 merrie says: Foreign investments, though at record levels, remain less than 3% of GDP, on the whole foreigners remain reluctant - not to say scared stiff - to touch Russia. Worse yet, though foreign investments have grown, they usually go to mineral extraction, not to production of finished goods. During Putin's reign oil and gas production nearly trebled, to nearly a full third of the entire economy, and four-fifths of all exports. Putin initially capped government spending and ended the derelict printing of cash, last year - according to The Economist - the state bureaucracy expanded by more than 50% to 828,000 people, while government spending rose 20%. PUTIN'S MAIN message has been that the demise of communism and the Warsaw Pact, and even the arrival of former communist states in the EU and NATO, don't yet spell freedom's historic victory. The world has been introduced to a new authoritarianism, one which emulates the kind overseen a generation ago by Chile's Augusto Pinochet However, back when it was cultivated in Latin America, this combination of political oppression and economic freedom posed no threat to Western power or dogma. Russia is a different matter. Under Putin, the world's largest country, with its military might and mineral riches, has come to spearhead the counter-revolution no one saw coming in the heady days when the Berlin Wall fell. The counter-democratic international today comprises China's quasi-communists, Russia's proto-capitalists and the Middle East's assorted fundamentalists. While there are differences among them - the Islamists think that we're infidels, the Russians that we're idiots, and the Chinese don't care what we think - they ... |
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