By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
As democracy goes in states at war, in Russia there is more of it — faction fighting, public criticism, media debate — about battlefield operations, wins and losses, than there is on the NATO side, in the US, Canada, Germany, France or England.
By contrast, on the conduct of domestic economic policy, in Russia there is much less open argument than there is on the other side.
This is surprising because the sanctions war has forced the US-controlled and NATO-allied banks and corporations to abandon their Russian business, halt production plants, close offices, cancel supply and marketing agreements, write down the value of their Russian assets, and withdraw from Russia if they can. The outcome is an opportunity, a revolutionary one, for Russia’s businessmen to take over the foreign assets and operate them for domestic profit for the first time in many years.
In theory, there has been active debate in Moscow about how this re-nationalization should be managed, and to whose profit. On one side, there has been Sergei Glazyev and his Anti-Crisis Expert Council which includes the public economist Mikhail Khazin and Duma deputy Mikhail Delyagin. On the other side, the oligarch lobby known as the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RUIE), led by Alexander Shokhin.
In practice, Glazyev has kept his government job as minister for integration and macroeconomics of the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC, aka EAEU ), the bloc of former Soviet states coordinating customs, central banking, trade and fiscal management policies together. However, Glazyev has lost the fights he has waged for change in Central Bank policy and in the priorities of the government’s war economy. Like Glazyev, Khazin and Delyagin have kept their tribunes, but their message has proved unsuccessful.
At the same time, Elvira Nabiullina – Glazyev’s attack target as Governor of the Central Bank – has kept her Kremlin mandate and her policies. Her former patron, Alexei Kudrin, has lost his post at the head of the Accounting Chamber but received Kremlin promotion instead to run the new presidential campaign fund created around the Yandex group of companies, owned by Arkady Volozh.
How much then of the opportunity to convert the foreign-owned assets to new purpose in the Russian economy is being seized by the well-known oligarch faction? What evidence is there for the political defeat of the Glazyev faction? What is the current balance-sheet of foreign assets lost to Russia and Russian assets gained by the US side?
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