Russia Still Leverages Marxist Ideology to Maintain Power: Senior Fellow

Anti-Vladimir Putin sentiments were high in Times Square on Feb. 26, 2022. Richard Moore/The Epoch Times

The current Russia is the by-product of the collapse of morality and lack of law advanced by the Marxist ideology, according to David Satter, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

“The lack of law, the lack of objective standards created a situation when Russia began the huge transition from socialist economics and state owned property to a capitalist system based on individual-ownership market,” Satter told EpochTV’s “China Insider” program.

“The result was not the creation of a market-based democracy, nor the creation of normal democratic institutions, but on the contrary, criminal capitalism, capitalism run by bandits,” he said.

According to the scholar, the dominant class, meaning the government, “was resorted to terror to strengthen and maintain their hold on power.”

In order to maintain the facade of a democratic country, they need to garner public support and, in Satter’s opinion, rallied it with attacks on foreign countries.

“Whether it was an attack on the breakaway Republic of Chechnya, which they treated as a foreign country, or Ukraine, Georgia, and the like,” Satter said.

The expert further pointed out that the ideological basis of the functioning of the Soviet Union is Marxist-rooted class conflict theory.

“Marxism assumes that the driving force of history was class conflict. So that didn’t leave any room for moral restraint,” Satter said.

“The dominant class was free to do anything it wanted to do, because it was acting in the interest of history. So mass murder was actually not particularly sanctioned,” he added.

Satter cited Lenin’s speech to the Komsomol, meaning the Young Communist League, to illustrate how ethics and morality were rejected by communism.

“Lenin said in his speech to the Komsomol that ... right and wrong are determined by the interests of the dominant class,” he said.

“In the Soviet Union, that class was claimed to be represented by the communist party,” Satter added.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the continuation of this doctrine led to Russia’s failure to establish the rule of law.

“In the Republics, which emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union, that [establishment of the rule of law] rarely happened, and in Russia, practically not at all,” Satter said.

Although it is widely assumed that the threat of communism doesn’t exist anymore, the scholar noted that communism still remains in the habits of thought.

And to defeat communism, it’s necessary “to recognize that there have to be principles derived from a sense of morality, rather than from the political interests of a given group,” he said.