Well, it is capitalist, but it is also still a huge mess. My mother has made a couple trips there too in the past 4-5 years. The problem, of course, is that their entire socialist structure was corrupt before it was overthrown. The people who stepped in to fill the vacuum were themselves corrupt, and in many cases, they were the same individuals who held power in some form or other under socialism. They just rebranded themselves and kept doing business as usual. Remember Pooty-Poot? Former KGB muckety muck? He's still running the show... except that now, the former Comrade Pooty-Poot is now Tsar Pooty-Poot. "President" Dmitry Medvedev doesn't relieve himself without permission from Putin.Abraham wrote:Funny, Russia used to be a mess and now with Capitalism being all the rage there, it's economy is soaring. (This according to a friend who spends a great deal of time there)
And as it happens, there is so much dissatisfaction among the proles as to how capitalism has turned out, that a significant political movement is afoot to return the country to communism.... ...and not because capitalism is inherently bad (I personally believe that capitalism is the greatest force for person freedom on the planet), but rather because it is being practiced at the macro level in Russia by men who are essentially pirates with the morals of a piranha. So sure, you can go downtown in Moscow and buy a gold Rolex watch, a real one, but the average Russian still can't afford a Seiko.
Even the Orthodox Church in Russia has been heavily corrupted. (I am not talking about the church's doctrine. I am talking about the church's organizational structure having been coopted during the Soviet era, and that control still continues.) I give you THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE from the Hoover Institute at Stanford University about the church under Yelstin:
Speaking Putin specifically, the same article says:Prostitution and drug use, both very hush-hush in the Soviet era, became open and rampant. Russian society may have lost some of the warped values of the communist era, but it failed to gain any others instead. The Orthodox Church, heavily penetrated by the Soviet secret police, hardly provided a substitute for the spiritual vacuum of the late communist and post-communist era. Instead, it was busy begging for tariff breaks for its vast alcohol and tobacco importing operations. A spiritual leader of the liberal reformers of the Church, Father Alexander Men, was brutally murdered. Other reformers and dissidents in the Church, such as Father Gleb Yakunin and Father Georgi Edelstein, were defrocked or exiled to far-away parishes.
I wouldn't trust that piece of work farther than I could throw him, and I can't throw very far.Vladimir Putin is a tough (some say ruthless), competent, non-ideological ruler. Moscow pundits agree that he is more focused than his predecessor. Igor Malashenko, a well-known Russian commentator, recently stated that Yeltsin presided over a "disorganized autocracy," while he anticipates that Putin’s will be an orderly one. A prominent Russian businessman termed the whole of Putin’s generation "ruthless and unprincipled." Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in a view shared by at least one Russian reformist politician, thinks that Putin is a moderate nationalist. There is little doubt that Putin is a statist who surrounds himself with "securocrats" — long-tested collaborators primarily from the intelligence services.
Putin’s speeches and interviews demonstrate beyond doubt that he is acutely aware of Russia’s weaknesses and deficiencies. He understands that Russia’s over-dependence on energy exports, with their market volatility, bodes ill for a country of 150 million people. Putin became aware of Russia’s industrial decline during the 1980s, while he was stationed in Dresden, East Germany, as a kgb intelligence officer. During his stint in the GDR, he was reportedly involved in some "technological acquisitions" (industrial espionage) for Moscow and was a kgb liaison to the East German secret police, the Stasi. Putin is said to have realized that the Soviet Union did not possess the manufacturing base necessary for the early post-industrial age. It could not even manufacture adequate personal computers and mainframes. Given his position at the time, he must have been aware of the inadequacies of the Soviet Union’s late start in the information age. The highly centralized, incompetently run economy was losing to the West.
Putin’s eventual involvement in reformist politics and his current preoccupation with economic growth rates as well as Russia’s technology base do not contradict his security background. His treatise on Russia’s place in the twenty-first century (published on the Russian government’s website) claims that by growing 8 percent to 10 percent a year, Russia can catch up with Western Europe’s current levels of production within 15 to 20 years. Unfortunately, Russia grew only 2 percent during the very favorable economic climate of 1999.
Thus far, Putin’s political and public relations instincts have been astute. He was filmed giving out hunting knives to Russian officers and troops in the trenches of Chechnya the morning of New Year’s Day, when most Russians were sound asleep after having spent the night toasting the new millennium. He sent Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana Diachenko, packing on his first day on the job. The notorious Diachenko not only was her father’s Kremlin advisor, but is also alleged to have spearheaded many of the corrupt financial dealings attributed to the Yeltsin family. He fired Yeltsin’s presidential property manager, Pavel Pavlovich Borodin, who is now being sought by police in Switzerland. He demoted Nikolai Aksenenko, first deputy prime minister in charge of the economic portfolio, to preside over the railways, while elevating a tough debt negotiator, former Finance Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, to the No. 1 economic position. Watching their dynamic new acting president, many Russians quoted their proverb, "a new broom, which sweeps clean."
The first political crisis of the "new broom" occurred when the newly elected Duma met. The much-anticipated "coalition for reform," including the Union of Right Forces, the liberal-left Yabloko, the Fatherland-All Russia Party led by Primakov and Luzhkov, and Putin’s party, the Unity Party (a.k.a. the Bear) failed to materialize. Instead, Putin struck a compromise with the communists. Gennady Seleznev, a fellow Peterbourgeois and a rather docile former Duma speaker, was reelected. The Duma communist faction received the largest number of committee chairmanships, nine, while the opposition coalition got only three committees.
While the liberal factions cried foul, the coalition with the communists made sense for Putin from a number of angles. To begin with, it denied Primakov the important perch of chairmanship of the Duma, from which he could have challenged the acting president. Second, it made the communists appear not to be in implacable opposition to the Kremlin prior to the presidential elections. In addition, the move provided Putin with a manageable chairman within the legislature. And finally, it struck a blow to the cocky Union of Right Forces and its de facto leader, Anatoly Chubais, who had boasted that Putin was in his pocket.
But Putin’s "pact with the devil" dealt a blow to hopes for a reformist agenda. While the communists may well give Putin parliamentary votes, the Union of Right Forces could have provided him not only loyal Duma members but also a relatively competent (by Russian standards) pool of yuppie policy analysts and managers. These experts would have been independent of Boris Berezovsky and his group. In addition, the coalition with the communists served to discredit Putin among the Russian elites and anti-communist voters and did nothing to boost his image in the West. While the deal might be sensible tactically, in the long run it undermines the same reforms that Putin claims he is so anxious to promote. The communist faction in the Duma will not support the private ownership of land, a new bankruptcy law, and tax reform, all of which are at the top of the reformist legislative agenda. Putin will need the voices of the democrats, namely Yabloko, and some of the Fatherland deputies, in order to legislate Russia forward.
Even more worrisome is Putin’s reliance on the St. Petersburg "mafia" of ex-kgb officers to staff his administration. These advisors make the Russian intellectuals nervous. They cite potentially repressive steps, from Internet controls to outright censorship and a crackdown on Russia’s relatively free media. Two cases in point of the tendency toward greater intervention in the media came to light recently. In January 2000, Vladimir Babitsky, Radio Liberty’s correspondent in Chechnya, was arrested by the Russian military and then disappeared. When he finally resurfaced, he was immediately rearrested. The Russian prosecutor’s office is threatening to charge him with treason. In another incident, also in January, Alexander Khinshtein, a Muscovite investigative reporter, was threatened with incarceration in a psychiatric prison for digging into the background and business practices of the controversial tycoon Berezovsky and Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo. This was the first time since the Soviet era that authorities attempted to use psychiatric prisons for intimidation.
