Gilbert Doctorow

For those who still think there is no Opposition party in Russia, think again! For those who believe the official statistics that 80% of the Russian population enthusiastically supports Putin, think again!

Yesterday, 22 April, on the anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Lenin, Russian Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, who is a calm, collected and moderate politician, stood before the State Duma and warned that there may be a repetition of the revolutionary 1917 scenario in contemporary Russia: “If you don’t quickly take measures – financial, economic and other measures -then by autumn what await us is what happened in 1917.”

Those words touched off a vast controversy in the Russian social networks and the Party later issued a transcript which defined his warning more precisely: “If you do not change course in a fundamental way, then by autumn we may expect what happened in February 1917.”

For those unfamiliar with Russia’s two revolutions in 1917, the first one, in February was in fact a coup d’etat in which the Russian army commanders and chief politicians from the liberal centrist parties forced the abdication of the tsar. Put in modern language, it was a ‘palace revolution’ by the elites.

Note that Zyuganov was initially quoted as calling for financial and economic reform. What is that all about? Of course, it means that Nabiulina has to be fired and the insane high Central Bank interest rates must be brought down to levels that the small and medium sized enterprises can live with.

But as I have been saying in recent days, the Nabiulina interest rates which Putin has backed supposedly to counter inflation are a hidden way that the Putin government has been shutting down the consumer economy and subsidizing the war economy, so the issue is much bigger than just the prime rate by itself. It has everything to do with Russia’s current foreign policy that is preparing for a war with Europe several years down the road and with its military policy which is dragging out the war with Ukraine to absurd lengths for the profit of the oligarchs.

Russian elites, the foreign policy establishment, wants the war to end now. They have gotten no satisfaction from Putin. And now Zyuganov is saying in the Russian parliament what some prominent politicians within Russian have been saying: enough is enough; time to finish off Kiev right now. That Moscow has allowed Prince Harry to comfortably visit to Kiev as he is doing today just adds insult to injury: why in hell isn’t Russia bombing out the railways to put an end to such tourism which in the Western media makes a mockery of Russia’s war effort.