and this is something we have to try to understand as well. Now Trotsky said that the planned economy needs democracy like the body needs oxygen. Another analogy might be that the planned economy needs democracy like machinery leans oil. You can run a machinery without oil, but eventually it will break down out of all the friction and damage that's caused by the machinery. And this is basically what takes place. By the time of the 1970s the whole economy started to ground to a halt. You still have growth, but it's very limited. So in the 50s and 60s if you were living in the Soviet Union you would find every year things were improving, you'd get better housing and more commodities. Things weren't great, you had a tremendous political oppression of course, but things seemed to be a little bit improving every year. But by the time of the 70s this starts to change. And when you come to the 80s the economy basically starts to stagnate. And the reason for this is that bureaucracy doesn't really have any interest in developing the economy itself. They're interested in just maintaining their privileges. And they're incapable of allocating resources in a balanced way. You can see the complexity of an economy and resource allocation. If you look at the economy today, well the so-called bottlenecks they talk about. And you find bureaucrats, there are in the factories and industries, they will do what they're told, but they won't really do, they would just do what they're told and nothing else. So they were told to produce shoes. They didn't have enough resources to produce both left and right shoes. So they just produced left shoes. Because it was quicker because they didn't have to change over the machinery to produce right shoes. So they just produced left shoes for one year. And then next year they produced right shoes. I mean these kind of absurdities which make no sense in any kind of situation but under the specific bureaucratic cloud economy that kind of made sense. And they had technically fulfilled what was asked of them which was produced X number of shoes. They wouldn't ask to produce pairs of shoes, they would ask to produce shoes. So they did that. Another example is the one tonne nail which famously was produced. They were asked to produce one tonne of nails. But they didn't have the resources to produce one tonne of nails so instead they produced one tonne nail. Which is obviously completely useless. But they did fulfill the quota. And the quality of the products got worse the worse the closer they got to the consumer. And it got to the point where half the clothes that reached the shops had to be discarded because they were of so poor quality. And the solution to this obviously the bureaucrats didn't have to suffer these problems. They had their own shops where a different quality of clothes were sold. And they also bought, were able to access western imports, imported goods from the west. So they had luxury clothes, they had mint coats, they had watches, jewellery, all the trappings basically were washed while in the west. They had access to through their special shops and special privileges as well as corruption. And the solution to this problem was workers' control but bureaucracy couldn't accept this. The first thing that would have been questioned in an open democratic discussion and it was actually questioned multiple times whenever they started having these debates would have been the privileges of the bureaucracy and it started to be happening in earnest in the 1980s. This group, the bureaucracy of the state was parasitic caste. It didn't really play any progressive role whatsoever. Even the capitalist in our society, they take a big profit, a good chunk of the surplus value of the workers but they reinvest at least some of it. But these guys, they were completely parasitic. They weren't reinvesting any of the money, they were just consuming it basically. They were just piling it up in luxury cars or whatever. They weren't really playing a progressive role in the economy. And they were merely a barrier to the future development of the society. They were actually obstacles to the development of the economy, development of workers' control, development of socialism. And the more of a barrier they became, the more corrupt they became and the more they started filling their own pockets instead of attempting to solve the problems. And the worst got towards the end in the early 1980s. The worst was the new generation that was born at that time or born in the 70s who were completely born parasites and they had no outlook other than to be parasites. If you look at some of the bourgeois, the children of the 70s who were completely born parasites if you look at some of the bourgeois, the children are very, very rich in western society. You have a very similar phenomenon. All they can do is go and sit on yachts and go to nightclubs and that's all they're capable of doing really and take lots of drugs. But this was the kind of people that were developing in Russia at that time, the young generation. Ted Grant in the book Russia from Revolution to Counter-Revolution which is an excellent book that explains the whole of the period that I've just gone through very, very quickly. He says, The ruling elite fell more and more under the influence of capitalism. The more and more they fell... Sorry. The ruling elite fell more and more under the influence of capitalism, the more alienated they became from Soviet society. So the less they were living among the workers in the sense they were living often some villas and so on in fancy seaside resorts, the more separate they became from workers, the more attracted they became to capitalism. Gorbachev came to power in the early 1980s kind of by accident, but accident expresses necessity, as we say. He represents an attempt by the bureaucracy to try to solve these problems by a mess or measure of reform. So he spoke about workers' control and democracy and many social democrats in the West thought, oh, here we go, here's someone who's trying to introduce democracy to these problems. Actually there's some other people as well, but anyway, he made noises like this. You could never implement workers' control or democracy in the planned economy without actually having a political revolution overthrowing the bureaucracy was controlling everything, right? So this is a fundamental problem. What would have been needed was a political revolution, but this was obviously not something neither Gorbachev nor the rest of his compadres at the top of the bureaucracy were prepared to do. It really was a choice between, on the one hand, workers' control, socialism, a road to socialism on the one hand, or on the other hand, it was capitalism. And in the early stages, this was not clear to the bureaucracy. They didn't understand that they had this choice in front of them. They were kind of fumbling, trying to resolve problems, doing whatever they could, trying one thing then the other to resolve the problems, but they didn't have a conscious idea of where they were going with this. The fundamental flaw in Gorbachev's position was to encourage greater initiative and therefore greater productivity from the workers while simultaneously defending the privileges and perks of the bureaucracy was an attempt to square the circle. So that's another quote from Ted Grant's book. So basically, he was trying to square the circle, defend the bureaucracy, attack the bureaucracy at the same time, talking about workers' control where it's actually not implemented in practice. What he said was, we are fully restoring the principle of socialism from each according to his ability to each according to his work. That's what Gorbachev said. Now, for those of you who feel like, that's not quite where it's supposed to be, right? It's supposed to be to each according to their needs. But they had changed this little phrase because if you say to each according to his work, it becomes like these university vice-chancellors who are defending their salaries, basically. They say, oh no, because we have so much responsibility, right? We're so important. That's why we need to have these privileges, right? So they're claiming basically a bureaucracy was fulfilling some kind of essential function, which is completely wrong. They would have been entitled to what Marx called the wages of superintendence, but let's not go into that. But anyway, obviously you have some of these roles are necessary, like managing and so on, but these kind of privileges have nothing to do with what was necessary and everything to do with a caste trying to defend its own privileges against the workers and living off the backs of the workers. And this thing was basically an ideological justification for the privileges of the bureaucracy. Now, the reforms they introduced led to temporary improvement in the economy for about one year, but then things quickly turned to the worse. Workers' conditions were worsened. They were asked to work longer hours and work harder. They introduced management models from the west in order to try to squeeze more productivity out of workers. But at the same time, the bureaucratic mismanagement and the corruption got a lot worse. I'll give an amazing example in a minute. The black market became the main source of goods and raw materials. So the shops had to get their goods, not from the official channels, but had to go to the black market in order to get the goods they can sell in the shops. And the same goes for industries, which had to buy the raw materials for their production on the black market, because nothing was coming through for the official channels. And this is obviously completely unsustainable. By 1990, 70 million were living on the bread line. And at this point, only 15 to 20% of the Russian population said that they built a Soviet population to say they believed in socialism, which gives you some idea of the kind of demoralization that was taking place. But at the same time, only 25% wanted a market-oriented system. So it was a lot of confusion, basically. The move towards capitalism wasn't popular. And even at that stage, 40% favored a return to more centralized economic management. But the bureaucracy, if the population was confused, the bureaucracy was starting to become clear about what they wanted. And they had lost all faith in themselves and their ability to run the economy and was rather looking towards the West and capitalism as the solution. As Trotsky said, they were trying to secure their position and that of their children by turning themselves into capitalists. That's the way Trotsky forecast that things would develop in the Soviet Union. And with some delay of a few decades, it did actually happen. And so they began a program of austerity and deregulation. And this was on Gorbachev. But now in different characters. You have this, you start, you know, basically start to become a split in the bureaucracy at this point. And Yeltsin became the leader of the pro-capitalist wing. He had a flair for gestures. He was a bit of a populist, as they would say today. He didn't use his limousine when going to state or dispense to his limousine, sometimes and appeared in a normal car. He would visit markets, talk to people, obviously always making sure that the TV cameras were following when he was doing this. So he announced the privileges of bureaucracy. He was a demagogue, basically. He, you know, make a lot of noise, but didn't really have any proper solutions. In fact, when he was running Moscow, he started closing down the black market. Very good, you think. But there was a slight problem with that. If you close down the black market, but all the shops and all the industries are getting their products from the black market, then what's going to happen? So you just make the situation even worse. You're not solving the problem. You're just making a superficial attempt, which failed. But he emerged as a big player in 1990. And at this point, the Gosplan, which was the planning department, they were warning of a complete collapse in the economy. And Gorbachev, at this time, he was vacillating. He was leaning on the one hand or the hardliners, as they were called, the people who were resisting the restoration of capitalism. And they have on hand the pro-market people, the pro-capitalist people, like Yeltsin. And he was balancing between these two factions, sometimes leaning once again to strike against the other. So leaning on the pro-capitalist to strike against the hardliners, sometimes leaning on the hardliners to strike against the pro-capitalist. Yeltsin, however, was impatiently wanting to press ahead with what they called reforms. At this point, you have the disintegration of the Soviet Union that really happened in earnest. All the different countries of the Baltic states and so on would declare their independence. The Warsaw Pact had been wound up in 1989, I think it was. And Yeltsin used this position as chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet. So remember, there's Russia and there's the Soviet Union. Russia is part of the Soviet Union. But there are many other republics in the Soviet Union. They have the Russian Supreme Soviet. And he used that, this chaos or this constitutional crisis in order to increase his own powers as being the head of the Russian Supreme Soviet. And this situation was slipping out of Gorbachev's control. Now, he began, he tried to stabilise the situation by negotiating what they would call the New Union Treaty, which was to be a new treaty for the management of the Soviet Union, which basically was dissolving the Soviet Union. Not completely, but there was very limited powers that would still rest with the central leadership. And lots would be devolved, as I say. And this was a red flag to the hardliners who were absolutely adamantly opposed to this movement. They were against the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, but they acquiesced to it. But now the Soviet Union was being dissolved basically and they were completely opposed. And so they launched a coup against, well, basically against the New Union Treaty, against the ratification of it. Gorbachev was put under house arrest, but he refused to resign, which was probably miscalculation of part of the hardliners, but didn't seem to know what they were doing really. Yeltsin evaded capture. They had surrounded his villa, but somehow we managed to escape. It's not quite clear how. And he made himself then in the White House, which the White House is not the residence with the presidency, but the residence is the place where the parliament meets in Russia at that time. The White House in Moscow. And he made an appeal to the masses, saying, well, I have to defend democracy, or I can't remember exactly why he wanted to defend, but anyway, against the coup and so on. And actually, it had some echo. About 10,000 people turned up to the White House to defend the White House from the coup makers. But these people were mainly Petroboroshevian characters. There were people who basically were looking towards capitalism and seeing the advantages that this would bring to them personally. The coup makers attempted to assault the White House, but after only a few casualties, deaths like three or something, they pulled back. And this just shows a complete lack of resolution. Look at Sudan, for example, right now, where there's been a military coup. They're not going to pull back because a few people get killed, right? They're just going to go steam roll ahead. It's not a few deaths, they're going to stop them. But these coup makers lacked that kind of resolution. And as soon as they pulled back from the siege of the White House, the whole thing unraveled and within 24 hours, the coup makers were imprisoned or arrested. And this reflected, this uselessness of lack of determination reflected that the leaders of the coup didn't really have confidence in themselves. They didn't have confidence in the alternative. What they were fighting for, essentially, was the failed status quo. They weren't fighting for the workers' democracy, workers' control or socialism. They were fighting for the failed status quo. So, obviously, there wasn't really much. How are you going to make people enthusiastic about that? But the result of this was that the hardliners were routed and this also meant that Gorbachev was finished. Because his whole, the way he had kept himself afloat was by leaning one against the other, but now suddenly with the hardliners gone, all that remained was the pro-capitalist faction. The Soviet Union was dissolved completely and with that, also Gorbachev's presidency. He was president of the Soviet Union, right? Instead, Yeltsin stepped forward as the leader of the reconstitution Russian Federation. So now we have the Russian Federation and henceforth it's Russia, not the Soviet Union. Yeltsin and his faction were confident. They suspended the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on the 29th of August, which is the day after the collapse of the coup. They seized all the assets of the party. They banned the party on the 6th of November and the parliament granted emergency power to Yeltsin to carry out reforms. Now, how did this take place? Well, the absence of the workers is the key part in this equation. There was not really any particular strength of the Yeltsin faction, 10,000 in a country of 150 million, is it? Oh, there's more. Anyway, it's not that big here. It's not that much in the grand scheme of things. Yeltsin called for a general strike and although Margaret Thatcher called for a general strike, he didn't actually get many workers to participate in it. There were some, but not many. Instead, the battle took place between a confident pro-capitalist wing who had the backing of the West. All the papers in the West loved Yeltsin throughout the 90s. They had no plan, sorry, and the other side were demoralized, didn't know what they were fighting for. They had no plan and there was, as I said, defending a status quo which no one believed in. But this wasn't the end of the story. Yeltsin now faced opposition in parliament to the continuation of his so-called reforms. In fact, the reforms that only made the situation worse. Inflation stood at 2,400% at the end of 1992, which is quite remarkable. Now they talk about 6%, and they're like, oh, we've got high inflation. Well, 2,400% is a bit more. And they had the worst of all worlds, bureaucratic mismanagement as well as currently capitalism. Wages were not being paid, Wages were standing still. They were mass processed, and this actually led to Yeltsin having to give a number of concessions and roll back a couple of his reforms and sack his minister of finance. It was particularly odious. Yeltsin in his memoirs stated that he wanted to make reform, i.e. the transition to capitalism, irreversible, and that was his aim. But in order to do that, he had to get rid of congress or parliament, and he had to do everything his measures. So they needed to grant Yeltsin dictatorial powers, and congress was refusing to do that. 1992 was spent strangling over a new constitution, and congress and Yeltsin couldn't agree. March 1993 Yeltsin attempted to rule by decree, i.e. the defense of parliament just ruled by decree, but he was blocked by the constitutional court and he faced impeachment, although he narrowly escaped impeachment. Then they went for referendum. If you know something about bonapartism, I'll return to the question. Referendums is a typical method by which someone, you know, one person can rule by the use of referendums. It's a way of a one person rule, you could say, it's a method of that. And he launched a referendum for a new constitution without actually having written the constitution. So it was a referendum about having a new constitution without having actually written it. And it was narrowly won by Yeltsin with the support of the west, who granted him some extra money just a month before the referendum took place. There was also quite a bit of vote rigging and what we call pork barrel. Yeltsin offered all kinds of nice things, increasing minimum wage, increasing pensions, if people would just vote for his new constitution. And they did narrowly, as I said, some vote rigging that managed to get a narrow majority. By September then he suspended congress, wrote a new constitution himself and his cronies, and then congress voted to impeach him. So now there was a showdown basically between congress, which had been elected a couple years earlier, and Yeltsin who was the president. And imperialism stood wholeheartedly behind Yeltsin calling him a democrat where in fact he was the one who was basically doing a one-man rule trying to dissolve parliament as a president and write a new constitution on his own. But that didn't really bother the west because what were interesting was democracy, i.e. capitalism, they were interested in the return to capitalism. Just like Yeltsin, they wanted to make the return to capitalism irreversible. So congress, the hardliners, we could call them that again, they ensconced themselves in the white house and this is a bit confusing because there's twice a siege of the white house which confuses a lot of people including myself before I got the hang of it. And Yeltsin then he has to try to seize the white house. And this wasn't very easy because he went to his generals and he said, look, your president demands that you seize the white house and they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay. And they basically did nothing. And then he said, are you refusing to follow the orders of the president? This is all from his memoirs. And they were like, no, no, no, no. Basically, no one wanted to do anything. So what he had to do was to get some millions of dollars and he had to bribe certain army officers in order to lead this thing. And he managed to cobble together a force of some couple of thousand and so out of an army of two and a half million. So a couple of thousand soldiers, they managed to cobble together and some of these would have been KGB agents, some of them soldiers, some of them interior ministry people. Anyway, it was very hodgepodge. And they managed to assault parliament. Obviously, parliament didn't have an army or didn't have any soldiers of their own. And so they fell. The hardliners did attempt to make a counter coup or try to appeal to the masses, but it was a bit half-hearted. There were some workers who turned up to defend parliament, but it was relatively limited in the grand scheme of things. Again, 10, 20, 30 thousand, something like that. But to defeat the parliament created a power for impetus for the capitalist restoration. And Yeltsin banned opposition parties. He banned newspapers. He suspended local councils. He sacked councillors and governors of the provinces. He suspended the constitutional court. All, of course, in the name of democracy. But none of these questions actually solved the economic problems. In 1989 the economy was worth 1.46 trillion dollars. This is doing like that much, but in those current states money. By 1998 it was worth 800 billion dollars. So it's a fall of 44 percent in the space of nine years. It was an unmitigated disaster. The resolution of the West was more shock, more therapy. We remember the way they called it, it was shock therapy. The Financial Times had a headline in the middle of it saying more shock, more therapy. And this was the solution of the West, basically. A starved them into capitalism. Yeltsin obliged and at the same time he lined his pockets of himself and his cronies in the process. And some of this was recently, has been in court of the last decade in the UK where all these kind of dodgy dealings that went on at the time were actually exposed where the different oligarchs were fighting it out in the British courts about who owned what and what comes across very clearly is that no one really wasn't really clear who owned what and people just basically said this is mine now got a group of armed people together and then established it as a fact and this was the way things worked at that time. And also Yeltsin were also handing out shares left, right and centre. Guardian wrote Yeltsin practically gifted state assets to a small group of well-connected businessmen in return for help bringing the 1996 election. And this was the nature of the new ruling class in Russia and the workers were paying the price. Real wages were halved they were owed months and years the back wages unpaid but obviously over a period of time these wages were that they were owed completely diminished in value because of the massive inflation so struggles started to appear in because of this as well as the wages ahead and there was a new wave of struggle that developed and they set up workers were set up salvation committees they were called basically soviet like workers organs of power in around Russia in 1996 factory occupations factories being run on the workers control and this re-emerged again in 1998 and at this time in 1998 a poll showed that 48% preferred socialism to capitalism and only 27% preferred capitalism to socialism so you can see that the consciousness started to catch up with what capitalism really entailed Yeltsin's support in the opinion polls at this time in 1998 stood at 3% so there was an election coming up in 1999 but the incumbent hadn't 3% I think he actually had to stand there anyway but he supports the 3% and at this point you could actually have reversed the process the workers were on the streets they were fighting, they were organizing Soviets and so on the whole regime was in a crisis it didn't really have any kind of sense of stability and at that point you could have had a reversal of the process you could have a workers actually by generalizing the struggle by organizing together these committees of action or soviet you could have actually had a new worker state emerging and you could relatively easily return not just to the national economy but actually put the country on the road to socialism you could have workers, a political revolution overthrowing the bureaucracy and the new oligarchy would have been relatively easy but there was no party really that took up this call a new party had been formed called the CPRF so communist party of the Russian Federation which was largely consisted of the old bureaucrats from the communist party of the Soviet Union there were some other people as well but in this struggle they openly defended capitalism with the market reforms so they didn't really present an alternative so you have a very, it was a very popular party Shugan had probably won the couple of elections but was robbed of it by fraud it was a very popular party and because it stood for it was communist right it called itself communist it stood for something different supposedly in name but in practice they defended capitalism and obviously it created a huge amount of confusion there was a movement which really should have been a movement towards socialism to abolish capitalism, reverse the market reforms and introduce workers' control it should have been on the programme but it wasn't so this created a huge confusion I think Shuganov was interested in trying to prove to the West and the Russian oligarchs that he was a safe pair of hands a bit like when Chip Glass wrote in the Financial Times that he wasn't going to confiscate any private assets and so on and the workers had no alternative so instead a new character emerged because of a failure of this movement a new character emerged and here we have Vladimir Putin who emerged on the scene he's quite remarkable if you study his career it doesn't make any sense because he was a minor KGB official in Leipzig not a big thing and then in 1991 he supposedly resigned from the KGB and he went to work in St. Petersburg involved in foreign relations and there I'm afraid I'm going to go a bit overtime here he was working in foreign relations and there he managed to embezzle 100 million dollars in those days currency worth of raw materials and products that have been produced in Russia and were exported to the West supposedly in return for food so basically someone was taking the money and Putin almost admitted that he had done this in an interview he's quite a brazen character he said well look this was the way things were done at the time this was the way we did business and this is but that was what he did there and then this mayor that he was working for got booted out of office in 1996 and in 1997 he went to work for the president like Jelsen by 1998 he had been put at the head of the FSB which is the new KGB they renamed the KGB to FSB and suddenly Putin was at the head of the FSB very strange by 1999 he was prime minister right so it's a very you know it wasn't a minor official in St. Petersburg but it's quite a meteoric rise basically he never left the KGB he don't leave the KGB basically so and this was become quite evident once he became prime minister but still he is prime minister but no one knows who he is right no one really knows who he is he was the candidate of the oligarchy so they needed to do something to boost his popularity and what happens in September 1999 it was called the Russian apartment bombings where a number of supposedly Islamists bombed a number of apartments in Russia and killed some hundred people but there are so many strange things going on about these bombings one being that there was a bombing in Moscow and on the afternoon of that bombing the speaker of the Duma the rebranded the congress the Duma like in the Tsar's days so the speaker of the Duma he announced that there had been a bombing in let me get the name right where is it in the bombing in Volgodonsk but the bombing in Volgodonsk didn't happen until three days later so someone had mixed up the dates so they gave him a piece of paper with the wrong dates so he announced the wrong date where the speaker himself was a member of the communist party by the way was aware of this but still someone was giving him notes and then giving him the wrong date there was also an FSB there was a found the bomb the hand exploded and the FSB said oh no that's our device it's part of the training exercise so there was all kinds of shenanigans going on called for an independent inquiry were blocked and all the supposed perpetrators were killed or sentenced in secret courts the Islamists they supposedly did it were never heard in public the trials were held in secret or they were assassinated before or killed before they ever got to court there was an attempt to an informal inquiry about the members of the Duma but it was stopped by the killing of two of the members of the committee and the arrest of a third of the committee a witness for the committee for this inquiry was defected FSB agent Litvin Jynko remember to recognize that name he's the guy who got poisoned by a polonium in London in 2008 it was 2008 right so you can see something that's actually going on with these things basically and it's fairly this is kind of an open secret but these blasts were a propaganda victory for Putin and he was showered, repressed, formed the oligarch owned the press his popularity skyrocketed and Yeltsin resigned at the end of the year and then they basically put the elections early so in March Putin sails to victory in the first round still he didn't have the majority in the Duma there the Communist Party the CPRF scandalously supported him and gave him a majority Putin represented the consolidation of the capitalist regime in Russia Yeltsin wasn't all that more democratic now they say oh Yeltsin is really nice but they weren't actual like you know it's quite obvious it weren't fundamentally different but they still had the rule of the oligarchs and that's what's happening today and that's what took place on the Yeltsin rule the West quite wrongly assumed that Russia would return as a colony of the West a bit like happened in Eastern Europe where all the banks are owned by western banks and so on but after the crisis of 1998 Russia emerged on the world arena hungry to reclaim its fears of influence now Yeltsin agreed with some of these he's often the darling of the West but actually he didn't have a fundamentally different position on this he supported for example the subjugation of Chechnya which was one of the key elements when Chechnya, that's where the bombings link as well conflict in Chechnya and he also suggested redrawing the borders of the former Soviet Union republics in Russia's fader so he wasn't really fundamentally more like kind of in favor of the right of self-determination or anything of the sort it was just as bad as Putin on that question of course that was it was all in favor of self-determination before the Soviet Union was disbanded once the Soviet Union was disbanded he was against it so that's how it works Putin cleared up some of the worst excesses of the Yeltsin years he imprisoned some of the oligarchs he broke up their control of the media and then gave it to him and his cronies he stood up to the west as well saying you know we're not going to listen to the IMF and so on anymore the US you know you can stick it somewhere and these were all very popular measures that basically increased his popularity at this time because these people were absolutely hated by everyone and he kind of kept this sort of distance to them even though he was actually part and parcel of the same regime the Soviet national anthem was re-adopted with new lyrics and Yeltsin was against this actually he says you shouldn't be following the whims of the masses basically he admits that the Soviet Union national anthem stood for something different a different kind of society and this was quite popular and Putin always had to do this balance between a little bit of Soviet nostalgia and on the other hand basically being a very different regime all together the new regime also decided to attempt to forget the Russian Revolution ever took place so you don't mention it that's the rule instead of Yeltsin which tried to basically say the Russian revolution was a tragedy or something wrong with it and so on Putin's line is don't talk about it for very little and they also had economic revival after the crisis of the 1990s so you have a boom in the economy because of a change in the oil price it had nothing to do with Putin himself but the oil price went from $12 a barrel to $60 and eventually at a height it was at $100 or whatever and that's obviously made a massive difference to a country like Russia where 60% of the exports are oil and a little bit of gas so compared to the disaster of the Yeltsin years things seem to be improving and that's just because of Putin's long reign as president well president and president behind the scenes Putin also played heavily the external enemy cards so the first was the brutal crushing of the attempt at the independence of Chechnya he went into Georgia in 2008 and smashed the Georgian army which was trained and equipped by the Americans he defeated he will involve himself in the civil war in Ukraine as you probably remember in 2014 he was involved in Syria in 2015 and 2016 so it's a lot of foreign basic adventures to try to divert attention from domestic problems he was a strongman but this is quite expensive so the Russian expenses on the Russian military has skyrocketed as a result and now spending more as a share of the GDP than the United States are and twice about twice as much as the UK are spending what is the nature of a regime like what is it done? well we say if someone was here for the previous session in this room the state is on bodies of men in defence of certain property relations and here it's clear that we're dealing with a state that is defending the private property of the oligarchy that's the fundamentally what the state is defending but this wasn't entirely so clear in the 1990s because actually the state at that time was more split particularly in the early 1990s so the change there's a change that's taking place but it isn't fundamentally different to Yeltsin in other ways it's ruled by a strongman use of referendums and plebiscites there was a recent referendum in Russia for example which to total overrule things and get support for things well for undemocratic maneuvers trampling over the rights of parliament and most fundamentally ruled by the sword or ruled by violence which you can see ample examples of now in Russia Putin was more successful at the latter than Yeltsin because the state had stabilised and reconstituted itself whereas it was in turmoil during the 1990s so it's different isn't so much that Yeltsin was against using violence and Putin is in favour differences that Yeltsin had far less ability to use violence as you could see from when he tried to invade the White House but we call both of these regimes Bonapartist the deadlock between the classes enabled the state to acquire a certain degree of independence vis-à-vis the ruling class and balancing between the classes strikes both blows against both left and right i.e. both against the workers and the oligarchy and you can see that in Putin he would occasionally make a televised appearance where he basically goes to some factory and denounces the boss to work as properly it doesn't really mean much in the grand scheme of things but this is the kind of thing that you wouldn't get Boris Johnson doing for example if you want to make a comparison he attacks the oligarchs but only in order to defend the rule of the oligarchy as a whole so individual oligarchy would go after but only to defend the oligarchy as a whole Putin's popularity is now waning he used to pull around 60-70% support but it's now down to his personal popularity it's down to 40% and this is also... you should always take your opinion polls with a pinch of salt but yeah, you can see even these official opinion polls you can see a 10th official they're not exactly official but you can still see a clear tendency his party United Russia is doing even worse and it's quite interesting to see the figures if you compare the opinion polls to the election results you can see a certain trend so in 2011 United Russia got 50% in opinion polls and 50% in elections in 2016 they got 40% in opinion polls and 50% in elections in 2021, so just now in August they got 30% in opinion polls before the election and then 50% in elections you can see a certain basically what is less and less popularity means they have to resort to more and more fraud in order to make up the difference and also more and more violence this estimated maybe as much as half of the 28 million votes that United Russia got this time around were fake, it was a mathematician who tried his luck trying to estimate the amount of fraud and he said about 14 million votes might be artificial it is therefore not surprising there's an increasing repression across the board and the use of force we should always remember it's a sign of weakness not of strength it's a result of force basically because you cannot convince people it's not enough to lie to them in the press preach them from the pulpits it's when you use force when the methods of ideological control or persuasion are insufficient so when the work starts to move you can't hold them back by those means you have to resort to violence but suppressing dissent only makes dissent come back again in a stronger and much more virulent form so it is no wonder I think I'm going to end this it is no wonder that Vladimir Putin does not want to talk about the Russian revolution because really he's not too stupid he can see that another revolution just like that one is being prepared for Russia today