It started inauspiciously – they were supposed to make common cause. To set out a unitied front that put democratic values first, for when the ‘political opening’ comes to Russia again. The format was not great – three speakers, a host, and a moderator/mediator: Yulia Navalnaya, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Sergei Guriev (moderator), Mikhail Lobanov.

The inheritor of the anti-Putin opposition’s mantle, the technocrat manager [sic], the liberal economist, the democratic socialist – these were some of the self-projections of the participants. What stuck out immediately here was Khodorkovsky’s waffly and curious pitch – I’m a ‘manager’ – upravlenets. It’s the manager’s job to reel in unrealistic competing demands and overcome Schmittian politics in Russia. The charitable interpretation was that he was all about building robust institutions, but less charitably, he channelled a depoliticized, technocratic take on the future hardly different from how the Russian government (under Mishustin) operates today. This intoning of ‘I’m a manager’ from the man worth at least 100 million dollars later became a rather spurious reason for an unedifying argument between him and Navalnaya. Overall, despite how dull the discussion was, Khodorkovsky’s performance was quite revealing because it was significantly at odds with the progressive and ‘left-friendly’ vision he has set out in writing in his Garðaríki writings. As others have remarked – he also sadly looked like he has no fewer health issues than his nemesis.

But back to the dingy Amsterdam studio: immediately discussion got bogged down (for nearly half of the allotted time!) because of a rather weird set of statements by Mikhail Khodorkovksy about young people being particularly pro-war in Russia. Cue a back and forth about surveys, evidence, and so on – the kind of arguments I rehearse on Twitter all the time. This derailed discussion so much that one of the audience later remarked – in really the only interesting point of the whole two-hours discussion – “It’s a great shame that the moderators allowed the interesting discussion about those responsible for the war to be diverted into discussion of some conspiracy theories about the guilt of young people.” The audience member then argued that banks enjoy record profits (elsewhere we find calculations that Russian billionaires increased their net worth by 50% thanks to the war); there has been a major redistribution of property; that a new clan of oligarchs has emerged (The Khod hated this comment!). It was a good point: various actors have accumulated resources that could obstruct socially meaningful reforms even in a best-case scenario of ‘transition’. In a related question, another audience member asked about the 1993 constitution and revisiting the botched privatization of state businesses in the 90s – the latter of which our liberal commentors rejected.

Let’s face it, none of these speakers are really ‘media-trained’ and that’s part of the charm. The majority of YouTube comments were critical of Yulia Navalnaya for her not coming across well. Part of which we can put down to sexism, but part to the light-weight approach she took: dealing in generalizations – platitudes even (“I want to be of use to the Russian people”), expressing open hostility and other negative emotions to the others.  This roughness at the edges– on the part of all the speakers, made it captivatingly-dull viewing.

Then another set of unproductive discussions: ‘red lines’ (who should be allowed to take part in political processes in the new Russia), lustration. Things risked looking more and more ridiculous – The wonderful Russia of the future is La Fontaine’s  bear hide. Lobanov was really the only person to offer much detail: on the need for things like worker control over labour processes, public (not state) ownership of enterprises, avoiding another oligarchic settlement as well as avoiding western capital capturing the Russian economy. A well-rehearsed set of democratic socialist demands including – again – some of the only concrete political proposals of any of the speakers – such as a solidarity tax on war profiteers like the one imposed on assets accrued during Vichy rule France.

Lobanov’s ideas get little but scepticism from the others. No doubt they and some of the audience see him as wanting to return to the bad-old days of Soviet state ownership. However, his ideas are close to the traditions of a perfectly reputable market socialism, economic democracy and workers’ self-management. There is also a substantial Russian intellectual history behind this distinction: scholarship on Russian democratic socialism has identified workplace democracy, worker ownership and economic decentralisation as an important alternative tradition to both Bolshevik command socialism and neoliberal transition.

Moreover, Lobanov highlights a problem the others are little concerned with: the transition itself will be a struggle over who controls the enormous wealth accumulated during Putinism and the war. For Lobanov and democratic socialists, neither institutional design to prevent the same disaster recuring (charitable reading of Khodorkovsky), nor simply free elections and robust political democracy with lustration (Navalnaya) is enough: unless ordinary people gain institutional power over economic as well as political life, the same concentration of power will reproduce itself under a different political regime.

*the comment about the ‘weather’ was from Lobanov – correctly restating the problem that at the moment this is the attitude people rightly have in Russia. You can’t change the weather; you have to wait it out. He made the point that it’s only economic crisis that will change this attitude.

Meanwhile the phony war Russians enjoyed for some years after the invasion continues to crumple a deflating balloon. This is just the beginning of the return of immiseration – real deterioration in the material conditions and wellbeing for millions. In rather different online space Oleg Komolov and Rafail Abdulov discuss the slow-motion stagnation of the economy and its effects: the juicing effect of increasing military spending is nearing its end. A key indicator is wage arrears – a phenomenon that almost everyone in the West overlooks, indeed, struggles to understand. “How can it be that people work when they don’t get paid?”, I’m continually asked by students and colleagues alike. The amount of unpaid wages has doubled in the last year but still looks relatively low: a lot less than 1% of GDP. In the 1990s this figure reached 3%. However, one needs to think about the cognitive effect of this; ‘at least this isn’t the 90s’, is pretty much the only legitimating rhetoric from the government that everyone can agree on. But what if it gets worse and involves not just blue-collars but white-collars as well?

Actually it already is. Wages stopped rising, indeed, even official statistics reports large, double-digit declines in the most vulnerable regions, while inflation remains high (10% on consumer goods, according to Rosstat). The leading indicator here is the not-so-slow collapse of the construction industry that in turn feeds into metallurgy. Even making a big war cannot save these sectors when their profits are mainly from building boxes for people to live in and shop in. If you lose 40% of production in these sectors because of high costs of investment borrowing, then, guess what – that’s 40% of a workforce you can’t pay anymore.

But that’s not quite right. Along with wage arrears, the classic Russian obfuscation of such economic pain is via forced reduction in working hours – a four-day week (and it will get worse than that). Which of course means a 20% reduction in pay (actually more). I personally experience this phenomenon in that ‘my guys’ generally have a lot more time to talk to me because they are working so much less nowadays. Komolov remarks that forced furlough has affected most vehicle producers, rail, engineering, machinery and loads of other industries. A perfect storm: demographic (aggregate) shortage of labour gets worse and worse at the same time as a large-scale destruction of ‘good jobs’ in both blue- and white-collar work, and among many self-employed (the Wildberries factor). Very old, yet familiar economic phenomena rise from the dead (not only from the 1990s, but all the way back to the 1930s): enterprise labour hoarding and labour immobility. The tradition of dead generations does not weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living, but is more like in a George A Romero film: enterprises are like zombies stumbling through a waste-land in search of sustaining blood, in an ever decreasing pool of living humans.