Word: kremlins
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...region's most vital industries: imports of used cars from Europe that are then sold in Russia. The end of that trade has put as many as 20,000 locals out of work. The price of utilities has jumped. On top of that, the unpopular governor, a Kremlin-appointed former tax minister from Moscow named Georgy Boos, levied a new tax on drivers. During the worst bout of unemployment and economic decline in a decade, reports of Boos' lavish vacations to Europe have made many locals despise him. (See pictures of Russian police breaking up an anti-Kremlin rally...
...entire bureaucracy. The government controls all the major TV channels. The Kaliningrad protest got virtually no coverage in the mainstream Russian press. Putin has also been able to deflect part of the resentment by dressing down his political party, United Russia, and sending out envoys to show that the Kremlin is paying attention...
...Kremlin's answer to that question, however, does not exactly jibe with the liberal culture of Silicon Valley. In his Vedomosti interview, Surkov acknowledged that Russia is an innovation "vacuum" in a field of dynamic economies and that it needs a breakthrough soon to avoid stagnation. But when prodded about the political openness needed to encourage that breakthrough, he snapped back into the language of control. "Consolidated power in Russia is the instrument of modernization. I would even insist it is the only one," he said. "If you want to put the matter on autopilot and wait for squabbling liberals...
This points again to the old habits - the nationalism, the overbearing management - that the Kremlin is dragging into its modernization drive. Masha Lipman, a political expert at the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow, says Russia will never succeed unless those habits are left in the past. "A modern, competitive economy can't thrive in an environment where the quality of governance is this low," she says. "And why is it low? It is low because they seek to control everything, because they do not trust their own people, and as a result the people do not trust them...
...this atmosphere of distrust, it is unclear whether the Kremlin will be able to foster an open culture of innovation, which Berlin at Stanford calls the main ingredient in Silicon Valley's success. Kolesnikov agrees. "What developed around Stanford was an entrepreneurial culture," he says. "I don't know how you create that. I guess it's up to the government to set up some kinds of conditions and leave people alone, stop freaking them out. Maybe something will come...