Russia Today

Given his origins in St Petersburg which, as Leningrad, had been downgraded and largely left to rot under the Soviet regime; plus his subsequent career in the KGB, I am continually astonished how ably President Vladimir Putin is coping with the massive range of issues and responsibilities that fall on his shoulders.

He succeeded the drunken shell of the once-outstanding Boris Yeltsin, under whose presidency of Russia - just one of the successor states to the collapsed Soviet Union - the crumbling economy had been despoiled and brought to the brink of ruin. Crass and corrupt 'privatisation' [which had supposedly been intended to hand out shares in all major assets to the mass of the people] had enabled the most competent of the former 'fixers' to acquire control of massive corporations and rightly earn the description as 'oligarchs' and as a 'mafia'. Under the Soviet regime, especially when strict Stalinist controls and planning targets were relaxed, the economy was only able to function by factory managers and farm directors operating a massive black market in which clothing and shoes were bartered for industrial output and food, so that the towns' workers could be fed and the oppressed involuntary farmhands shod; while the factories and farms turned in less than their planned output to the official channels of distribution. This huge trade was managed by risk-takers who were occasionally arrested when one of them failed to bribe the local party officials sufficiently, or when some illicit trade became so much of a public scandal in the region where it was perpetrated that action simply had to be taken to restore some credibility to the regime.

The spread of television gave millions of people more awareness of how low the standard of living for hard-working Soviet subjects had become, in comparison to western Europe and the USA. The diffusion of access to telephones allowed millions of people - especially in western Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, the Baltic Republics [which had slightly better access to knowledge of Scandinavia] and the European satellite states - to begin personal bartering to raise their own standard of living. Swapping knowledge, access to better schools and hospitals, and admission to the queue for buying cars, electrical goods, western records and properly-made jeans. This development of trade went on through the stagnant years of Brezhnev's presidency, and reached such proportions in the early years of Gorbachev's rule that his government took strenuous measures to drive this illicit trade further underground so that the government's plans to develop a real consumer economy might have some chance of success. With the collapse of Gorbachev's regime and into the chaos of the Yeltsin's years, it was only the illicit swap economy that kept most households going. as the formal economy collapsed.

Putin's achievement has been to create something very broadly like a market economy in less than twenty years. This accomplishment has been unprecedented: and it is recognised by the genuine 80%-plus approval rate that the president has received from the Russian population. The many faults of the regime, the corruption and the acts of oppression that are far too common, are well reported in the west. Those are is important aspects of life in modern Russia, which in an ideal world would quickly be rectified: but priorities have to be set, and a broad consensus of the population accepts the sequence that has been adopted.

The Sovereign Club, Crimea and Catalonia

The Spanish king and his government are adamant that there should be no truck with a purported 'sovereign' administration that has just been announced to exist in the region/province of Catalonia. The United Nations has asserted that a 'solution' should be found within the Spanish Constitution. Washington has declared that Catalonia is simply part of Spain, and that fact will not change in the perception of the United States [which fought a very nasty civil war to preserve their Union]. Britain, France and Germany have made similar assertions: there will be no recognition of a rebel 'government' by any European Union member state.

President Putin deeply deplores the fact that the Gorbachev administration in the last stage of the Soviet Union acted in accordance with the 'Stalin Constitution' which had enshrined the myth that the state was a federation of independent [largely ethnically-based] sovereign republics. This was very particularly Stalin's constitutional speciality. He had been sent to Vienna in the early years of the twentieth century to find out how the Habsburg regime was coping with the question of Nationality in Austria-Hungary. Slovaks and Czechs were asserting that they were distinct national groups, with a right to statehood of their own. Minorities of the population spoke Romanian, Polish, Ukrainian and various forms of German in distinctive territories split between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Austrian Empire  [and the latter contained a massive range of entities from the Kingdom of Bohemia to small counties that were notionally sovereign]. The heir to the throne [Franz Ferdinand, who was to be killed in 1914 thus triggering the war that ended the monarchy] was said to want to change the 'dual monarchy' of Austria-Hungary into a 'trial' [or triple] monarchy with autonomy for the Slavs, in deference to his Czech wife.

Stalin produced a convoluted account of his thoughts on nationality, and after the revolution he was appointed Commissar for Nationalities. As the Soviet Union consolidated its absolute power over all the former Russian Empire, except Finland, it did not matter that a constitutional charade was enacted whereby the political entity was asserted to be a federation of notionally independent states. However, come the end of the Second World War, in their anxiety to keep Stalin on-side with the new United Nations, Britain, France and the USA agreed that three of the Soviet republics should each be independent members: Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. After Stalin's death, Khrushchev - a Ukrainian - almost casually transferred the Crimea from Russia to Ukraine: it did not seem to matter, at the time. The facts that the Crimea had been hard fought for under Peter the Great and Catherine II, and was seen as strategically important, did not cause any controversy while the USSR was operated as a single hegemonic state.

However, suddenly in 1990, the USSR collapsed; while the Communist party stooges who held office as the presidents and premiers of the various [formally fully sovereign] Socialist Republics simply colluded to ignore Gorbachev and his collapsing central authority and go their own ways. The largest component of the Union, Russia, had the charismatic Boris Yeltsin on hand to crush a half-cock attempt by party old hands to reverse all the democratic changes that Gorbachev had instituted: and as head of the Russian Republic's government Yeltsin established his hold over the biggest and most complex Soviet Socialist Republic; thus of Moscow. A notional federation was established of the former Soviet Republics, while the asserted sovereign authority in each of them began doling out the national assets to their families and friends. The Russian Republic itself became the Russian Federation including all the Autonomous Republics and Regions that Russia has inherited from Stalin's manipulations of notional boundaries. Yeltsin and his associates employed American Economists to assist them with a hugely corrupt and corrupting 'privatisation', which transferred much of industry to the hands of the so-called 'oligarchs' and caused massive deprivation to the mass of the population.

Putin's rise to power came after the damage derived from Stalin's constitutional machinations and Yeltsin's alcoholic incompetence had been done. In territorial terms, he has tried to rectify what he sees as two major failures: the transfer of the Crimea to Ukraine and the welfare of millions of Russians whose families were settled in the southern and eastern Ukraine, particularly in the reigns of Peter I, Catherine II and Stalin's post-1945 implant of Russian speakers into territory known as 'New Russia' that he had assigned to Ukraine. Stalin planted similar minorities of Russians in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; which has ensured that those countries have become very keen members of NATO in order to preserve their territorial integrity. Putin's attempts to make minor revisions of Stalin's and Khrushchev's cavalier actions, at the expense of Ukraine, have placed him under sanction by the western powers, who have set their faces against all tinkering with the pattern of states that was admitted to the United Nations in 1945 and subsequently. I have drawn attention previously to the idiocy of keeping the colonial frontiers in Africa: but they are also part of the stasis that goes with the present, deeply flawed concept of sovereignty.

East Germany was allowed to vanish into West Germany, and an independent Scotland arising from due democratic process would have gained international acceptance: provided it had been set on the international stage by the United Kingdom government acting as its sponsor.

On the other hand, if the Chechens declared themselves independent of the Russian Federation, President Putin could call on the UN to help him to suppress such pretension; at least, with verbal assurances such as have been given to Spain in respect of Catalonia.

The Catalans are having an exciting game; but they need to learn from history, quickly; before hotheads start getting hurt.