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By Sergei Roy

Year's end. Time to sum up the year's events and take a cautious look into the future. Alas, for some of us it's time to think much bigger. Time to sum up a whole life - just in case. You know, like Somerset Maugham did. But that guy was lucky, he wrote The Summing Up at about 60 and then lived on to 90. Of course, that's not the way we do it in this age and place, but still.

OK, if not a whole life, let's deal with just a couple of decades, say, 1988-2008. At the end of 1988 we "democrats of the first wave" here in Russia, which was then still the Soviet Union, were fighting the "red-and-brown plague," also known as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with its Article 6 enshrining in the Constitution that Party's "leading and guiding role" or, plainly speaking, the one-party system.

Early 1989 saw more fighting of this kind, mostly verbal but often enlivened with some lusty kicking and punching in the darker alleys near halls where deputies were elected to the First Congress of People's Deputies, held in May and early June.

To cut a very long story short, we won. We wanted a multi-party political system, a capitalist economy, freedom, democracy, etc. etc., just like in what we dreamily called the "civilized world." That earth-shattering event, the First Congress, gave a mighty impetus to processes that were eventually crowned with a victory for us democrats and liberals.

The trouble with dreams, of course, is that they come true. This one did, bringing with it collapse of a former superpower, ruination of the economy worse than during the Second World War, more than half of the population of Russia proper sliding below the poverty line, not to mention bloody wars in the former outlying republics of the Soviet Union and their reversal to the worst kind of Oriental despotism and, in the case of Chechnya, to wholesale banditry and a jihad aiming to build an Islamic caliphate "from the Caspian to the Black Sea." 

Then we saw more of our dreams coming true: the advent of a capitalist economy which, for some reason, most people branded as bandit capitalism, with the slimiest rats, or those closest to the top rat, carrying out the scam of the century called privatization of what was formerly known as state-owned property. Billions for the rats, zero or, in most cases, minus profits for the rest.

That period culminated in the August 1998 financial meltdown - a fancy phrase covering up the collapse of the pyramid or Ponzi game called the GKOs. More people went to the wall, the tendency for the population to be reduced by about 800,000 a year firmly setting in.

Sure, we grumbled like everybody else. By "we" I mean those of us first-wave democrats who, for purely hygienic reasons, had not joined the rats and were still peering ahead, looking for the light at the end of the tunnel leading to the kingdom of true capitalist civilization. We still believed that what happened in August 1998 was a mere quirk of fate in a country that was still struggling to graduate from a "developing" phase to the "developed" one. Once there, we would be all right, just like the big ‘uns. We would advance to the prosperity level of, say, Portugal - and then we would see.

Skip a decade, during which, by a sort of miracle, some of the biggest rats were either kicked out of the country or into line, and Russia's slide toward being further dismembered and divided up among the "civilized world's" multinationals was arrested.

Now we come very close to the present -- to September 2008 and the start of what is elegantly known as the "economic downturn" or, more rudely, a global financial, economic, ideological, and every other kind of crisis. I must say that this event has been quite salubrious - in at least one respect: those of us who were still peering ahead into the aforementioned tunnel's maw did see the light.  At last.

It's very simple, really. Like someone said: deep down, this ideology is pretty shallow. Capitalism in the world's most developed, highly advanced, unattainably civilized country proved to be the same kind of Ponzi game as in backward Russia or, say, Papua New Guinea. It has even provided its most graphic emblem: the Madoff Investment Securities LLC.

So what is this capitalist ideology I am talking about? In a nutshell, it's this: everybody lives on credit; those who borrow moderately are squeezed out of the market - they cannot compete with those who borrow more and then some more. So the bubble grows bigger and bigger; those who inflate it know that it will burst sooner than later, and feather their nests well in advance, on the time-hallowed principle, "Devil take the hindmost."

Providers of credits are in the same boat as borrowers: if they do not lend bigger money, they are swallowed up by the big providers.  To be able to go on growing bigger, they invent all kinds of schemes. This time it was "securitization," which generated lots of paper now blithely referred to as "toxic."

And here we come to what is, to me, the most fascinating point. It would appear that the mechanism described above applies to individual companies. Nohow! Contrariwise! It applies to the whole damn world. The United States, the country that borrowed most, the nation that absorbed most of the other countries' credit, still wins!

The U.S. overconsumed while the rest of the world underconsumed - and the only hope for the world to come out of the crisis is for that country's consumption to be restored to something like its former glory. Mr. Obama is sure to preside over a gigantic scheme for the U.S. to spend its way out of the "downturn."  What is he going to spend? Dollars, what else. Those same dollars that the world is hankering after right now - and he can print as many of them as his left foot desires. The world will swallow all that paper with gusto.

You know, for someone who prides himself on belonging to the "sacred order" of the Russian intelligentsia, with its much-vaunted high moral principles, it's a pretty melancholy conclusion to come to, at the end of two decades of dreams and hopes and struggles: The winner in the capitalist rat race is the biggest rat.  So melancholy and frustrating that one has lost all desire to look ahead, toward the end of this endless tunnel. The most one can hope to see there is stars - as yet another Ponzi scheme hits one in the eye.