05.08.2025, Moscow.
The destruction of Russia’s highest productive forces by the post-Soviet elite following the collapse of the USSR is an unprecedented event in world history, political scientist Sergey Kurginyan wrote in his article The Sharp Turn, published in The Essence of Time, issue 637.
Kurginyan emphasized that the results of the 1993 referendum — in which the public supported the course of Russian President Boris Yeltsin — enabled him to shell the Russian parliament building with tanks during the constitutional crisis later that fall.
“Against the backdrop of this shelling, the appeals of Yeltsin’s team to the wonderful Western political system, which does not allow the legislative branch to be trampled on, looked especially grotesque,” Kurginyan noted. He pointed out that the Russian elite blatantly contradicted their proclaimed values at the time.
“Those who shelled their own parliament with tanks then went on to build the so-called capitalism, disregarding law, morality, and basic economic constants — the only anchors that could have kept the country from plunging into destructive regress,” Kurginyan said.
The political scientist stressed that throughout history of all nations, “during all transitions between social systems, some fundamental constants have always been preserved.” The most fundamental of these, he explained, are the highest productive forces of a country — which are independent of the social system.
While social systems may change dramatically, no one, Kurginyan argued, has ever attacked the highest productive forces. As an example, he cited late 18th-century France,
“Did someone like Lazare Carnot, leading member of revolutionary bourgeois France’s Committee of Public Safety, ever attack them?” Kurginyan posed the question.
He explained that Carnot was a revolutionary Jacobin who hated the old feudal order and aggressively replaced it with a bourgeois system. Yet, Carnot significantly expanded the capabilities of France’s defense industry.
“This expansion was one of the key reasons why bourgeois Napoleonic France defeated the feudal powers of Western Europe,” Kurginyan emphasized.
The philosopher stated that throughout history, a change of social system has never led to the destruction of a nation’s highest productive forces. “It’s clear to everyone that neither Carnot nor Robespierre did such a thing, nor even Lenin and Krasin made something like that, but, on the contrary, they dramatically improved the quality of Russia’s productive forces,” he said, referencing early Soviet industrial policy.
“We are justified in asserting that history offers only one example of a nation destroying its own highest productive forces during a transition to a new system — and that example is the post-Soviet destruction of Russia’s productive forces,” Kurginyan emphasized.
He added that the Russian people were presented with “something literally unprecedented and clearly disastrous during the April 1993 referendum.” And at that referendum, the population agreed to this insane proposal put forward by the Yeltsin administration.
“By October 1993, the population was already reaping the bitter consequences of that decision — in the form of the shelling of the Russian parliament building. After that, everything began to spiral downward even faster,” Kurginyan concluded.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
