When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.
Of course, as with his ideological brethren, Sowell only sees this "worsening degeneracy" on one side of the aisle. And hell, perhaps those institutions, when you get right down to it, are functionally reflecting the people who keep them going. Who is voting for the whinging incompentence and breathtaking mendacity of the Chimpco set, out of pure spite and ignorance? Who keeps watching the fluff and crap spewed forth by the "news", and the road-rage commentators pontificating about the most trivial of stories? Who keeps reading the likes of Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg, and not understanding straight away that their heads are up their respective asses?
I mean, you want to tackle "worsening degeneracy", there ya go, Chief. But judging from the rest of the Sowell-searching, the wistful ruminations for a military coup appear to be of a piece with the logical incoherence of most of the other riffs.
A sign of the times: A full-page ad for an Alaska cruise in the left-wing New York Review of Books says, “See Alaska’s Glaciers Before They’re Gone!” Shipmates listed include Ralph Nader and the editor of The Nation magazine.
Heh-indeedy. Is this more or less of a "sign" than, say, footage of Rhode Island-sized chunks of Antarctica breaking off into the sea? Or is that faked, like the moon landing? I know Sowell thinks he's making a funny here, but maybe he could toddle up to Glacier National Park and see for himself. Or take a non-political cruise to Alaska. Maybe he'll get lucky and watch some polar bears drown.
The people who are scariest to me are the people who don’t even know enough to realize how little they know.
Uh, yeah. Why doncha read that one to your genius-in-chief, see where that gets ya? Or maybe some values voters, whose biggest priorities seem to be picking on homos and being able to use an RV for the simplest errands.
Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.
True. After all, that's what we have James Dobson and Marion Robertson for.
Is your employer poorer by the amount of money he pays you? Probably not, or you would never have been hired. Why then should we assume that a corporation or its customers are poorer by the amount paid to its chief-executive officer?
Indeed. If a CEO can't pad his bottom line on the backs of his workers, or by grifting the taxpayers, then what is he there for? Sowell is either willfully dense or painstakingly disingenuous by asserting that the debate over skyrocketing CEO compensations is merely a value-added function of the free marketplace, and not a prime condition of worsening income disparity.
But this one might take the cake for being the most intellectually dishonest out of all his silly "why do they call it taking a dump and not leaving a dump" bits:
The last time I saw a Republican express outrage was 1991, when Clarence Thomas told the Senators what he thought of the smear tactics used against him. Before that, it was Ronald Reagan saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Before that, it was probably Teddy Roosevelt.
Maybe it depends on how Sowell selectively defines "Republican" or "outrage", or maybe he hit himself in the head with a ball-peen hammer a dozen times before writing something so pathologically dumb. Maybe I should try reading the passage upside down; it might make more sense that way.
Really, it is this sort of blatant disingenuity, this plain disregard for even the most obvious, fundamental truths, that has gotten these would-be thinkamators into the fix they're in. They've emotionally and intellectually invested themselves in idiots and liars for too long to be able to discern the differences for themselves.
2 comments:
Heywood--
as promised, here's a copy of that article about contemporary Russia, from Harper's Magazine. Sorry about the formatting -- I had to copy it from a .pdf doc into your comment box. Enjoy.
READINGS
[Essay]
JUST THE SAME
CAPITALISTS AS YOU
By Perry Anderson, from "Russia's Managed Democracy," in the January 25 issue of the London Review of Books. His most recent work is Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas.
Under lowering skies, a thin line of mourn-
ers stretched silently outside the funeral hall. Barring the entrance, hulking riot police kept them waiting until assorted dignitaries had paid their respects. Eventually they were let in to view the corpse of the murdered woman, her forehead wrapped in the white ribbon of the Orthodox rite, her body, slight enough anyway, diminished by the flower-encrusted bier. Around the edges of
the mortuary chamber, garlands from the media that attacked her while she was alive stood thick alongside wreaths from her children and friends, the satisfied leaf to leaf with the bereaved. Filing past them and out into the cemetery beyond, virtually no one spoke. Some were in tears. People
dispersed in the drizzle as quietly as they came.
The authorities had gone to some lengths to divert Anna Politkovskaya's funeral to a dreary
precinct on the outskirts of Moscow. But how
necessary was the precaution? The number of
mourners was not large, perhaps a thousand or so, and the mood of the occasion was more sadness than anger. A middle-aged woman, bringing groceries home from the supermarket, shot at point-blank range in an elevator, Politkovskaya was killed
for her courage in reporting the continuing butchery in Chechnya. An attempt to poison her had narrowly failed two years earlier. As she was eliminated, she had another article at press on the atrocities of the Kadyrov clan that now runs Chechnya for the Kremlin. She lived and died a fighter. But she was buried with resignation, not fury or revolt.
Her death, the official media explained, was either an unfathomable mystery or the work of enemies of the government vainly attempting to discredit it. The president remarked she was a nobody whose death was the only news value in her life.
It is tempting to see in that casual dismissal no more than the ordinary arrogance of power. All governments deny their crimes, and most are understanding of one another's lies about them. Bush and Blair, with still more blood on their hands - in all probability, that of over half a million Iraqis - observe these precepts as automatically as Putin.
But there is a difference that sets Putin apart. On the evidence of opinion polls, he is the most popular national leader alive today. Since he came to power six years ago, he has enjoyed the continuous support of over 70 percent of his people, a record no other politician approaches. By comparison, Chirac now has an approval rating of 38
percent, Bush of 36 percent, Blair of 30 percent.
Such eminence may seem perverse, but it is
not unintelligible. Putin's authority derives, in
the first place, from the contrast with the ruler who made him. From a Western standpoint, Boris Yeltsin's regime was by no means a failure. By ramming through a more sweeping privatization of industry than any carried out in Eastern Europe,' and maintaining a facade of competitive elections, it laid the foundations of a Russian capitalism for
the new century. In the eyes of most Russians, on the other hand, Yeltsin's administration set loose a wave of corruption and criminality, stumbled chaotically from one political crisis to another, presided over an unprecedented decline in living standards and collapse of life expectancy, humiliated the country by obeisance to foreign powers, destroyed the currency, and ended in bankruptcy.
Any new administration would have been hard
put not to do better. Putin, however, had the good luck to arrive in power just as oil prices took off. The country has been the largest single beneficiary of the world commodities boom of the early twenty- first century. For ordinary Russians, though average real wages remain very low, less than $400 a month,
they have doubled under Putin. To relative prosperity Putin has added stability. Cabinet convulsions, confrontations with the legislature, lapses into presidential stupor, are things of the past. Administration may not be that much more efficient, but order-at least north of the Caucasus - has been restored. Last but not least, the country is no longer "under external management," as the point-
ed local phrase puts it. Freed from foreign debt and diplomatic supervision, Russia is an independent state once again.
Prosperity, stability, sovereignty: the national
consensus around Putin rests on his satisfaction of these primordial concerns. That there may be less in each than meets the eye matters little, politically speaking, so long as their measure is memories of the abyss under Yeltsin. But the stratospheric polls
reflect something else as well-an image of the
ruler. Putin cuts a somewhat colorless, frigid figure in the West. In cultures accustomed to more effusive styles of leadership, the sleek, stoat-shaped head and stone-cold eyes offer little purchase for affective projection. In Russia, however, charisma wears another face. When he came to power, Putin lacked any trace of it. But possession of the presidency has altered him. Once installed in the office, Putin has cultivated two attributes that have given him an aura capable of outlasting it. The first is the image of firm, where necessary ruthless, authority.
Historically, the brutal imposition of order has
been more often admired than feared in Russia. Rather than his portrait suffering from the shadow of the KGB, Putin has converted it into a halo of austere discipline. In what remains in many ways a macho society, toughness-prowess in judo and drops into criminal slang are part of Putin's kit - continues to be valued, and not only
by men: Putin's most enthusiastic fans are often women. But there is another, less obvious side to his charisma. Part of his chilly magnetism is cultural. He is widely admired for his command of the language. Here, too, contrast is everything. Lenin
was the last ruler of the country who could speak an educated Russian. Stalin's Georgian accent was so thick he rarely risked speaking in public. Khrushchev's vocabulary was crude and his grammar barbaric. Brezhnev could scarcely put two sentences together. Gorbachev spoke with a provincial southern accent. The less said of Yeltsin's slurred diction the better. To hear a leader of the country capable once again of expressing himself with clarity, accuracy, and fluency,
in a more or less correct idiom, comes as music to many Russians. In a strange way, Putin's prestige is thus also intellectual, and an apparent union of fist and mind has captured the popular imagination.
The actual regime over which Putin presides,
however, although it has involved important
changes, shows less of a break with Yeltsin's time than might appear. The economy that Yeltsin left behind was in the grip of a tiny group of profiteers, who had seized the country's major assets in a racket-ealled "loans for shares." The president and his extended "Family" (relatives, aides,
hangers-on) naturally took their own share of the loot. It is doubtful whether the upshot had any equivalent in the entire history of capitalism. The leading seven oligarchs to emerge from these years ended up controlling a vast slice of the national wealth, most of the media, and much of the Duma. Putin was picked by the Family to ensure that these arrangements did not come under scruti-
ny later on. His first act in office was to grant
Yeltsin immunity from prosecution, and he has generally looked after his immediate entourage.
But if he wanted a stronger government than
Yeltsin's, he could not afford to leave the oli-
garchs in undisturbed possession of their powers.
After warning them that they could keep their
riches only if they stayed out of politics, he moved to curb them. The three most ambitious magnates were broken: two fleeing into exile, and the third, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, dispatched to a labor camp. A fourth has opted for residence abroad.
Putin has taken back under state control parts of the oil industry and created out of the country's gas monopoly a giant conglomerate. The public sector's share of GDP has risen modestly, by about 5 percent, but for the time being, the booty capitalism of the 1990s has come to a halt. The balance of power has shifted away from extraordinary
accumulations of private plunder toward more
traditional forms of bureaucraticmanagement.
These changes are a focus of some anxiety in the Western business press, where fears are often expressed of an ominous statism that threatens the liberalization of the 1990s. In reality, the Russian state has been strengthened as an economic agent,
but not with any socializing intent, simply as a
quarry of political power. Neoliberalism is safe
enough in Russia today. The president has made this clear to all who are interested. On a visit to Germany in October, brushing aside questions about the death of Politkovskaya, he told his hosts: "We do not understand the nervousness in the press about Russia investing abroad. Where does this hysteria come from? It's not the Red Army that wants to come to Germany. It's just the same capitalists as you."
The political system put together since Yeltsin's departure is a similar mixture of novelty and continuity. It is now de rigueur for Western journalists to deplore the muzzling of the media, the neutering of parliament, and the decline of political freedoms under Putin. These realities, however, all have their origins under Yeltsin, whose illegalities were
much starker. No act of Putin's compares with
the bombardment of the parliament by tanks, or the fraudulent referendum that ensued, imposing the autocratic constitution under which Russia continues to be ruled. Yet because Yeltsin was considered a pliable, if somewhat disreputable, utensil of Western policies, the first action was applauded and the second ignored by virtually every foreign correspondent of the time. Nor was there
much criticism of the brazen manipulation of
press and television, controlled by the oligarchs, to engineer Yeltsin's reelection. Still less attention was paid to what was happening within the machinery of state itself. Far from the demise of the U.S.S.R. reducing the number of Russian functionaries, the bureaucracy had - few post-Communist facts are more arresting - actually
doubled in size by the end of Yeltsin's stewardship. Not only that. At the topmost levels of the regime, the proportion of officials drawn from the security services or armed forces soared above their modest quotas under the late Communist Party of
the Soviet Union: composing a mere 5 percent under Gorbachev, they occupied no less than 47 percent of the highest posts under Yeltsin.
Serviceable though much of this was for any
ruler, it remained a ramshackle inheritance. Putin has tightened and centralized it into a more coherent structure of power. In possession of voter confidence, he has not needed to shell deputies or forge plebiscites. But to meet any eventuality, the instruments of coercion and intimidation have been reinforced. The budget of the FSB--the
post-Communist successor to the KGB-has
tripled, and the number of positions in the federal administration held by personnel brigaded from its repressive apparatuses has continued to rise. In jovial spirit, Put in allowed himself to quip to fellow veterans: "Comrades, our strategic mission is accomplished-we have seized power." Still, these developments are mainly accentuations of what was already there. Institutionally, the more striking innovation has been the integration of the economic and political pillars of Put in's system of
command: The new regime is dominated by a
web of Kremlin staffers and ministers with "secu-
rity profiles," who also head the largest state com-
panies quoted on the stock market. The oligarchs
had mixed business and politics flamboyantly
enough. But these were raids by freebooters from
the first into the second domain. Putin has turned
the tables on them. Under his system, a more or-
ganic symbiosis between the two has been
achieved, this time under the domi-
e
nance of politics.
orruption is built into any such connubium
between profits and power. By general consent, it
is now even more widespread than under Yeltsin,
but its character has changed. There appears to be
little active indignation at the corruption rife at
all levels of society. A common attitude is that an
official who takes bribes is better than one who in-
flicts blows: a change to which Brezhnev's "era of
stagnation," after the end of the terror, habituat-
ed people. In this climate, Putin-so far, at least,
lacking the personal greed that distracted Yeltsin-
can coolly use corruption as an instrument of state
policy, operating it as a system of rewards for those
who comply with him, and of blackmail for those
who might resist. The presidential party, United
Russia, and its assorted allies, with no more spe-
cific program than unconditional support for Putin,
command about. 70 percent of the seats in the
Duma, enough to rewrite the constitution if that
were required. But a one-party state is not in the
offing. On the contrary, mindful of the rules of any
self-respecting democracy, the Kremlin's political
technicians are now putting together an opposi-
tion party designed to clear the bedraggled rem-
nants of Communism-liberalism has already
been expunged-from the political scene, and
provide a decorative pendant to the governing
party in the next parliament.
Too much has been invested in the triumph
over Communism for any deep doubts in the West
about the destiny of Russia. Either blemishes are
normal and superable at this stage of develop-
ment, or they are the regrettable but unavoidable
costs of capitalist progress. Or they are indurated
vices of the longue duree. That the West itself
might be implicated in whatever is amiss can be
excluded. The U.S. ambassador to Moscow in the
late 1980s, Jack Matlock, has explained why:
"Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev, in effect, co-
operated on a scenario, a plan of reforming the So-
viet Union, which was defined initially by the
United States. The plan was devised by the Unit-
ed States but with the idea that it should not be
contrary to the national interests of a peaceful
Soviet Union." Gorbachev "adopted the U.S.
agenda, which had been defined in Washington,
without attribution, of course, as his own plan."
Adult supervision-the term once employed by
another U.S. envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad of Kabul
and Baghdad, to describe his country's relations
with the world at large-was even closer under
Yeltsin. By these lights, if anything goes wrong,
the progenitors are certainly not to blame. See Iraq today.
At Politkovskaya's funeral, the three principal
forces behind Yeltsin's regime were all on hand.
Two of them, hypocrisies obliging: the West, in
the persons of the American, British, and German
ambassadors; and the oligarchs par personne inter-
posee, in the figure of Anatoly Chubais, vice
premier under Yeltsin and an architect of priva-
tization, to most Russians more odious, as their procurer, than the oligarchs themselves. The third,
in authentic grief, waiting outside: the tattered
conscience of the liberal intelligentsia. In 1991, of
all domestic groups, it was mainly this stratum that
helped Yeltsin to power, confident that in doing
so it was at last bringing political liberty to Russia.
Clustered around the presidency in the early 1990s,
when it occupied many policy-making positions, it
supplied the crucial democratic legitimation of
Yeltsin's rule to the end. Not since 1917 had intel-
lectuals played so central a role in the government.
Fifteen years later, what has become of this in-
telligentsia? Economically speaking, much of it has
fallen victim to what it took to be the foundation
of the freedom to come, as the market has scythed
through its institutional supports. In the Soviet sys-
tem, universities and academies were decently fi-
nanced; publishing houses, film studios, orchestras,
all received substantial state funding. These privi-
leges came at the cost of censorship and a good
deal of padding. But the tension bred by ideological
controls also kept alive the spirit of opposition that
had defined the Russian intelligentsia since the
nineteenth century-and for long periods been its
virtual raison d'etre. With the arrival of neo-
liberalism, this universe abruptly collapsed. Bud-
gets for higher education were slashed to one
twelfth of their late Soviet level. In the press and
publishing worlds, which had seen an explosion
of growth in the years of perestroika, circulation
shrank remorselessly after 1991, as paper costs
soared and readers lost interest in public affairs.
All this was demoralizing enough for the in-
telligentsia, but there was a further alteration. For
the first time in its history, money became the
general arbiter of intellectual worth. To be needy
was now to be a failure, evidence of an inability
to adapt creatively to the demands of competition.
In these conditions, as the common values that
once held it together corroded, the sense of col-
lective identity that distinguished the tradition-
al intelligentsia has been steadily weakened. The
term itself is now repudiated by those for whom
it smacks too much of a common identity and a
revolutionary past in favor of the neologism in-
tellektual, of healthier American origin, to denote
the new independent-minded individual, distinct
from the collective herd of old. Such dissocia-
tions themselves have a long history, but the
events of 1991, not those of 1905-7, constituted
the first revolution liberals could call their own.
Hostility-often, in private, verbally extreme
hostility-to Putin's regime is widespread. But of
public opposition there is little. The reason is not
only fear, though that exists. It is also the knowl-
edge, which can only be half-repressed, that the
liberal intelligentsia is compromised by its own part
in bringing to being what it now so dislikes. By
clinging to Yeltsin long after the illegality and
corruption of his rule was plain, in the name of
defense against a toothless Communism, it de-
stroyed its credibility in the eyes of much of the
population, only to find that Yeltsin
rJ" had landed it with Put in.
-The distance between the frayed, precarious
fabric of private lives of a people now, in the
words of Georgi Derluguian, "profoundly tired
and resistant to any public mobilizing"-and the
global canvas on which the destiny of the Russian
state is written seems enormous. Yet there is one traumatic knot that ties them together. In just five years, from 1990 to 1994, the mortality rate among Russian men soared in peacetime by 32 percent, and their average life expectancy plummeted to under fifty-eight years, below that of
Pakistan. By 2003 the population had fallen by
more than 5 million in a decade; it is currently losing 750,000 lives a year. When Yeltsin took power, the total population of Russia was just under 150 million. By 2050, according to official projections, it will be just over 100 million. So many were not undone by Stalin himself.
Official demographers hasten to point out that
high mortality rates were already a feature of the Brezhnev period, while low fertility rates are after all a sign of social advance, in syntony with Western Europe. The combination of a mortmain from
the past and an upgrade from the future has been unfortunate, but why blame capitalism? Against these apologetics, Eric Hobsbawm's judgment that
the fall of the U.S.S.R. led to a "human catastro-
phe" stands. The starkness of the break in the early
1990s is not to be gainsaid. As AiDS, TB, and sky-rocketing rates of suicide are added to the list of traditional killers-alcohol, nicotine, and the like-public health care has wasted away, on a
share of the budget that is no more than 10 per-
cent: below that of Bolivia. A sense of the sheer
desolation of the demographic scene is given by
the plight of women-more protected from the
catastrophe than men. There are now 15 percent
more women alive in this society than men. Vir-
tually half of them are single. Such is the solitude
of those who, relatively speaking, are the survivors.
In power-political terms, a relentless attrition of
Russia's human stock has obvious consequences for
its role in the world, the subject of urgent addresses
to the nation by Put in. What will remain of the
greatness of the past? Foreign diplomats were fond of describing the U.S.S.R. as "Upper Volta with rockets." From one angle, Russia today looks more
like Saudi Arabia with rockets, although against
the waxing of its oil revenues must be set the
aging of its missiles. That the country, even if it
has now regained a certain independence, has so
come down in the world haunts not only its
governing class but many of its writers. The pos-
sible spaces of empire-past or future, native or
alien-have become a leitmotif not only of its
political discourse but of its literary imagination.
In the leading example of the "imperial nov-
el," now an accepted form, Pavel Krusanov con-
structs a counterfactual history of the twentieth
century. His bestseller Ukus Angela ("Bite of the
Angel") recounts a Russia that has never known
a revolution and, instead of contracting in size,
expands to absorb the whole of China and the
Balkans, under the superhuman command of
Ivan Nekitaev ("Not-Chinese"), a tyrant of
Olympian freedom from all morality. Vladimir
Sorokin inverts the schema in his latest novel,
Den' Oprichnika ("The Day of the Oprichnik").
By the year 2027, the monarchy has been re-
stored in a self-enclosed Russia, surrounded by a Great Wall and run by a reincarnation of Ivan IV's corps of terrorists, under the thumb of China, whose goods and settlers dominate economic life, and whose language is the preferred idiom of the tsar's children themselves.
The extravagance of these dreamlands of im-
perial recovery is an indication not of any feasible ambition but of a psychology of compensation. The reality is that Russia's rank in the world has been irreversibly transformed. It was a great power con-
tinuously for three centuries: longer-this is ofren forgotten-than any single country in the West. In square miles, it is still the largest state on earth. But it no longer has a major industrial base. Its economy has revived as an export platform for raw materials, with all the risks of overreliance on volatile world prices familiar in first and third world countries alike--overvaluation, inflation, import addic-
tion, sudden implosion. Although it still possesses the only nuclear stockpile anywhere near the U.S. arsenal, its defense industry and armed services are a shadow of the Soviet past. In territory, it has shrunk behind its borders at the end of the seventeenth century. Its population is smaller than that of Bangladesh. Its GDP is less than that of Mexico.
More fundamental in the long run for the
country's identity may be the drastic alteration in its geopolitical setting. Russia is now wedged between a still expanding European Union and a vastly empowered China. Historically speaking, this is a sudden and total change in the relative
magnitudes flanking it on either side. Few Russians have yet quite registered the scale of the ridimensionamento of their country. To the west, just when the Russian elites felt they could at last rejoin Europe, where the country properly belonged, after the long Soviet isolation, they suddenly find themselves confronted with a scene in which they
cannot be one European power among others
(and the largest), as in the nineteenth century, but face a vast, quasi-unified continental bloc, from which they are formally-and, to all appearances, permanently--excluded. To the east, there is the rising giant of China, overshadowing the recovery of Russia but still utterly remote to the minds
of most Russians. Against all this, Moscow has
only the energy card-no small matter, but scarcely a commensurate counterbalance.
These new circumstances are liable to deal a
double blow to Russia's traditional sense of itself.
On the one hand, racist assumptions of the superiority of white to yellow peoples remain deeply ingrained in popular attitudes. Long accustomed to regarding themselves as-relatively speaking-
civilized and the Chinese as backward, if not barbaric, Russians find it difficult to adjust to the spectacular reversal of roles today, when China has become an industrial powerhouse towering above its neighbor, and its great urban centers are exemplars of a modernity that makes their Russian counterparts look small and shabby by comparison.
The social and economic dynamism of the People's Republic, brimming with conflict and vitality of every kind, offers a painful contrast, for those willing to look, to the numbed apathy of Russia-and this, liberals might gloomily reflect, without even
the deliverance of a true post-Communism. The wound to national pride is potentially acute.
Worse lies to the west. Catherine the Great's
famous declaration that "Russia is a European
country" was not so obvious at the time, and has often been doubted since, by foreigners and natives alike. But its spirit is deeply rooted in the Russian - elites, who have always--despite the urgings of
Eurasian enthusiasts - mentally faced west, not east. In many practical ways, post-Communism has restored Russia to the "common European home"
Gorbachev liked to invoke. Travel, sport,crime,
emigration, dual residence, are letting better-off Russians back into a world they once shared in the Belle Epoque. But at state level, with all its consequences for the national psyche, Russia - in being what cannot be included in the Union - is
now formally defined as what is not Europe, in the new, hardening sense of the term. The injustice of this is obvious. Inconvenient though it may be for the ideologues of enlargement to acknowledge, Russia's contribution to European culture has
historically been greater than that of all the new member states of the E.U. combined. In the years to come, it would be surprising if the relationship between Brussels and Moscow did not rub. Few peoples have had to undergo the variety of
successive shocks - liberation, depression, expropriation, attrition, demotion - that Russians have endured in the last decade and a half. Even if these
are so far only a brief aftermath of the much vaster turbulences of the last century, it is no surprise that the masses are "profoundly tired and resistant to any public mobilizing." What they will eventually make of the new experiences remains to be seen. For the moment, Pushkin's closing line applies--"narod bezmolvstvuet." The people are silent.
Fantastic article. I definitely appreciate the time and trouble you took to posting that, Marius.
As hobbled as Russia is economically and demographically, with its energy resources it holds a pretty decent hand. Both China and Europe will be looking in the near future to work more closely with them. The Russian leadership -- and this extends beyond Putin and his necessary levels of cronyism into the mafiya and oligarchs that really run the country -- have to decide what they would want out of such an opportunity.
The money and power are easy for them already, but the return to national prominence is obviously going to require a much different strategy. The grift is sustainable only for them as individuals, not for the country as a whole.
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