Here’s the situation. Anyone who stands up to corporate America and its giant military-industrial complex, be it the Occupy Movement, or individuals like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Naomi Klein or Michael Moore, deserve our respect and support. Similarly when a country stands up to US aggression we instinctively cheer them on. Cuba, Vietnam and more recently Venezuela and Ecuador all have honourable records in this respect. These days however, with the corporate global economy getting its tentacles around the neck of every nation, only the really big economies can dare to take an independent stand.

In short, that is China and possibly India, Brazil and Russia. The BRIC nations. So it is with some cheer that we witness the latter finally standing up to Nato’s relentless eastward aggrandisement. But is there anything really to cheer about? Is there anything remotely progressive about Putin’s Russian Federation? The fact that it seeks to protect its self-proclaimed interests from NATO’s encirclement can hardly be called progressive. In fact, is there anything progressive left in the lands of the old Soviet Union, or are we simply witnessing an old fashioned East-West tug of war for influence and markets?

If Pussy Riot and their biographer, Masha Gessen are to be believed, Putin’s Russia is far from worthy of our support. On the contrary, today’s Russia is portrayed as a brutish, autocratic, unenlightened bureaucracy that has all the worst features of the old Soviet Union with none of the positives. All political and civil dissent is crushed and order is instilled by threat of a prolonged spell in Russia’s prison system, a system that seems to have more in common with Joseph Stalin’s famed prison Gulags than a modern regime of detention. Of course Russia is not alone in its medieval prison system. The United States has its very own brand of prison humiliation and brutality brilliantly highlighted by the Sons of Anarchy series. And the least said about the Chinese and Indian prisons the better. But Pussy Riot and similar Russian activists must work in the circumstances that they find themselves in, and that is today’s Russia run by a cabal of billionaire gangster oligarchs and ideologically bankrupt ex KGB operatives. If you want to get a feel of what it’s like living in Putin’s Russia, Masha Gessen’s The Passion of Pussy Riot is as good as place as any to start.

The jailed Pussy Riot activists were and are young and they cannot be expected to have a rounded world view. Their protests should be taken at face value and it is clear that their time in prison has taken their thought processes to a whole new level. Having said that, having read Gessen’s account including court statements made by the Pussy Riot activists and documents smuggled out, there appears to be no recognition whatsoever of the positive social gains made by the former Soviet Union. This is not to downplay the soulless and often criminal bureaucracy that the Soviet Union became, but to fail to acknowledge the historic advances in the realm of social ownership is to fail to see the march of history. We ought not to forget that those social advances were the spur that forced the developed capitalist countries to introduce welfare programmes to ameliorate the worst effects of boom and bust capitalism. Without the example of the Soviet Union, western capitalism would likely never have introduced welfare provision at all. And as we speak, that provision, patchy as it is, is being dismantled brick by brick. Homelessness, repossessed houses, chronic personal debt, pay day loan sharks, zero hour contracts, humiliating soup kitchens and food banks, all this is back on the western capitalist agenda. Is it just a coincidence that social provision is being withdrawn now that the Soviet Union no longer exists as an alternative model of social organisation?

Is it just a coincidence, that since the defeat of the Soviet Union just over a thousand billionaires across the globe have amassed 94% of the world’s wealth leaving the rest of us, seven billion of us, to squabble over the remaining 6%?

It is surely correct to highlight and condemn the crimes committed under the banner of the Soviet Union: the prison gulags and the forced transportation of millions of Soviet citizens by their own government. It must be equally correct to condemn the atmosphere and culture of political repression against any form of socialist criticism and dissent, and all in the spurious name of crushing bourgeois opposition. But in so doing, great care must be taken to recognise and cherish the greatest leap forward ever attempted by settled, civilised humanity; that of attempting to organise the social ownership of the means of production. Ultimately this first attempt ended in failure due to a complex web of external and internal factors. But fail to recognise the significance of the project and the whole of human history becomes just a mish-mash of unrelated events.

With the Russian oligarchs now spiriting their ill-gotten gains to that greatest of all money laundering systems the City of London, it is clear that Putin and his mafia run Federation have no interest in revisiting 1917 and everything that that epoch making year heralded. Fair enough. They are what they are gangster capitalists. The jailing of environmentalists, of punk activists and of political opponents is now routine. The criminalisation of homosexuality is indicative of a medieval backwardness. Thuggish racism and xenophobia are on the rise, both sanctioned by government policy. To the Russian youth, much of this must have echoes of the darkest days of Soviet society. But, tempting as it might be, that does not excuse Pussy Riot’s mistake in equating the former Soviet Union with the current regime. Yes, there are obvious similarities in form and appearance but the content and essence of the two are fundamentally different. I suspect, reading Masha Gessen’s account, that the recently released Pussy Riot activists are brave enough and intellectually honest enough to make that distinction in the fullness of time.