there is a fair amount of state purchasing of private industry going on and Russian workers are, relative to the 1990s and also to Europeans in manufacturing losing their jobs right now, doing fairly well for themselves. this doesn’t, of course, mean that any socialism is happening but it is two interesting trends.

my personal prediction for the next few decades of Russian history is something along the lines of:

1. Russia wins war relatively soon, possibly not this year depending on how exactly things shake out but very probably by 2025-2026
2. the break with neoliberal policy, such that it is (there’s still plenty of neoliberalism going on) also ends and there’s a return to the almighty god-given authority of the Central Bank
3. this necessarily means that Russian workers, who were previously in an alright spot, start suffering as neoliberals enact austerity to beat down the working class again so they don’t start getting any ideas
4. this austerity goes through without much organized resistance, but Russian workers are able to draw the conclusion that when the state was more involved, things were good, and when the state retreated, things got bad. Putin is probably dead by this point due to his age which further complicates things
5. who even knows what happens after that, it’s way too underdetermined and the decline of the US empire will have had even more impacts by then that make analysis and predictions not very helpful, but drawing on the couple years after WW1 in Italy and England (which Mattei’s The Capital Order nicely analyzes), we either get a new USSR rising, a successful beatdown of the working class without too much violence like what happened in England, or we get Italian-style fascism in retaliation for socialist revolutionaries trying and failing to take power. though how fascism would even work in a multipolar context is kinda fuzzy to me, especially as China would, hopefully, act as a counterbalancing force ideologically for that kind of thing.