Vladimir Putin is immensely corrupt, an evil dictator who has dismantled Russian democracy, repeatedly kills his political enemies, meddles in the affairs of foreign countries, invades his neighbours, and leads a life of opulent luxury. Aleksei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, is an idealistic activist and dissident, who willingly went to prison, thereby taking his fight against the corruption of the Russian elite to the extreme. So far, so indisputable.
The politically correct interpretation of these facts is that Putin should be regarded as the ultimate enemy of the present liberal capitalist order, whereas Navalny is its hero, as he fights against corruption, which is to be regarded as ‘the leading threat to the global world’, if we are to believe Alexander Etkind, who nominated Navalny to the Nobel Peace Prize, and if we are to go by the global anti-corruption consensus. However, if we change perspective and put today’s capitalism in a critical light, we could employ a metaphor and argue that Navalny, for all his real, personal sacrifice, is the beautified and deceiving face of a globalised capitalism, while Putin is its raw and ugly, but more honest, face. Putin does not represent another order, but to a large extent, the worst excesses of the present one – capitalism.
On Christmas Day, Navalny finally surfaced after having disappeared without a trace weeks earlier. Back in early December, his lawyers were told that he was no longer an inmate at the ‘strict-regime’ penal colony no. 6 in a small town outside the city of Vladimir, where he had spent almost three years of his prison term, sentenced on various trumped-up charges. Some claimed that this region was chosen because, thanks to the preposition usage in Russian, ‘in the vicinity of Vladimir’ (pod Vladimirom) could also mean ‘under Vladimir’, that is, under Putin. Here, in any case, he had been subjected to various forms of what taken together amounts to torture, such as deliberately giving him undersized clothes, placing him in a cell with a highly unhygienic inmate, waking him every hour of the night for ‘identification’, as well as repeatedly putting him in solitary confinement for long periods as punishment for patently ridiculous ‘offences’ such as using a swear word in a conversation with another inmate or keeping a shirt button open (recall the undersized clothes). Navalny’s Christmas present was a transfer to a ‘special-regime’ prison (even stricter than the previous one) in the Arctic zone. Hence, Navalny is left even more out in the cold, both in the literal sense, with winter temperatures occasionally dipping below minus 50 degrees Celsius, as well as metaphorically speaking, as the train journey from Moscow takes nearly two days, which of course makes it exceedingly difficult and costly for his supporters and lawyers to communicate with him.
By the starkest of contrasts, Putin likely spent Christmas nights in the perfect microclimate of one of his ultra-luxurious residencies, perhaps at his beloved Valdai, where he can enjoy life in either a 3000m2 or 7000m2 house, which the Navalny team sarcastically refers to as ‘the temple of his asceticism’. It sports nearly all the amenities one would expect, such as an extensive spa, a private church, restaurants, a saltwater floating pool, dental clinic and doctor’s cabinet, as well as highly ornamental furniture. Most tellingly, there is a meeting room with gilded chairs and a gilded globe hanging from the ceiling, from which one can literally reap golden leaves. A major part of Navalny and his team’s activism consists of exposing these ‘dirty’ – or else, corruption-funded – luxuries, publishing them on YouTube and adding biting comments, such as ‘Putin loves luxury, he craves luxury, he cannot live otherwise’.
Putin and Navalny are mortal enemies in the most direct sense; in 2020 Putin sent his FSB henchmen to kill Navalny using a nerve agent. But despite their enmity, they are both essentially neoliberals.
Notwithstanding Western sanctions and Russia’s more and more war-like economy, Putin has by no means bidden farewell to capitalism. He is both a product and promoter of capitalism. His mythological image as the restorer of order after the chaotic oligarchic capitalism of the 1990s has been highly important for his popular legitimacy, but he has done nothing to change the system’s main feature: the fierce competition between atomised individuals ruthlessly seeking to maximise personal profit. This corresponds to Michel Foucault’s definition of neoliberalism and is a crucial part of the divide-and-rule strategy which has kept Putin in power since 2000. More to the point, the looting of the country’s resources by him and his coterie would not have been possible without the consulting firms, tax havens and other offshore structures of financialised global capitalism. Nor has Navalny, a failed businessman, presented anything resembling a consistent political-economic alternative to neoliberal capitalism, save for a few references to welfare. His economic programme is exceedingly simple: rid Russia of its corrupt elite and thereby lay the foundation for ‘real’ capitalism. By setting the competitive market free, he will open the road to innovation and prosperity for Russia. For Navalny, more capitalism, purer capitalism, is the cure to all Russia’s ills.
In the Western mind, Navalny has, thanks to his sacrifice, emerged as a symbol of purity, or else what psychoanalysts would call the West’s ego ideal – what Westerners would like themselves to be. Conversely, Putin represents everything Westerners do not want to be. For the proponents of capitalism, it is simply unbearable that kleptocracy, graft, corruption and expansionist war could be internal to the capitalist order. Hence, despite being a product and promoter of capitalism, Putin, who represents all of the above-mentioned vices – is externalised from this order via various mental and discursive strategies. But such externalisation only serves to perpetuate the same order that has produced innumerable ills, including Putinism. Make no mistake: Putinism should be fought. Not by artificial externalisation, but by recognising how it is the result not only of an isolated despotic mind or a nation’s post-imperial syndrome, but also internal to the political-economic order of which the West is also a part – neoliberal capitalism.
Jardar Østbø is Professor and Head of Programme for Russian Security and Defence Policy at the Institute for Defence Studies, Norwegian Defence University College.
Luxury and Corruption by Tereza Østbø Kuldova, Jardar Østbø and Thomas Raymen is available here for £16.99 on the Bristol University Press website.
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