A Map of the New Normal by Jeff Rubin

Author:Jeff Rubin [Rubin, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2024-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

Russia and the New Normal

We don’t have to look to the future to consider the effects of Western sanctions on Russia. The Russians have been living with them for more than a hundred years. Following the conclusion of the First World War, Western powers, led by the United States, turned sanctions that had previously been targeted at a now defeated Germany toward the new Bolshevik government in Moscow and the newly formed Communist government in Hungary, led by Béla Kun.

At the time, the governing economic and political elites in Western Europe and America felt threatened by the Russian Revolution, fearing that worker unrest might spread to their own countries. (Indeed, at the time there was widespread labour unrest in the United States and the Winnipeg General Strike in Canada, and the newly formed Labour Party organized the largest general strikes in history in the United Kingdom). Crushing the newly formed Soviet state was a high priority for both the American and British bourgeoisie. Although Western powers were not technically at war with Soviet Russia, Britain and France sent 200,000 troops to fight against the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war that followed the 1917 revolution.

Even back then there were many doubts about whether the crippling sanctions would actually promote the regime change that they were intended to achieve. Many opponents of sanctions in the West feared that further impoverishing the Russian people through economic warfare against their government would serve only to strengthen the Bolsheviks’ hand and their fight against the czarist White Army that was still operating in many parts of the country and challenging the new Soviet government.

In addition to its trade ban with the newly formed Soviet state, Great Britain—at the time the most ardent advocate of economic warfare against the new Bolshevik government in Russia, as it is today—forbade any ships that had been supplying Bolshevik-controlled ports from being loaded with British coal. That restriction created a major disincentive for shipping countries to service any Russian ports, since British control over the production of bunker coal, which was the primary fuel used for shipping at the time, was much greater than Saudi Arabia’s control of today’s oil market.

Over time, however, support for continued sanctions began to wane. Scandinavian merchants were the first to lobby for a repeal of the trade blockade, but other voices were soon heard, on both humanitarian and commercial grounds. Russian resources, particularly wheat, were highly coveted by European governments cognizant that hungry stomachs among their own labour force had the potential to feed the same kind of social unrest they’d seen unfold in Russia, while both European and American industrialists were eager to sell their wares to a backward and still largely rural Russian economy desperate for foreign technology.

Eventually their voices were heard and enthusiasm for the three-year-old economic war against the Bolshevik regime waned. It had clearly not achieved its intended effect of bringing down the revolutionary Bolshevik government in Russia. By 1922, czarist forces had been annihilated, and the Bolsheviks were the undisputed rulers of Soviet Russia.

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