--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> That's what he says now. What was he saying when he
> was in the KGB?
I assume that he said one thing in public and another thing in private. The KGB is commonly believed to have been the least ideological branch of the Soviet gov, since they had full access to information (I don't think it's a coincidence that perestroika was started under Andropov -- even if they didn't use that word for it yet). Supposedly Putin (this is according to the book his former coworker wrote), as a lawyer, was disturbed by the arbitrary implementation of justice in the USSR. In any case, what Putin usually does is decry negative aspects of the USSR and praise positive aspects, usually depending on who his audience is, being a politician and all.
>
> Boris Kagarlitsky said years ago that the old Soviet
> elite was a
> model of flexibility - they went from being
> Stalinists to social
> democrats to pure neoliberals in just a few years.
>
It's a nice soundbite, but simplistic. One, the Soviet/Russian elite weren't/aren't a monolith. I think it's more that different elites came and went rather than the entire elite switching its ideology en masse. In any case, Russia has never had a pure neoliberal economic policy. A country that gives benefits to over half its population, subsidizes the economies of several other countries, and has half of its economy owned by the state is not operating according to neoliberal principles.
Putin surrounds himself with people of different ideological bents. Illarionov is (in my view) absurdly liberal, and why Putin keeps him around I'm not sure. Gref and Kudrin are liberals. On the other hand the two Ivanovs supposedly are not. Delyagin, a Keynesian of a rather catastrophistic bent, uswas one of the economic advisers to the government a couple of years ago.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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