My two cents is that it's highly developed monopoly capitalism, with private owners significantly integrated into the state. When privatization went down in Russia, the party bureaucracy privatized factories in their own interests, with a much smaller section of property distributed to some employees. Everything got fragmented, then it re-congealed under the new oligarchs. The closest comparison to how Putin is acting imo is Chung Doo-hwan, the south korean army general who ran the country from 1980 to 1988. Putin really is an extremely authoritarian liberal with nationalist tendencies. He's not a fascist, he doesn't rely on stuff like the far right National Liberation Movement (though doesn't mind using them as a pawn), but instead an internal National Guard. He's fully relying on the machinery of the bourgeois state, controlled by the oligarchy that rose in the smashing and looting of the soviet economy, to rule.
My two cents is that it's highly developed monopoly capitalism, with private owners significantly integrated into the state. When privatization went down in Russia, the party bureaucracy privatized factories in their own interests, with a much smaller section of property distributed to some employees. Everything got fragmented, then it re-congealed under the new oligarchs. The closest comparison to how Putin is acting imo is Chung Doo-hwan, the south korean army general who ran the country from 1980 to 1988. Putin really is an extremely authoritarian liberal with nationalist tendencies. He's not a fascist, he doesn't rely on stuff like the far right National Liberation Movement (though doesn't mind using them as a pawn), but instead an internal National Guard. He's fully relying on the machinery of the bourgeois state, controlled by the oligarchy that rose in the smashing and looting of the soviet economy, to rule.
Gotcha. That makes sense.