Osnovnye cherty smeny obshchestvennogo stroia kak peredela sobstvennost = The Basic Features of System Change as The Redistribution of Ownership

Krausz, Tamás (2023) Osnovnye cherty smeny obshchestvennogo stroia kak peredela sobstvennost = The Basic Features of System Change as The Redistribution of Ownership. RUSSIANSTUDIES.HU, 5 (1). pp. 43-68. ISSN 2677-0660

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Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the failure of the state socialist system would not have happened without the decisive role played by domestic economic and political crises and the active co-operation of the Soviet state elite. There can no longer be any doubt that the disintegration of the Soviet Union and state socialism was bound up with the unreserved embrace of the global economy by those in power in order to preserve their own positions, maintain their luxury lifestyle, and ensure their control over state property in perpetuity. Fearful for their social position, the Soviet elite, the nomenclature, were open to any solution which would consolidate their status. The most powerful groups in the Soviet Union joined an obvious and open alliance with international centres of power and money. Later experiences of privatisation showed that where there is a shortage of capital privatisation can only take place through raw expropriation. This fraud was most clearly demonstrated by the ‘voucher’ scheme or ‘popular privatisation,’ which accorded with the spirit of Shatalin’s programme but was at odds with the more cautious IMF programme. The preferred method for privatisation was ‘management privatisation,’, which involved an alliance of bankers, managers and state functionaries. According to the programme, enterprises should function as a kind of joint stock company “free from state control, with state holding companies following the model of private sector holding companies”. As is now well known, due to the lack of capital in the system, the end result was that the rapid ‘emancipation’ of state property descended into a frenzy of division and acquisition by the elite (which Russian called ‘prihvatizatsya’). In essence perestroika came to an end with the private expropriation of state property. The state remains the strict guarantor of property relations defining both the ‘state dependency’ of the new Russian oligarchic bourgeoisie and the political-institutional conditions for the emergence of a new, class society..

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