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Soviet Union & Russia - How to explain their governance?

Kitsune

Kitsune

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Virginia
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To make it clear, I don't mean how their governments were officially suppose to work but how they work / worked in practice.

This came up because somebody I was talking to face to face was saying that Russia is trying to go communist again and that their government is basically communism.

Now, maybe I am mistaken but it seems like Soviet Era communism and modern Russian Oligarchy are very different things. I just don't know how I can explain things succinctly and I may have my own misconceptions.

Anybody help untangle these issues? I did try some searches but nothing relevant appeared to come up.

I realize that this discussion might fit better in history and am torn if this is more history or more politics?
 
At the risk of sounding overly judgmental, I think you've basically done the equivalent of ask--"The United States, past and present, how can we explain its governance?"

Yes, it is that big of a topic. For example, I've described the 1993 Constitutional Crisis, which led to the destruction of the Russian Supreme Soviet, its replacement with the weaker State Duma and the transformation of the federation into a practical presidential republic, as being a seminal event in Russian political history--or at least, one that a lot of people even well-educated in Russia seem oddly unfamiliar with. But it doesn't really tell you very much about even the last decade of governance in the USSR, much less any decade before that. And it's been 26 years since it happened in turn. No other republic in the CIS saw it necessary to dismantle their Soviet-era parliamentary bodies with a military siege, including those with governments more autocratic than Russia's, and I suspect there's no way to answer the original question without looking at Russia's neighbors in the CIS.

So, at the risk of sounding "salty"--good luck with this. If the question were "Why is or isn't the modern Russian Federation a Marxist-Leninist state like the Russian SFSR was, ignoring the later's relative lack of sovereignty or unitary party arrangement?"--that is a lot more feasible, even if it is still a big topic.
 
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Kitsune said:
Now, maybe I am mistaken but it seems like Soviet Era communism and modern Russian Oligarchy are very different things. I just don't know how I can explain things succinctly and I may have my own misconceptions.
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It's probably better for you to actually focus on the core point you want to argue rather than getting stuck in the weeds. That core point sounds like "Modern Russia is not communist and is not becoming communist."
 
MJ12 Commando said:
It's probably better for you to actually focus on the core point you want to argue rather than getting stuck in the weeds. That core point sounds like "Modern Russia is not communist and is not becoming communist."
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At that stage though, you have to explain how modern Russia operates as compared to the USSR, don't you?
On the SGU forum, I got a lot of answers which help with items and I think a major problem is that I cannot explain it succinctly.
For example, this one:
The Soviet Union was ruled by the Communist Party, but it was never a communist country unless you define "communism" as whatever the Soviet Union was. Russia under the Czars was an authoritarian dictatorship under the rule of the Czar. The USSR was an authoritarian dictatorship under the rule of first Lenin, then Stalin, then the Politburo.

Marx said that the road from capitalism to communism was through a period of socialism. In capitalism the owners of capital run the economy and by their economic power, the country. In socialism the workers run the economy and the country. In communism the State (i.e. the government) has "withered away" and there is no more coercion; everybody does what's right and everything is shared.

The USSR claimed to be a socialist economy on the road towards communism. But the Russian Communist Party asserted that the workers were not ready yet to govern themselves, so it was necessary for the Party to rule "on behalf of the workers" for the time being. In fact, the Party ruled on behalf of its ruling elite. It was a dictatorship just like the Czars, although to be fair, the workers were much better off under the Bolsheviks than they had been under the Czars. The economic system has been described as "state capitalism." The state owned and managed the means of production, and did it poorly.

Now Russia is an authoritarian dictatorship under the rule of the oligarchs, who rule for their own benefit. Effectively, Russia has always had a capitalist economy, first with private ownership under the rule of the Czars, then with state ownership under the rule of the CP, and now with private ownership by the oligarchs who also rule.
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Struck through the part of his post that is pretty questionable.
 
Kitsune said:
At that stage though, you have to explain how modern Russia operates as compared to the USSR, don't you?
On the SGU forum, I got a lot of answers which help with items and I think a major problem is that I cannot explain it succinctly.
For example, this one:


Struck through the part of his post that is pretty questionable.
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My Global History Class had been going over The cold War, and Dissent was a topic at the end of the unit, what about Nikita Khrushchev, because if I remember my notes right wasn't he the one who started having public dissenters deemed dangerous to society and sent to Mental Institutions?
 
BigFan10 said:
My Global History Class had been going over The cold War, and Dissent was a topic at the end of the unit, what about Nikita Khrushchev, because if I remember my notes right wasn't he the one who started having public dissenters deemed dangerous to society and sent to Mental Institutions?
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That happened after the attempt on Brezhnev's life and was mainly organized by Andropov IIRC.

Kitsune said:
This came up because somebody I was talking to face to face was saying that Russia is trying to go communist again and that their government is basically communism.

Now, maybe I am mistaken but it seems like Soviet Era communism and modern Russian Oligarchy are very different things. I just don't know how I can explain things succinctly and I may have my own misconceptions.
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USSR: Ideological apparatchiks ran the country based on ideological principles. Corruption was a fact of live but not the end goal of the ruling elite.

modern Russia: A wild coalition of disillusioned former apparatchiks who got rich in the privatization feeding frenzy, mafia and former KGB now runs the country. Their big goal is to get rich and secure the wealth and power of a small elite. Ideological concerns are a distant second priority. The heterogenous ruling coalition probably agrees on some vague Russian nationalist ideals and some vague pro-Soviet nostalgy. Most of that actually is a show for the population.

You could argue that the current ideology is some modern form of fascism but I really doubt that Putin and friends actually give enough fucks to be fascists. There is no grand ideological goal here. Putin is literally just a dude that uses his KGB training and political instinct to stay in power to accumulate more power and wealth.
 
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I'd hazard to describe modern Russia as an oligarchy, and the oligarchy is using whatever ideology that suits their needs to placate the people and keep power.

And what happens to suit the needs of a small group staying in power by any means necessary happens to look a lot like fascism, with a nationalists bent to get people enthused and their anger pointed away from the people in power and with a not quite so healthy dose of nostalgia for the (not actually quite so) good old days when the nation was one of two superpowers.
 
While both the Soviet Union and New Russia are both authoritarian police states politially dominated by an oligarchy they diverge on key points:

* The Soviet Union was ideologically communist and this influenced its domestic and foreign policy at all levels. It's one of the reason for the creation of the concept of "bourgeois pseudoscience" which is all science that is inconvenient for the ML ideology such as genetics and Darwian evolution (ironically, not so with economics). Also the Lysenkoism which is conformity with the plastic view of life held by the party's dogma.
* The way the oligarchy interacts with politics. While the Soviet and Capitalist oligarchies had/ve control over the economy, they do so in different but eerily similar ways- a tight, state-enforced ownership of economic enterprises and a ruthless dismantling of any opposition or competition. Difference is that the Soviet oligarchs were the government while the Capitalist oligarchs are independent from the government (with the exception of the enforcement of private property rights) and, like American oligarchs, exerce influence through the media (which they own or have influence over) or engage in pay-to-play shenanigans.

So to a large extent on a macro-level they're very similar, including politics and socio-economics but foreign policy is a big change. The Soviet Union was a world power that held vast influence over a global communist network and funded and aided communist uprisings the world over. The New Russia's military is a pale shadow that prefer to spend its time beating up weak defenseless countries such as Ukraine or Georgia. Internationally, Russia is largely isolated and have lost nearly all their influence and power projection capabalities.
 
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WildCan said:
While both the Soviet Union and New Russia are both authoritarian police states politially dominated by an oligarchy they diverge on key points:

* The Soviet Union was ideologically communist and this influenced its domestic and foreign policy at all levels. It's one of the reason for the creation of the concept of "bourgeois pseudoscience" which is all science that is inconvenient for the ML ideology such as genetics and Darwian evolution (ironically, not so with economics). Also the Lysenkoism which is conformity with the plastic view of life held by the party's dogma.
* The way the oligarchy interacts with politics. While the Soviet and Capitalist oligarchies had/ve control over the economy, they do so in different but eerily similar ways- a tight, state-enforced ownership of economic enterprises and a ruthless dismantling of any opposition or competition. Difference is that the Soviet oligarchs were the government while the Capitalist oligarchs are independent from the government (with the exception of the enforcement of private property rights) and, like American oligarchs, exerce influence through the media (which they own or have influence over) or engage in pay-to-play shenanigans.

So to a large extent on a macro-level they're very similar, including politics and socio-economics but foreign policy is a big change. The Soviet Union was a world power that held vast influence over a global communist network and funded and aided communist uprisings the world over. The New Russia's military is a pale shadow that prefer to spend its time beating up weak defenseless countries such as Ukraine or Georgia. Internationally, Russia is largely isolated and have lost nearly all their influence and power projection capabalities.
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Foreign policy isn't that different, just smaller in scale and flipped in polarity. Before they had active invasion and frequent military support to back up their efforts to use leftist groups as geopolitical proxies and useful idiots, now they just have the efforts to manipulate proxies and useful idiots, and instead of doing so with far-left groups they do it with far-right groups.
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
and instead of doing so with far-left groups they do it with far-right groups.
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I am pretty sure Russia will use any groups that let them, regardless of alignment. And I am also pretty sure the Soviets were the same.

The focus may have changed, but intelligence services are nothing if not opportunistic.
 
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