Serfdom back in Russia
If the U.S. and Europe ever get serious about finding and freezing the assets of sanctioned Russian oligarchs, they should keep in mind that it will be ordinary Russians who might be forced to pay the price.
This week, Russia’s rubber-stamp parliament will consider, and probably pass, a bill that envisions government compensation for Russians’ seized overseas assets.
The backing of United Russia and the government usually makes a bill a shoo-in. The legislature will consider it on Oct. 7, Putin’s 62nd birthday.
Once it is passed, billionaire Arkady Rotenberg, whose four villas and luxury hotel were sealed by the Italian authorities last week, will be able to file suit in a Russian court seeking reimbursement from the finance ministry. If the court rules the foreign asset freeze illegal, the Russian government will pay out the value of the property.
Considering the provenance of Putin’s sanctioned friends’ fortunes, made mostly on vastly inflated government contracts, Russian taxpayers have already paid for their villas, hotels and luxury condos. Now they will have to pay a second time: European countries and the U.S. probably have much less government property in Russia than the Putin cronies have foreign assets. The Russian government, however, doesn’t really consider ordinary citizens as taxpayers, as political commentator Stanislav Belkovsky recently pointed out.
“Our government is its own taxpayer,” he wrote. “It sells oil, gas and other minerals, and it distributes the proceeds to the population according to how valuable they are within the current system of power.”
Russians, who have acquiesced in Putin’s external aggression and intolerance of internal dissent, are no more than serfs, expected to accept whatever their lord tells them in the name of the all-powerful state.
A prominent member of the Putin elite, Constitutional Court Chairman Valery Zorkin, recently suggested in the government-owned Rossiyskaya Gazeta that the abrupt abolition of serfdom in 1861 may have been a mistake. “Despite all its drawbacks, serfdom was the brace holding together the nation’s internal unity,” he wrote. “It was no accident that, according to historians, the peasants told their former masters after the reform: ‘We were yours and you were ours.’ ”
Zorkin’s historical ruminations are no accident. Before Russia annexed Crimea and became a de facto pariah state, membership in the international community restrained the Putin elite, forcing it to show at least superficial respect for human dignity. Now it’s no longer necessary, and Russian citizens are being openly treated as property of the state. The government has already confiscated part of their pension savings to finance Crimea and is now about to scrap the $10,800 subsidy paid out to mothers who give birth to a second or third child.
There will be no mass protests because, though Russians once again belong to a master, they feel he belongs to them.