Edit: I didn’t post the following quotes to say he’s a communist. He’s pivoting to centre-left positions with his rhetoric and 6 year plan. He called for reducing poverty by 2% in 6 years and for progressive taxation on the rich.
The true elite are all those serving Russia. Workers and soldiers, reliable, trustable, who have proven their devotion to Russia, the worthy people.
“The very word ‘elite’ has largely been discredited by those who, having no merit to society, consider themselves to be some kind of a caste with special rights and privileges. I specifically mean those who, in previous years, filled their pockets through all sorts of processes in the economy of the 1990s. Those are definitely not the elite,” the president said.
ah yes, the “true elite” will be hardworking patriotic troops and cops, not the decadent rootless cosmopolitans. such worker, very proletariat.
Even calling this “socdem” is rube shit. this is totally standard socially conservative liberalism. Recognizing the progressive role Russia plays in the current imperial world system shouldn’t excuse wishful thinking about the administration’s domestic politics. Nobody would credit Mitt Romney with a “center left pivot” for saying he prefers a “fair and simple” tax system in which “higher-income individuals pay a higher rate than lower-income individuals”.
Officers doesn’t mean cops, military officers. 1M Patriotic Russians participated in the SMO, a lot of whom are ordinary workers with simple lives before the war.
This was also the system in the Soviet Union where front line soilders occupied key managment positions after the great patriotic war.
The Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union. This is ordinary bourgeois nationalism from the leader of a committed liberal anticommunist party. An insistence on reading secret revolutionary character into ordinary conservative rhetoric comes across as fantastical at best. “Nation, troops, family, flag!” doesn’t mean something different here than it does coming out of Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, or any other head of state since the advent of liberal democracy.