Guns Won't Save a System: Moscow Is Repeating the Soviet Mistake

According to Courrier International, which reprints an editorial from the Nezavisimaya Gazeta (a Moscow daily), Russia is watching its economic and social indicators deteriorate. The war drags on. Regular Ukrainian strikes on strategic infrastructure make the picture worse. The state has sharply increased military spending. The Russian paper warns that believing that backing the defence sector will be enough to keep the country standing is a "dangerous illusion". It recalls that military spending did not save the Soviet Union.

That is the facts as reported. The file is thin: there are no figures in the summary we have, and no precise timeline. So we will not say how much, or how fast. That leaves the question of structure. And it is a political one.

Cui bono? Not the population. When the state pours money into weaponry, the money goes to the military-industrial complexes, their management and their suppliers. Households pay through inflation, through services that erode, through infrastructure that no longer gets repaired. Lenin said it: the state is not an arbiter above society, but an instrument of class, financed by taxes and borrowing. Here, the instrument turns towards those who live off public orders. This is our reading, not a finding of the paper.

The Soviet precedent is instructive, but it must be handled with care. The USSR was not an imperialist power in Lenin's sense: no fused financial capital, no massive export of capital in search of returns. Yet it paid for the arms race with its civilian economy. Today's Russia is capitalist. It has oligarchs, banks, oil and gas rents. Its war therefore runs on a different logic: contesting with rival blocs a sphere of influence, markets, routes, resources. Lenin posed the question in his pamphlet on imperialism: under capitalism, what means other than war can resolve the gap between productive power and the division of the world? Moscow is answering in its own way.

But the Russian editorial points to a limit the analysis must take into account. War is not an economic solution. It shifts wealth, it does not create it. A state that turns its budget into a machine for military orders ends up exhausting the base that feeds it. Rivalries between great powers are real, but they do not guarantee victory to the most bellicose. They mainly guarantee that someone foots the bill.

Who? Russian workers, for certain. And the soldiers, sent to carry interests that are not their own. Today's Lenins would say that talk of defending the homeland serves to cover the appetites of the national bourgeoisie. One can add, without cheap irony, that this reasoning also applies to Washington, Brussels and their arms dealers, who celebrate their order books.

What we do not yet know: how far the decline will go, and which social force will draw political consequences from it. That is where what comes next will be decided, not in the communiqués.