Word: putin
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...with HIV and more joining them every day. But life has become more predictable since the economic catastrophes of the Yeltsin years, and a growing economy is slowly bringing some improvement. The government's elimination of most independent media voices has allowed it to package reality in the most Putin-friendly way. And actions such as the arrest of Khodorkovsky were actually welcomed by much of Putin's electorate, for whom the oligarchs are seen as opportunists who took advantage of Yeltsin's political weakness to loot the national patrimony...
...Putin's combination of authoritarian political instincts and market-friendly economic policies make him a political creature quite familiar in countries at Russia's level on the economic ladder - the authoritarian modernizer. Combined with his clampdown on political and media freedom and his ruthless war in Chechnya, Putin has delivered a solid economic performance that has seen investors turning bullish on a Russian economy that grew by 7.3 percent last year. Buoyed by high oil and natural gas prices, Russia's economy looks positively rosy right now compared to Yeltsin's final years. And Putin's brusque, businesslike and sometimes...
...Putin certainly brings with him the baggage of the epic paranoia of the KGB, but the arrest of Khodorkovsky reveals a more complex agenda. Khodorkovsky was certainly bankrolling opposition political activity, which must have been an irritation to Putin - but not necessarily much more than that, as his ability to simply barge the opposition off the political playing field has shown. Far more worrying to Putin, however, were the oil tycoon's plans to build Russia's first oil pipeline independent of state control, and his efforts to sell a major share of his company to Exxon Mobil. States...
...plans to revive the disastrous central planning of the Soviet-era economy; he remains a strong advocate of market economics. Indeed, the stellar performance over the past decade of the oligarch-owned corporations in the energy sector will be the strongest deterrent to restoring any sort of public ownership - Putin and his minions know better than to kill the goose laying the golden egg. After all, the KGB had been first among the Soviet Union's institutions to recognize the decrepitude of its planned economy; it was in the spy apparatus that the Soviet reform process originated...
...Dealing with Putin's Russia is now a dilemma that confronts the West for at least the next four years, and more if he decides to take up his legislature's offer to extend his term limit. If Yeltsin's Russia had been an economic basket case run by a pliant buffoon, Putin's is a major and growing oil producer run by an authoritarian nationalist willing to deal with the West but on an independent and often competitive basis. Its domestic politics are likely to offend the eye for some time to come, but so does the domestic politics...