Tony Wood - Russia Without Putin - Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War

as prime minister under Yeltsin, 17–18

in St Petersburg, 13–15

support among intelligentsia for, 80, 81

Rasmussen, Anders Fogh, 130

Remington, Thomas, 38

Roldugin, Sergei, 55

Rotenberg, Arkady and Boris, 30, 55, 118

rouble

1998 crash in value of, 45

speculation in, 33

used by former Soviet states, 118

Rubtsovsk, 95

Russian March (2007), 104

Russian Orthodoxy, 101, 152–54

Russian Socialist Movement, 99

Russo-Georgian War (2008), 1, 105, 113, 131–32, 139, 155, 167

Ryklin, Mikhail, 74

Saakashvili, Mikheil, 131, 176

St Petersburg (Leningrad), 11, 13–15, 94

Salye, Marina, 14

sanctions, 29–30, 138

Savitsky, Pyotr, 150

Schmitt, Carl, 151, 153

Schulmann, Yekaterina, 176

Sevastopol, 165

Sechin, Igor, 15, 29, 48, 53

Seleznev, Gennady, 152

Sessions, Jeff, 142

Shamalov, Kirill, 30

Shamalov, Nikolai, 30, 55

Shevardnadze, Eduard, 176

Shevchuk, Yuri, 99

siloviki , 48–50

Sinyavsky, Andrei, 73

Skripal, Sergei, 173–74

The Slynx (Tolstaya), 59–60

Smolensky, Aleksandr, 33, 25, 37, 40, 45

Sobchak, Anatoly, 13–16

Sobchak, Ksenia, 100

Sochi, 30, 103

Soldatov, Andrei, 49

Solidarity (party), 99

Sorokin, Vladimir, 49, 160

South Ossetia, 131, 167

Soviet Union

collapse of, 12–13, 35, 115–16, 167

nationalism in, 150–51, 154–55

Spiral Motion (Furman), 176–77

Stalin, Josef, 44, 60, 81, 85

‘state capitalism’, 31–32

Stepashin, Sergei, 15, 18, 49

Stolypin, Pyotr, 153

strikes, 75, 93

Surkov, Vladislav, 30, 83

Syria, 2, 90, 113, 132, 138–41, 143, 144, 158

Talbott, Strobe, 124

Taylor, Brian, 166

Tillerson, Rex, 142

Timchenko, Gennady, 15, 30, 55

Togliatti (city), 95

Tolstaya, Tatyana, 59–60

Tompson, William, 48

trade unions, 76, 93–94

Trenin, Dmitri, 55

Trotsky, Leon, 61

Trubetskoi, Nikolai, 150

Trump, Donald (Sr), 2, 132, 141–43

Trump, Donald (Jr), 142

Tunisia, 139

Tuva, 66

Udaltsov, Sergei, 101

Ukraine, 131–32, 155

annexation of Crimea, 137–38

in Commonwealth of Independent States, 119

crisis in (2013–14), 8, 133–34, 136–37

European Union and, 135–36

Maidan protests in, 12, 135–136, 139, 154n

Orange Revolution in, 128–29

Ulitskaia, Liudmila, 99

unemployment, 21, 64, 68–69, 94

Union of Right Forces (party), 92, 127

United Kingdom (UK)

attempted murder of Russian spy in, 173–74

sanctions against Russia by, 29

United Nations (UN)

on Libya, 139

on Syria, 139

United Russia party

dominance of Duma by, 21, 22

and middle class, 83

personal wealth of children of officials in, 54

protests against, 95, 96

United States

hegemony of, 157, 158

middle class in, 83–84

NATO expansion and, 121–26

Post–Cold War power of, 120–21

sanctions against Russia by, 29

Urusov, Valentin, 93

Ustinov, Vladimir, 53

Vernadsky, George, 150

Vishnevsky, Anatoly, 164

Vladivostok, 94, 95, 130

voucher privatization, 36

Vsevolozhsk, 93–94

Warnig, Matthias, 15

Warsaw Pact, 118, 121, 132

White, Stephen, 49, 50

Woerner, Manfred, 121n

women

pay gap for, 78

poverty and, 70–71

in Soviet labour force, 62

Women of Russia (political party), 70–71

working class, 68–70

Yabloko (party), 92, 99, 104

Yakunin, Vladimir, 15

Yanukovych, Viktor, 128, 133–36, 154n

Yavlinsky, Grigory, 127

Yeltsin, Boris, 18, 26

foreign policy under, 118–21, 123–24

and NATO membership, 125

Parliament attacked by, 27, 73

poverty under, 64

privatizations under, 35–38, 40–42

Putin continuing the policies of, 4–5, 21–22, 27–28

support among intelligentsia for, 73

war in Chechnya under, 166

Yukos (firm), 23, 24, 31, 37, 41, 43, 46–47

Yushchenko, Viktor, 128

Zakharov, Andrei, 170

Zinoviev, Aleksandr, 57

Zvyagintsev, Andrei, 55–56

First published by Verso 2018

© Tony Wood 2018

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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In Russia, Jewishness is generally held to be an ethnic category, and is often registered in official census data along with other narodnosti – ‘nationalities’ – such as Tatars, Chechens, Buryats, and so on. The share of the Russian population identifying as Jews in 2002, in the first post-Soviet census, was 0.16 per cent.

Of course, ‘insiders’ could still make money from their industrial holdings through transfer pricing, creative accounting or asset-stripping; but it was much more difficult to turn a profit from production itself.

FSB agents had arrested a high-level officer of the FSKN in connection with a bribery investigation; the arrested man countered by accusing top FSB agents of involvement in a smuggling and tax-evasion scheme, which he had apparently been investigating.

Holding title to an apartment also exposed people to the risk of extortion; many actually sold their apartments back to the municipality after privatizing them, as a kind of juridical self-defence.

Alongside the UK and Switzerland, Cyprus was often the preferred place for wealthy Russians to keep their money, in banks as well as shell companies and trusts. This explains why the island frequently appeared in statistics as the number one source of ‘foreign direct investment’ in Russia.

Their willingness to overlook the Pinochet regime’s bloody record was the worst part of this fantasy – a latter-day version of the idea that fascism ‘made the trains run on time’. But it also relied on a total misreading of pinochetismo’s economic performance. What is commonly referred to as the ‘Chilean miracle’ actually consisted of short bursts of growth that followed deep recessions largely caused by the regime’s own policies. It took until 1989 for Chile to regain its per capita output level of 1970. In the meantime, swathes of the economy had been transferred into private hands at knockdown prices, public health care, pension and education systems had been gutted, and poverty had almost tripled. In that respect, Russia had already had its Pinochet – and his name was Yeltsin. For a substantial critical assessment of the dictatorship’s economic outcomes, see Joseph Collins and John Lear, Chile’s Free-Market Miracle: A Second Look , Oakland, CA 1995, especially pp. 243–57.