The Port of Leningrad: From Late Communism to Crony Putinism | Norman Naimark and Tomasz Blusiewicz | Hoover Institution

Looking at Russia in 2023, it is now clear that much has remained unchanged from Soviet times. The biggest change is the elimination of communist central planning, which made Russia’s regime stronger despite the initial turmoil of the 1990s. This paper offers a clue as to why the communist economic management system had to go, and why the KGB’s foreign intelligence and trade cadres, many of them based in Leningrad, came out on top of the refurbished new-old system, and did so with a vengeance.

Tomasz’s latest paper explores the roots of the Soviet collapse as it unfolded in the port economy of Leningrad, and the critical lessons that a group of local KGB officers drew from that process. These lessons helped them to recover from the setbacks of 1991 and to eventually take the helm of the Russian Federation in the 2000s. It was the KGB-covered smuggling schemes of late communism that provided the model for the Putin regime to spread its crony ways domestically and corrupt Western institutions abroad. Washington Post reporter Kathryn Belton wrote that “What had begun as corruption within the system became a KGB-cultivated petri dish for the future market economy.” This paper expands this apt metaphor with concrete examples of how that mechanism worked in practice amidst the late communist realities of Leningrad's maritime economy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Tomasz Blusiewicz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Blusiewicz is a historian of modern Europe and Russia, with emphasis on the intersection of economics, trade, and politics in the Baltic Sea region. He is currently working on his first book manuscript, Return of the Hanseatic League, or How the Baltic Sea Trade Washed Away the Iron Curtain, 1945–1991. In it, he develops a transnational perspective on the Baltic region, from Hamburg in the west to Leningrad in the east, and highlights the role played by Hanseatic port cities such as Rostock, Gdańsk, Kaliningrad, and Riga, all of which served as “windows to the world” linking Communist-controlled Europe with the globalizing world in the Cold War era.

Between 2017 and 2022, Blusiewicz worked as a history professor at the University of Tyumen, Russia. He helped to establish the only remaining English-language liberal arts college in Russia, the School of Advanced Studies, in the West Siberian city of Tyumen. There he designed and taught more than ten courses on modern history and international relations until March 2022, when he resigned from his position in protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Blusiewicz also designed, launched, and directed a master’s program in Analytics and Consulting in International Relations. This program was taught in English mostly by US-educated scholars and professionals until it was suspended by the authorities in March 2022.