From Bolshevism to Monopoly State Capitalism: The Yabloko Ban and the Class Anatomy of the Regime in Russia

A Call to Young Comrades: The only way not to lose our philosophical and political compass in the face of the abstract concepts, discourses of moral conscience, and ideological illusions that the bourgeois media, postmodern academia, and liberal ideological apparatuses dump into our minds every day is dialectical and historical materialism. The effort of the imperialist system and its culture industry to present the world as a shallow duality between "democracy and dictatorship" or "light and darkness" is a vast smoke screen drawn to conceal the concrete relations of production in the base, the laws of capital accumulation, and the underlying class struggles.

Young Comrades!

The most concrete development on our agenda is the Russian Supreme Court’s court-ordered ban on Yabloko—the only officially registered anti-war liberal party in the country—from standing in parliamentary elections. This decision, presented in bourgeois public opinion and liberal organs simply as "the rise of autocracy" or "the end of democracy"—as can also be seen in the reports of T24 Foreign News and Medyascope—has in truth once again laid bare the instrumental character of bourgeois law and parliamentarism.

The Yabloko Ban: A Class Anatomy

The Class Anatomy of the Ban

For us Marxist philosophers and revolutionaries, this development is not merely a party’s exclusion from the ballot. Here we must dialectically expose two fundamental class dynamics:

The State-Monopoly Bourgeoisie (the Kremlin and the Siloviki): Under conditions of a war economy, a deepening crisis, and an unjust imperialist market struggle, the Bonapartist state apparatus cannot even tolerate the shop window of bourgeois parliamentarism; it tramples even its own legal rules in order to protect capital accumulation and its power.
The Comprador / Liberal Bourgeoisie (Yabloko): Yabloko, which presents its opposition to the war in abstract humanist wrappings such as "freedom and peace," in essence represents the interests of Western-oriented capital cliques in Russia and of those strata that wish to integrate with finance capital. Their objection stems not from an anti-imperialist principle, but from the losses created by Russian capital’s isolation from global markets.

Young comrades! In this study, starting from this concrete fact brought to light by the Yabloko ban, we analyze Russia’s present class situation, the monopoly-state-capitalist character of the Putin regime, and the historical transition processes from the 1917 October Revolution to today by a dialectical-materialist method. Setting aside the illusions created by the bourgeois world, we focus only on the bare class facts.

A Summary of Historical Transition Processes and Class Structure

Historical Threshold	Relations of Production and Form of Property	Ruling Class / Class Base	Political Form of the State
Socialist Construction (1917–1950s)	Social property in the means of production; abolition of the law of profit; central planning.	The proletariat (alliance of workers and poor peasants)	Dictatorship of the Proletariat
Revisionist Degeneration (1950s–1990)	Return of the law of profit and profitability; covert state capitalism.	The privileged bureaucratic stratum (Nomenklatura)	Bureaucratic Dictatorship (the illusion of the "State of the Whole People")
Savage Restoration (1990s)	"Shock Therapy" privatizations; plunder of public resources; primitive accumulation.	Comprador oligarchy and mafioso capital	A fragmented / weak bourgeois state
The Present (Putin Regime)	Monopoly state capitalism; an accumulation regime centered on energy and rent.	The monopoly bourgeoisie and the military-bureaucratic clique (Siloviki)	Bonapartist bourgeois state

The Historical Process from Bolshevik Power to Capitalist Restoration: The Dialectics of Contradictions

Young comrades, bourgeois historiography teaches history as a straight line, through the errors or virtues of great leaders. This is the illusion of modern liberal academia: they present the collapse of the USSR as "the bankruptcy of a utopian project contrary to human nature." Yet dialectical materialism teaches us that history advances through the unity and struggle of opposites. Socialism is not a static "paradise" on the way to a classless society; it is a transition process in which class struggle continues in its sharpest form between the proletariat and a bourgeoisie that has been defeated but not yet abolished (and petty-bourgeois habits of production).

To understand today’s Putin Russia and the construction of monopoly capitalism, we must take apart the moments of this historical reversal (restoration) through a dialectical process analysis.

The October Revolution and the Period of Construction: The Struggle of Opposites (1917–1950s)

The October Revolution was not merely a change of hands of political power, but a radical inversion of property relations. The dictatorship of the proletariat under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin, while abolishing private ownership of the means of production and building central planning, faced a colossal contradiction: on one side the forward surge of socialist construction; on the other, imperialist encirclement and, within, small commodity production that continually generates capitalism.

Dialectical Reality: In this period class struggle did not end; on the contrary, it took the form of the state. The rapid industrialization and agricultural collectivization of the Stalin period were a necessary economic-political war for the liquidation of capitalist elements in the countryside (the kulaks). The capitalist law of profit (the law of value) was excluded from production, and use-value was brought to the fore.
A Break from Illusions: That bourgeois literature paints this period as merely an "era of repression" is in fact the cry of the old ruling classes whose means of production were taken from them. Law and the state are not neutral; in this period the state functioned as the dictatorship of labor over capital.

The Revisionist Rupture and the Birth of a New Bourgeoisie (1953–1980s)

The qualitative breaking-point of the historical process is the Twentieth Congress of 1956, when the revisionist clique under Khrushchev seized the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) from within. For a revolutionary Marxist, what determines the character of a state is not the color of the flag that waves, but who directs the relations of production.

Superstructural Distortion ("The State of the Whole People"): Revisionism, claiming that the dictatorship of the proletariat had become unnecessary, produced anti-Marxist concepts such as the "state of the whole people" and the "party of the whole people." Yet where there are classes there can be no state "of the whole people"; this discourse was the cover with which the newly fattening bureaucratic stratum (nomenklatura) concealed its own class dictatorship.
Transformation of the Base (the Return of the Law of Profit): With the 1965 Kosygin Reforms, the principle of "social need," the fundamental motor of the planned economy, was abandoned, and the success of enterprises was once again tied to the criteria of profit and profitability. This meant, in practice, a turn to state capitalism. Although the means of production still appeared legally as the property of the state, they became in fact the collective private property of enterprise directors and party bureaucrats. Surplus-value began to be seized no longer for society, but for the welfare of this privileged bureaucratic bourgeoisie.

Qualitative Leap and Savage Capitalist Restoration (Late 1980s–1990s)

One of the fundamental laws of dialectics is the transformation of quantity into quality. The capitalist elements that had accumulated in the economy and the state apparatus from the 1950s onward (quantitative accumulation) could no longer fit inside the old socialist shell under Gorbachev’s policies of "Glasnost" (Openness) and "Perestroika" (Restructuring), and with a qualitative leap they turned into open capitalist restoration.

"Shock Therapy" as Primitive Accumulation of Capital: After 1991, with the Yeltsin period, the masks fell. Managers who for years had held key posts in the party bureaucracy, under the name of "privatization," in fact transferred onto themselves the colossal industrial plants, mines, and energy resources built with the blood and sweat of the working class.
The Birth of the Oligarchy: The bloody process of the bourgeoisie’s "primitive accumulation" that Marx recounts in Capital was lived through in a few years in 1990s Russia by means of "Shock Therapy" policies. This order of plunder, in which the mafia, the state apparatus, and former bureaucrats were intertwined, formed the foundation of today’s Russian monopoly bourgeoisie (the oligarchs). The bourgeois media shamelessly marketed these years of plunder as a "transition to freedom and democracy."

The Class Character of Putin’s Rule: Monopoly State Capitalism and Bonapartism

Young comrades, bourgeois ideologues and liberal academics try to explain the Vladimir Putin regime as a personal "autocracy," a "dictatorship," or merely an "old Tsarist/USSR ambition." This approach is a typical idealist distortion that conceals property relations and class dynamics. From the standpoint of dialectical materialism, individuals are not the constructive elements of history; they are executors of the class interests and objective economic necessities to which they belong.

Putin’s rule is not a personal regime that appeared by chance; it is the necessary organic expression of Russian monopoly capital and of the military-bureaucratic complex.

Monopoly State Capitalism: The Rule of Rent and Energy Capital

The first generation of oligarchs born of the savage "Shock Therapy" privatizations of the 1990s (the Yeltsin period) had completely paralyzed the state and opened resources to plunder by international finance capital. From the beginning of the 2000s, the clique Putin represented intervened in this process of disintegration in line with the common interests of the monopoly bourgeoisie.

The Centralization of Capital and the Illusion of Nationalization: The Putin period is one in which key sectors—from energy (Gazprom, Rosneft) to mining, from the defense industry (Rostec) to infrastructure projects—were turned by the state’s hand into colossal blocs. For the liberal media to present this as "statism" or a "return to socialism" is sheer ignorance. What is taking place here is the placing of state power directly in the service of monopoly capital—that is, the interpenetration of the state and the monopoly bourgeoisie.
State Institutions as an Apparatus of Capital Accumulation: Public resources are transferred, through contracts and budget transfers, directly to monopoly groups loyal to the Kremlin. This structure is not a dynamic capitalism that develops the productive forces, but a rotten monopoly state capitalism based on raw-material export and state-guaranteed rent accumulation.

The Bonapartist Form of Regime: The Real Class Character of the Appearance of Standing Above Classes

In Marxist literature (especially as Marx defined it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), Bonapartism is a form of regime that appears in moments of imbalance and crisis when the ruling class (the bourgeoisie) can no longer govern society by parliamentary methods, and the oppressed classes have not yet reached the organization needed to take power.

In capital’s moments of crisis the Bonapartist structure operates along this dialectical line:

Economic crisis and the conflict of capital cliques deepen; the regime gathers power by presenting itself as a "neutral referee" standing above all classes; it brings social opposition and rival capital groups under control directly through the police, the army, and the judicial apparatus.

The Illusion of the Referee Above Classes: Putin presents himself as the "neutral and strong leader" standing above the oligarchs, the army, the bureaucracy, and the broad poor masses. Yet this is sheer political sleight of hand. The regime has established a Bonapartist balance resting on the state bureaucracy (the Siloviki) in order to suppress conflicts among different fractions of the bourgeoisie (globalist capital and national-statist capital) and to keep the working class under control.
The Hardening of the Repressive Apparatus: Not only the working class and revolutionaries, but also bourgeois cliques that deviate from its line, are brought into line with this Bonapartist sword. Bourgeois law and the right to vote and to stand for election can be shelved at once according to the regime’s needs.

The Foreign Policy of Monopoly Capital: Imperialist Struggles over Partition

As Lenin set out in the theory of imperialism, monopoly capital, by its nature, crosses national borders in search of new markets, raw materials, fields of investment, and spheres of influence. Russian monopoly state capitalism is not exempt from this objective law.

The Source of Imperialist Conflict: The conflicts in Ukraine and the regional interventions are not, as bourgeois propaganda says, "Putin’s historical daydreams"; they are a war by Russian monopoly capital to protect and expand its own markets and spheres of influence against Western (US/EU) finance capital.
The Export of the Internal Crisis: In moments when the deepening economic crisis at home, falling purchasing power, and the blockage of the monopoly structure come together, the regime, by its Bonapartist nature, inflames Great-Russian chauvinism and militarism and directs the discontent of the masses toward the perception of an external enemy.

Class / Political Dimension	Liberal / Bourgeois Illusion ("What Appears")	Dialectical-Materialist Reality ("What Is")
Role of the State	"The state’s nationalization of the economy, or a remnant of communism."	Monopoly State Capitalism in which the state apparatus and monopoly capital have fused.
Putin’s Political Position	"A strong charismatic leader representing the people’s will," or "the one man."	A Bonapartist figure who secures the balance among bourgeois cliques and the pressure on the working class.
Foreign Policy and Wars	"A daydream of reviving the Tsarist empire, or a security concern."	Russian monopoly capital’s struggle with Western imperialism over the partition of markets and spheres of influence.
Approach to Opposition and the Ban	"A dictatorial intervention against the search for democracy."	A power conflict between the bourgeoisie’s national-monopoly clique and its Western-oriented comprador clique.

The Yabloko Ban and the Class Exposure of the Bourgeois Opposition

Young comrades! One of the greatest illusions that the bourgeois media, liberal think tanks, and postmodern theorists dump into the minds of the masses is to present politics as an abstract moral quarrel between "democratic-enlightened forces" and "autocratic-dark forces." Yet dialectical materialism looks not at what political actors say or in what moral wrapping they clothe themselves, but at which relations of production, which class forms of property, and which fraction of capital they represent.

The Russian Supreme Court’s blocking of Yabloko—the country’s only registered anti-war liberal party—from standing in parliamentary elections, on the application of the Kremlin-aligned Rodina Party, must be taken apart on the basis of class anatomy from a revolutionary Marxist standpoint.

Yabloko’s Class Character: Representation of the Western-Oriented Comprador Bourgeoisie

Yabloko is a structure founded by neoliberals in the process of capitalist restoration in the 1990s, historically representing the interests of Russia’s Western-oriented comprador bourgeoisie, of capital circles favoring integration with finance capital, and of the urban technocratic-academic petty bourgeoisie.

Market Foundation: Yabloko’s economic prescriptions in the 1990s were not against the plunder, under the name of privatization, of decades of labor of the Soviet peoples; on the contrary, they defended that this plunder be carried out in a manner smooth, in line with Western standards, and fully compatible with global capital.
The Ideological Illusion of "Anti-War" Politics: Yabloko’s opposition to the war in Ukraine does not stem from an anti-imperialist principle or from the internationalist solidarity of the working class. Their opposition is a bourgeois lament over Russian monopoly capital’s isolation from Western markets, over the losses the comprador bourgeoisie has suffered because of sanctions, and over the isolation of Russian capitalism from the global financial system.

The Two Faces of Bourgeois Law and the Anti-Capitalist Potential of Youth

Reports describe the protests of crowds gathered in front of courthouses after the court decision. The spontaneous reactions of the masses and of young comrades who feel anger at war, at a futureless life, at inflation, and at political repression are historically valuable. Yet here lies the danger of the bourgeois opposition: to take the just anger born of the contradictions created by the capitalist order and to subordinate it behind another fraction of that same order (the liberal bourgeoisie).

The Bonapartist state apparatus, when it suited it, took Yabloko out of the game by trampling its own laws. This has once again proved that bourgeois democracy and law are not neutral, but a weapon of control and liquidation in the hands of the ruling class.

Liberal Pacifism or Revolutionary Internationalism?

That all approved parties other than Yabloko support the Kremlin’s militarist line or remain silent on the war shows how blocked the parliamentary field has become in the eyes of the masses.

Yet the discourse of "diplomacy, ceasefire, and restoration" that Yabloko promises is nothing but abstract pacifism. As Lenin stressed during the First World War: "The way to stop imperialist wars is not bourgeois pacifism or calls for diplomacy; it is to turn the imperialist war into a class war." The war is not the result of Putin’s psychology, but of monopoly capitalism’s struggle over the partition of markets. Lasting peace cannot be built until the rule of the monopolies is overthrown.

Comparative Class Analysis: A Dialectical Analysis of Class Actors

Young comrades, bourgeois political science and the liberal media treat political actors as independent of social classes. For them, leaders and parties are compared only through "ideologies" or moral categories such as "democracy/autocracy." Yet dialectical materialism teaches us that every political actor in the superstructure is the representative of a definite relation of production and class interest in the base.

The table below makes visible the class character of these historical and contemporary actors:

Dimension of Analysis	Bolshevik Power (1917–1950s)	Revisionist Period (1950s–1990)	Putin Regime (Present Power)	Yabloko (Liberal Opposition)	Revolutionary Proletarian Line
Class Base and Material Foundation	Alliance of the proletariat (industrial workers) and the poor peasantry.	A privileged stratum nested in the party and state bureaucracy (Nomenklatura).	The monopoly bourgeoisie, the military-bureaucratic complex (Siloviki), and resource oligarchs.	The urban upper-middle class, the comprador bourgeoisie, technocrats favoring neoliberalization.	Industrial workers, precarious service-sector employees, the urban and rural poor.
Form of Property and Relations of Production	Public/socialist ownership of the means of production; exclusion of the law of profit and central planning.	Covert state capitalism; return of the profitability principle in enterprises and dominance of the law of profit.	Monopoly state capitalism; transfer of public resources and rents to capital cliques aligned with power.	Neoliberal private-propertyism; full integration of the means of production into global finance capital and market relations.	Abolition of private ownership of the means of production; central social planning under workers’ control.
Form of State and Political Superstructure	Dictatorship of the Proletariat (democratic rule of the working class).	Bureaucratic Dictatorship (a structure concealing class rule under the cover of the "state of the whole people").	Bonapartist bourgeois state (a power that secures the balance among capital cliques and the suppression of the masses).	Bourgeois parliamentary democracy (the illusion of the ballot and of law that covers over the rule of capital).	Genuine democracy based on workers’ councils (soviets) (dictatorship of the proletariat).
War, Militarism, and Foreign Policy	Proletarian internationalism; anti-imperialism and support for the liberation struggles of oppressed peoples.	Social-imperialism (a struggle for regional influence and spheres of influence that is "socialist in words, imperialist in essence").	Imperialist/militarist interventionism waged by monopoly capital for new markets, raw materials, and spheres of influence.	Alignment with the Western imperialist bloc; "liberal pacifism" against a war that disrupts capital transfer.	Class war against unjust imperialist wars; the line of "the defeat of one’s own bourgeoisie and revolution."
Approach to Law and Political Rights	Law is a class instrument that protects the interests of the oppressed; it does not recognize bourgeois freedom of property.	Law became a mechanism of control protecting the privileges of the bureaucratic stratum and the profit order.	Law is a selective weapon of repression that liquidates rivals and oppositional elements (Yabloko, striking workers, etc.).	The abstract "supremacy" of bourgeois law; an abstract construction of citizenship that sanctifies the right of property.	Exposure of the class character of law; revolutionary struggle for the organizing and strike rights of the laboring masses.

A Dialectical Reading of the Table: Class Lessons for Young Comrades

The Uninterrupted Character of Transformation and Qualitative Leaps: The revisionist deviation of the 1950s (the Khrushchev period) created quantitative accumulation by making the law of profit dominant again in the base; this accumulation turned into a qualitative leap with open capitalist restoration in 1991 (Yeltsin). The Putin regime and the Yabloko party are two different bourgeois fruits of this same process of capitalist restoration.
Exposure of False Dualities: The conflict in today’s Russia between Putin’s statist-chauvinist line and Yabloko’s Western-oriented liberal-pacifist line is not a conflict between capitalism and socialism. It is a struggle over the partition of property and markets between the bourgeoisie’s monopoly-national clique and its comprador/globalist clique.
The Independent Line of the Proletariat: Revolutionary youth must neither close its eyes to the anti-democratic bans of the Bonapartist state, nor trail behind the liberal bourgeoisie (Yabloko) merely because it has been subjected to those bans. The compass of Marxist philosophy is to expose both bourgeois cliques and to weave the independent line of power of the working class.

Revolutionary Tasks: The Independent Line of the Class and International Solidarity

Young comrades! The most dangerous illusion in which bourgeois and liberal thought imprisons the masses is to read the conflicts in the imperialist world system through a moral duality in which one side is "good/democratic" and the other "bad/autocratic." Revolutionary Marxist philosophy tears this smoke screen apart and brings us to objective reality—that is, to the relations of production and the laws of class struggle.

The Russian Supreme Court’s decision to bar Yabloko from the elections is a concrete indicator that Russian monopoly state capitalism, in crisis, has thrown off even the makeup of bourgeois parliamentarism in order to continue the war and class exploitation at home.

The Ukraine War and the Exposure of the False "Anti-NATO" Illusion

The greatest distortion of both international social democracy and certain revisionist circles is to present Russia’s unjust occupation and militarism in Ukraine as "an anti-imperialist defense against NATO expansion."

Dialectical-materialist analysis openly exposes this false anti-imperialist illusion:

A Struggle over Partition Between Two Imperialist Poles: The conflict underway in Ukraine is a war of redivision of markets, underground resources, energy corridors, and geopolitical spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea—on one side US, NATO, and EU imperialism; on the other, Russian monopoly capital.
The Class Character of Anti-NATO Politics: Russian monopoly capital’s objection to NATO is not based on an anti-imperialist principle; it is a capitalist rival’s objection to NATO’s encroachment on its own fields of exploitation. To prop up the Kremlin’s militarist policies with the understanding that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a betrayal of the working class and of the dialectical method.
A Double Seizure of Will: On one side, NATO imperialism and collaborationist bourgeois administrations such as the Zelenskyy regime make the Ukrainian people a pawn; on the other, the Russian monopoly bourgeoisie drives young workers to the front and sacrifices them for imperialist profits.

The Reawakening of the Russian Proletariat: A Historical Necessity

The dialectics of history is uninterrupted. As social contradictions deepen, even the hardest repressive apparatuses are doomed to crack under the pressure of the productive forces and of class struggle.

The Russian proletariat, which in 1917 overthrew Tsarist despotism and the bourgeois Provisional Government and founded the first workers’ state in human history, carries in its breast a historical revolutionary accumulation. The Russian working class, whose rights were seized through revisionist degeneration from the 1950s onward and through the savage capitalist restoration of the 1990s, is today still paying the heavy bill of this chauvinist war and crisis.

The destruction created by the war, the cost of living, and the news coming from the front are dissolving day by day the illusion created by Great-Russian chauvinism. The Russian worker in the factories, mines, and energy plants is entering a process of grasping that their real enemy is not the poor Ukrainian laborer across the border, but the monopoly bourgeoisie in the Kremlin that exploits them, forbids their organization, and sends them to die for its profits.

A Dialectical Comparison of Political Positions

Line / Actor	View of the Character of the War	Approach to NATO and the Western Alliance	View of the Russian State and Putin	Class / Revolutionary Proposal
Putin Regime (Statist-Monopoly Bourgeoisie)	An imperialist market struggle wrapped as "national defense."	A rival monopoly bloc; a struggle not to lose market share.	Fortifying the state and monopoly capital; inflaming chauvinism.	A war economy, repression, chauvinist domination, and the deepening of exploitation.
Yabloko / Liberal Opposition	An adverse disruption that spoils relations with the West and narrows the market.	A global capitalist center that must be allied with and integrated into.	An autocratic deviation; seeing the solution in liberal restoration.	A return to the neoliberal market order; full submission to Western finance capital.
Revolutionary Proletarian Line	An unjust imperialist war of partition encompassing both sides.	The main focus of imperialist militarism and aggression; it must be abolished.	The Bonapartist apparatus of the monopoly bourgeoisie and the military-bureaucratic complex.	Class war against imperialist war; the defeat of one’s own bourgeoisie and socialist revolution.

A Call to the International Labor Front and Internationalist Solidarity

Young comrades! We cannot surrender to the bourgeoisie’s lies of "rallying behind one’s own state" or "waiting for a liberal savior." The principle set by Lenin and the revolutionary wing of the Second International in the First World War still holds today: "In unjust imperialist wars the duty of revolutionaries is to work for the defeat of their own governments and to turn the war into a civil war—that is, into the struggle of the proletariat to take power."

From here we cry out to the world labor front and to young revolutionaries:

No to NATO and Western Imperialism!
No to the Occupying and Militarist Policies of Russian Monopoly Capitalism!
Down with Bourgeois Dictatorship and Bonapartist Bans!
Long Live the Reawakening of the Russian Proletariat and the Internationalist Solidarity of the Working Class!

The future belongs neither to the monopoly oligarchs nor to the liberal bourgeoisie; the future will belong to the organized working class that will take the means of production into its hands!