Amidst the myriad attempts to “explain” Vladimir Putin, maybe Karl Marx got there first—one hundred and sixty years ago.
Arguably the best of Marx’s body of work, and in my opinion probably the most readable, is his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. Written in 1851-52, it was essentially an attempt to explain the 1851 coup in France that saw the Legislative Assembly dissolved and former president Louis Bonaparte (nephew of that Napoleon) then proclaim himself Emperor Napoleon III, reversing the democratic experiment and ending the Second Republic.
In a nutshell, Marx’s answer was that a premature revolution, in a country without the social substructure to support it—essentially a mature, organized and politically aware proletariat—is a dangerous and counter-productive thing. The risk is that it actually leads to a regime with all the energies liberated by revolution, but all the instincts of the autocratic past.
This is an important work, not least as whether or not it adequately explains the rise of Napoleon III, it provides an interesting analysis of the way the utopian ideals of the Bolsheviks transformed into the brutalist nightmares of Stalinism. Lenin should have—did—know better, but the ruthless pragmatist within him overpowered the idealist when the opportunity offered itself to step into the power vacuum of 1917. Instead of listening to Marx, he rationalized his move with hollow thoughts that a “revolutionary vanguard” could substitute for that proletariat. And we know how well that went.
Putin may lack the splendidly-groomed mustache of a Napoleon III, or, thank the heavens, the murderous monomania of a Stalin. However, maybe he too is a figure emerging from the same process. The revolution was not his, it was born of Gorbachev and Yeltsin (now there’s a couple one would not usually put together), which saw democracy—of a sort—and the free market—of a sort—thrust upon a Russian people hardly ready for either. Without an experience of quite how these should look and work, to many democracy became characterized by rigged elections and fake contests, and the market the ruthless privatization of state assets into the hands of crooks and cronies.
Perhaps no wonder they were so willing to accept an emperor in all but name, and one who, like Napoleon III, seemed at least to offer a “liberal empire.” Above all, Napoleon offered a mix of state-led reform, national reconstruction, and assertiveness abroad. Paris was rebuilt, the railways expanded, education developed, finances overhauled. Oh, and he fought a victorious little war in Crimea, too, but eventually things went badly for him when he picked a fight with a rising Germany (Prussia). Some things don’t change.
In his first two terms, Putin likewise offered the stability of autocracy with the tangible benefits of reform, to a population who had felt that their country had essentially been bought by an aloof capitalist class, as to Marx had been the case in nineteenth-century France. They responded also because Putin was drawing on traditions of centralization, statism and authoritarianism and, by the late 1990s, they were frankly tired and miserable of the anarchy and poverty associated with Yeltsin’s boozy misrule. As Marx explained it,
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The traditions of dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living.”
Putin was fully able to exploit the circumstances in which Russians found themselves, and also their political culture, “weighing like a nightmare” upon their present. In the process, they won short-term advantage but betrayed their long-term interests, as corruption and geopolitical ambition would see their living standards in due course begin to decline once again, after they had already surrendered their practical political agency. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, after all, Marx sees the government becoming a “giant parasitic body” dominated by the “party of order,” when the left ought instead to act like the “party of anarchy.” Order is certainly the watchword of the Putin regime.
So here is Marx’s Putin, the beneficiary of an abortive, premature revolution not rooted in a politically-mature and engaged population. It is thus powerful and energetic, but driven by the same ambitions, confined within the same prejudices, and beholden to the same mutually-reinforcing circles of corruption and clientelism as past Russian and even Soviet regimes.
In the preface to the second edition of his book, Marx said he had set out to “demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.” That Putin never struck people before his magical rise as much more than a mediocrity is perhaps fitting. After all, in The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx also makes his memorable (if not wholly original) observation that history repeats itself, “the first as tragedy, then as farce.” He meant Napoleon and Napoleon III, but perhaps this could just as easily be applied to Napoleon III and Vladimir Putin…
