Moscow city. СС BY-SA 4.0 GURken / WikiMediaCommons. Some rights reserved.oDR recently published an article by Ilya Matveev, “Russia, Inc”, which positioned neoliberalism as an organic part of the Putin regime. The intense discussion that followed brings us back to two central questions: what is neoliberalism, and can it describe what is happening in Russia?
Here, I won’t criticise certain elements of Matveev’s article. Rather, I will use Matveev’s article to illustrate that “neoliberalism” is not so much a technical term, as a marker of an ideological agenda. For me, using this word reduces our understanding of the nature of political and social realities of contemporary Russia.
So what is neoliberalism, anyway?
The word “neoliberalism” was coined in 1938 by Alexander Rüstow, a German sociologist and economist, who suggested it as an alternative to the traditional laissez-faire type of liberalism. Neoliberalism was thus initially understood as a kind of “third way”, a combination of capitalism and free trade with state intervention in the economy and the provision of social welfare.
