Rentierism, ‘Capitalist Breakthroughs’ and Non-Transformative Development in Late Putinism

Abstract

This essay explores ‘territories of accelerated development’ (TORs) to reconstruct the economic policy-making, development institutions and macroeconomic framework of late Putinism since the 2010s. It argues that even with Russia’s integration into the world economy and the developmental rhetoric of state elites, TORs and the national developmental regime around them reproduce the patronal management and recycling of rents rather than the transformative and state-permeated facilitation of productive investments and capitalist profits. This upscaling of rents has been systemic. The result—rentierism—challenges common understandings of rent-seeking and commodity rents as incidental features of Russian ‘state capitalism’, and, instead places them at the centre of a non-capitalist order of its own.