Russian business newspaper Vedomosti began publishing in 1999. The idea was to create an independent, center-right, pro-business organ modeled on the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. Those two papers took stakes in Vedomosti and it was even printed on pink newsprint as a homage to the FT.
It was probably the high point of Russia’s short-lived and stunted decade of freedom but also, as is often the case with high points, the start of a decline.
For a couple of years after its founding, I wrote a biweekly column for Vedomosti, alternating with the eminent UK economic historian Baron Robert Skidelsky. In my last column, written but not published in September 2002, I analyzed the first two and a half years of Vladimir Putin’s domestic policies and mused about him setting himself up to rule as long as Leonid Brezhnev (who was the Soviet boss in 1964-82) and about Russia heading for a repeat of a Brezhnevite “period of stagnation.”
At the time, 2020 seemed very far away but today we can safely say that Putin’s Russia is in the grip of a full-blown stagnation. The coterie of Putin’s buddies who lord over the country all started in the KGB and the communist party before the Soviet collapse. The faces of prominent politicians and the heads of “opposition” parties in the Duma have been familiar for at least two decades—like the portraits of Soviet Politburo members displayed on every corner during the holidays, which never changed unless one of them died.
The Russian economy has been largely renationalized. No Russian company or brand of any significance has emerged during Putin’s years. Only a few, mostly resource companies are known beyond Russia’s borders. They were created in the 1990s and are now run by Putin’s buddies or flunkies.
America’s economy, in contrast, is by far the most dynamic and resilient in the world. The United States not only has a huge lead in developing technology but it also largely determines the direction of global technological progress.
Donald Trump in his inimitable style claims that by playing golf and tweeting nonsense he created the strongest economy in history, but the truth is that the creation of dozens of leading global brands and the disruption and recreation of entire industries began in earnest under Bill Clinton and continued at an accelerating pace under the next three administrations. Important, that process occurred without much assistance from politicians and totally independently of politics.
Worse, America’s political system is ossified and no less stagnant than Russia’s under Putin. The two current US presidential candidates have just over a century and a half between them — the oldest duo ever to run for the highest office in the land. But other party leaders, on both sides of the Congressional aisle, are pathetically, inexcusably old.
It’s not just the age of the political leaders. It’s the system that is out of step with modern society. Two of the last three presidents were elected by a minority of voters — and Trump by some 3 million fewer votes. For a country that in the 21st century still claims the title of the Leader of the Free World that simply won’t do. Not surprisingly, a government by a minority has pursued policies that are opposed by a majority and vice versa. Despite universal calls for gun control, Americans are allowed more and more freedom in owning battlefield weapons, brandishing them, and engaging in the mass murder of each other.
Despite overwhelming support for the woman’s right to choose and Obamacare, both are under constant attack and may even be rescinded.
Russians are nostalgically harking back to the Soviet Union as the golden age of their country. This nostalgia affects both the rulers and the ruled. While ordinary people pine for the supposedly great Soviet ice cream, Putin endlessly harps on the Great Victory which took place three generations ago and insists on his personal exclusive right to interpret World War II.
In fact, Russia now is a kind of modified USSR — perhaps as described by satirist Vladimir Voynovich in his 1986 novel Moscow 2042, complete with priests taking the place of communist ideologues. Even the three-month-long protests in Khabarovsk have settled into a kind of impotent hatred of Moscow by the rest of the country that Voynovich imagined.
Russian society is not homogenous and there are groups of people, admittedly fairly small, who are not interested in living in a stagnant, backward-looking nation. In the United States, such divisions run deeper — because a dynamic, globalized, science-based economy has produced a much larger well-educated, cosmopolitan class.
However, that economy has created very wide divisions between winners and losers—divisions that are economic, educational, and social. The stagnant political system is largely a reflection of the backward-looking segment of society.
There are so many ways in which society keeps looking into the rearview mirror, from the wacky “originalist” interpreters of the Constitution on the Supreme Court to calls to revive 1950s’ style manufacturing and from the embrace of fossil fuels to idle talk of a new Civil War a century and a half out of date.
The America First brand of nationalism goes hand in hand with the general feeling of the 1930s that this portion of society exudes.
Trump seems very much a throwback as well. Maybe not so much to the murderous dictators of the 1930s, but to the 1939 Hollywood film The Wizard of Oz or to the disco craze of the 1970s, since he sounds and acts like a drag queen waiting to be admitted to Studio 54.
It is deeply symbolic that the fate of Trump’s second term will likely be decided in Florida, in the south of the state by geriatrics and Cuban Americans still living in the warm glow of the Fulgencio Batista regime and in the north, by subsistence farmers.
Trump’s second term will be a combination of the retrograde, the incompetent, and the corrupt. A Joe Biden presidency will also hark back to earlier times but perhaps more recent and saner. But aside from the two seniors at the head of the party tickets, a revolution is gradually brewing just beneath the surface.
Geoffrey Gundlach, the CEO of the bond fund DoubleLine Capital, predicts that the crazy 2020 election will go Trump’s way, to be followed by an even wilder 2024 and a revolution in 2027. My view is that a revolution will come a lot earlier and, as with most revolutions, its results are likely to disappoint both liberals and conservatives.
