Berezovsky, Putin and the next Russian revolution

Submitted by Anon on 23 April, 2007 - 2:12

By Amina Saddiq

The British government is under pressure from Russian president Vladimir Putin to extradite dissident businessman Boris Berezovsky after the latter publicly called for the violent overthrow of Putin’s increasingly anti-democratic regime.

Socialists have no political sympathy whatsoever with Berezovsky, formerly one of Russia’s most powerful “oligarchs”, whose fortune of £850 million was made by grabbing what should have been public assets at knock-down prices during the privatisation-mania of the Yeltsin years. As we shall see, and as one would expect of someone so filty rich, Berezovsky is hardly a model democrat himself. However, it is vital that we oppose the Kremlin’s demands for him to be handed over.

This is an issue of basic democratic rights. Yet Putin’s chief spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, demanded to be reassured “that official London will never grant asylum to someone who wants to use force to change the regime in Russia” — and Jack Straw, when he was foreign secretary, told the Commons that “advocating the violent overthrow of a sovereign state is unacceptable” and threatened to strip Berezovsky of his refugee status.

This is the same political logic that led Margaret Thatcher to denounce Nelson Mandela as a terrorist because the ANC used violence against the apartheid regime. Straw’s view point does not even rise to the level of democratic liberalism. What exactly is wrong with advocating the violent overthrow of a state that is itself intensely violent against its own population? What, for instance, of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq?

When Karl Marx became a refugee in London more than a hundred and fifty years ago, the Prussian government made repeated attempts to have him extradited back to Germany - and was told by the British government, of course no friend of Marx’s revolutionary politics, that he had broken no laws in Britain and had the right to political asylum. Unfortunately, the moral and political standards of the British ruling class have sunk continuously since then.

We should defend Berezovsky’s right to stay in the UK and make all the anti-Putin propaganda he wants. That much is clear. The complication, for socialists, is that Berezovsky is not Marx. What he is advocating is not a democratic uprising of the Russian people (much less, naturally, one led by the Russian working class), but a palace coup to replace Putin. For Berezovsky, as was made clear by the interview published in the Guardian on 13 April, revolution and democracy are counterposed:

“We need to use force to change this regime. It isn’t possible to change this regime through democratic means. There can be no change without force, pressure...There is no chance of regime change through democratic elections. If one part of the political elite disagrees with another part of the political elite — that is the only way in Russia to change the regime. I try to move that.”

In other words, Berezovsky, who supported Putin’s election in 2000, now wants a new authoritarian leader who will do things differently — including, presumably, by being more solicitious to the rights of individual capitalists.

Berezovsky’s “revolution” would be directed against Putin — but also against the Russian working class. While defending him from being sent back into the hands of the Russian security services, the left must expose Berezovsky’s anti-democratic politics. We want the next Russian revolution to be ours.

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