I wasn't endorsing it.
-Original Message-
From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Thu, 6 May 2004 09:25:14 -0400
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Samuel Huntington's Hispanic panic
Chris Doss wrote:
It's typical eXile mockery of everything existing.
How daring
Actually, he'll probably be remembered as the translator of Eduard Limonov. But
shock-jock is about right. The same goes for Taibbi and Ames, largely.
Comment:
Shock-jock journalism, I guess. 50 years from now people will be reading
Hemingway while the only recognition Dolan will receive is from
Shit, since when has Dolan been writing for the NY Press? Taibbi must have put a word
in for him.
He wrote a hilarious book review in the eXile recently saying that the left should
just admit that the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War were a bunch of loons and that
the only one who was
It's like open season on Russian billionaires or something. Jeez, how many are left?
Business Day (South Africa)
May 3, 2004
Writing in the snow for Norilsk Nickel
By John Helmer
In the snow, Russian peasants still say, the law is like a sleigh. A clever judge can
steer it either way.
Vladimir
terminated in retaliation, and so the U.S. is
deterred from terminating that regime.
Charles
^
There are no contradictions between the statements below.It's not saying
only the U.S. can do this. /Joanna
Chris Doss wrote:
The United States has the capability to inflict appalling
The United States has the capability to inflict appalling destruction
while sustaining only minimal damage to itself. There is no regime it
could not terminate if it wanted to-including North Korea.
---
Why do people keep saying this? One Russian Oskar-class submarine can destroy the
Eastern
See below.
Chris D. asks:Could you define the term for economically-challenged me?
I'm talking about fixed produced means of production. If the machine tool (etc.)
industry in Russia is non-existent or produces obsolescent equipment, then either
all means of production need to be imported
-Original Message-
From: Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I fall half way between Chris Lou. A more social democratic
government could alleviate poverty a la US New Deal, but in no way
would it eliminate it.
It certainly won't _eliminate_ it. But poverty in Russia has diminished
From James Devine:
finally, the Chechens have figured out how to strike back in a decisive way!
:) Chechens have a large presence in the business elite (one of the big hotels in
Moscow, I forget which one, is Chechen-owned). There are a million Chechens, and
three-quarters of them do not
Societal change in Russia has always almost always come from the top down. It has been
Revolution from Above since the days of Peter the Great on through Catherine the
Great, Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin, and thus it shall probably be
until the end of time.
it's not like
Close, but it was the Donatists, and he helped get the Pelagians on the black list. He
called Pelagius a corpulent beast or some such.
I find it indicative that, in the Enkhiridion on Faith, Hope and Love, Augustine
devoted all over a few paragraphs to last of the three.
Course, when Augustine
I think this is absolutely correct:
I do not state that Putin is ideologically or emotionally against the bourgeois
property relations and its unique signature of reproduction, but he is a product of
Sovietism and has a certain dislike for the capitalist class in the flesh.
I do not believe
Hi, Charles.
Well, comparing them with an exaggerated image of _U.S._ living standards.
In actual fact, the SU did not fail economically,in the sense that there
were no famines or homeless or severe economic crisis. The illusion
regarding the living standards of the West and U.S.
Gorby was populat from around 1985-1988 (not now, boy). Yeltsin was hugely popular
from around 1998-1992 (i.e., right after hyperinflation hit). Putin has an approval
rating of about 70%.
I disagree. In 1917, there was a huge from below component, as there had been in
1905. The importance
BTW I just mentioned the Chechen elite, the so-called Moscow Chechens. who live in
Moscow. They are big in business. They fled the republic en masse in the early 90s. In
the run-up to the presidential elections in Chechnya recently, Kadyrov did a lot of
accusing the other candidates of being
Just that he's MUCH better than Yeltsin. But then to talk about leaders who are WORSE
than Yeltsin, you have to start wandering into Pol Pot territory. It's almost
impossible to be worse than Yeltsin. Yeltsin brought GDP down to 55% of the 1989 level
in 1998; it's at 80% now.
Can you really
:) Which, if you notice, Putin isn't doing, which probably has a lot to do with his
being villified in the US press.
of course, wasn't Yeltsin following the lead of the IMF, the US Treasury, etc.? so
he was our Pol Pot?
JD
Ooh, this is a little out of my territory. I know a bit about Russian business because
I spent three years with a Russian business newspaper, but am sketchy on the broad
picture.
Yes, most domestic equipment (with the big exception of arms) is out-of-date, I do
know that light industry was one
I replied to this message a while back, but for some reason it doesn't seem to have
gone through. Therefore, I will try to reconstruct what I said as well as I can
remember, operating as I am with a seemingly endless headache.
From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I'd forgotten that. Of
I have always thought that the Confessions don't show behavior any more risque than
what a lot of Romans of Augustine's class were doing at the time. More like young fig
stealers make old ascetes who like to talk about how bad they were in the old days,
when they didn't acually do too much.
Charles B. : The standard of living in the SU was higher than most countries
in the world, no ? The standard of living fell after the fall.
Yes. But they weren't comparing their living standards with those of Chinese or
Africans. They were comparing them with the West.
Who ,exactly,
My impression is that it is continuing but greatly diminished. The big days of
emigration were the early to mid 90s. Actually, Russia has net immigration (3 million
people have left since 1991, and 6 million have come). The rate of emigrees who are
returning has also greatly increased, most
James Devine wrote:
Dependent countries can escape dependency (or at least its effects) if they have a
highly-priced export item. But if oil goes away (i.e., if prices fall back to 1980s
levels), the Russian economy would be in Big Trouble, since there's not much else to
export. (Used
What's the point of disagreement? I didn't disagree with any of this. I believe that
Russia is developing into a stabilized state capitalist society with a lot of unique
characteristics, moving away from the anarchic oligarchic model into one governed by
the bureaucracy. Did I say anything
Nice and well-written article, though old hat since Russian Big Oil has come a long
way. I particularly liked the description of Pugachova. This part, however, had me
burst out laughing:
(Moscow has let its mass transit systems collapse, but built
six-lane highways for the New Russians in their
.)
It reminds of a (Russian) friend of mine who had an Internet-sex fling with an
American women who thought that Moscow was built of mud huts.
Chris Doss wrote:
It's all a function of geographic location and knowledge of the
relevant language. :)
Perceiving others truly is a bit more complex
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
By any chance is there any material you know of on line that talks about or
detail the actual physical organization of the Soviet system of reproduction? I
have some things I have thought over for a number of years that need to be
confirmed
I wrote:
It reminds of a (Russian) friend of mine who had an Internet-sex fling with an
American women who thought that Moscow was built of mud huts.
I add:
I think there is probably no country in the world about which more politically and
ideologically motivated bullshit is uttered than
I wrote:
It is for precisely this reason that the Western left has missed the pivotal events
in Russian history over the past 5 days
I meant to say years, obviously (although the past 5 days have been pretty big too!)
Indeed, it is remarkable to what extent social relations in Russia are similar to what
they were in the tsarist era (of course the continuities between the tsarist and
societ eras are notable too).
That said, it is hard to see who is colonizing Russia, unless the word is being used
in a
Well, a lot of Soviets were dissatisfied by their living conditions, especially the
intelligentsia. Soviet consumer goods did tend to suck.
-Original Message-
From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 10:58:37 -0400
Subject: [PEN-L] Why did the
-
From: Ted Winslow [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 11:02:42 -0400
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Why did the USSR fall?
Chris Doss wrote:
People see what they want to see, and ignore what they don't.
Earlier he wrote:
You were dissing the Russian public, something
As far as the relationship between
Russia and Chechnya is concerned, I think the better analogy is with
Turkey and the Kurds--not the US and Venezuela, for example.
---
This analogy would hold only in a hypothetical world in which the Kurds had achieved
de facto independence from Turkey, and then
as a
Siberian. Whence the notorious Muscovite snobbism.
-Original Message-
From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 11:26:15 -0400
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Why did the USSR fall?
Chris Doss wrote:
That said, it is hard to see who is colonizing Russia
Most foreigners have some knowledge about the US. Most Americans know nothing about
Russia other than that it has a lot of snow.
-Original Message-
From: Ted Winslow [EMAIL PROTECTED]
This must apply generally, mustn't it e.g. Americans have very good
reasons for feeling as they do
language with respect to the
Albanians? wait, no, that's different.
-Original Message-
From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 11:42:33 -0400
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Why did the USSR fall?
Chris Doss wrote:
This analogy would hold only
-Original Message-
From: Ted Winslow [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2004 8:03 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Why did the USSR fall?
Chris Doss wrote:
People see what they want to see, and ignore what they don't.
Earlier he wrote
.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
-Original Message-
From: Chris Doss [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2004 7:50 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Why did the USSR fall?
Indeed, it is remarkable to what
Ah, very good explanation.
Two things:
1. Any Russian government will be corrupt. It's part of the political culture.
Politicians are expected to be corrupt. It's been like that since the dawn of time. I
think this probably has something to do with the loosely federated nature of the
country,
-Original Message-
From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I am not an expert on Russia (not even close!), but it seems that in structural
terms, that country is economically dominated by the IMF and the US.
--
How? US trade with Russia is almost zero. Russia's debt/GDP ratio is lower
BTW the two big parties the interviewer refers to, SPS and Yabloko, or only big in
comparison to my immediate family. They are miniscule, and everybody hates them. Well,
Yabloko's more seen as irrelevant than actually hated.
I snipped out almost everything not related to the why did the USSR
This is actually probably even more relevant. From the horse's mouth.
(I was at a press conference with Gorby a few years ago, BYW, and boy does that guy
ramble.)
TITLE: PRESS CONFERENCE WITH MIKHAIL GORBACHEV
[GORBACHEV FUND OFFICE, 12:10, DECEMBER 21, 2001]
SOURCE: FEDERAL NEWS
This is a very nice interview. Note the huge regional differences, which I have
pointed out before. No one in their right mind would call Moscow poor. I am surprised
to hear about Tyumen, but only slightly, since it's a big oil-producing area (as in
Tyumen Oil Co.). I had also thought Dagestan
Well, he's a former oil company guy. What do you expect?
Painting with a light-year-wide brush, I would say that Russian public opinion is
divided into people who think the Brezhnev era was the best thing since sliced bread
(which, come to think of it, I don't think exists in Russia) and people
China's integration into the world market offers much food for thought and one would
question if the Soviet peoples would deliberately seek a path that lowered there
standard of living to that of millions of Chinese workers.
Interesting material.
Melvin P.
--
BTW, even given the Soviet- and
If you say so. I simply report. Though I might suggest a humbler and more receptive
attitude if you want to actually learn anything.
Russian mass media is not tightly controlled. The _electronic_ mass media are
_somewhat_ controlled. The print media are not. Russia is also far from
to express my gratitude to the information that Chris Doss has been bringing
to the
list regarding Russia. I don't always agree with him -- but then I don't always
agree with
anybody on the list -- but he does bring in material from outside the circles that
most of us
inhabit.
--
Michael
-Original Message-
From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]
My ideas on the former Soviet Union were shaped to a large extent by
Mark Jones, who I collaborated with closely for nearly 10 years. I was
always humble and receptive when he spoke. My attitude toward oil
company executives
Look, I don't think it's any great mystery why the USSR fell apart.
The USSR was probably the most multicultural, multiethnic country in the world,
containing everyone from Balts to Tajiks. The CPSU instituted glastnost' and
perestroika in attempt to develop the country. Perestroika created an
Uh, the US _opposed_ the collapse of the Soviet Union. Remember when Bush I got booed
off the stage by Ukrainian nationalists?
If this was the plan, it sure boomeranged.
Can you explain how: 1) US manipulated oil prices and 2) how this manipulation of
oil prices lead (in part) to the
5. Gorbachev opening up the criticism of the system before he started
fixing it.
--
Well, the IMMEDIATE cause of the collapse of the USSR was the need to get rid of
Gorbachev by depriving him of his country. It was a coup, really. Most of the
population was against it.
True. I think they probably spent a lot of time avoiding their drunk and violent
husbands too. :)
It's possible that men sat around on their asses while women
collected water, prepared food, tended to their little ones all day.
:-)
--
Yoshie
it's more than possible. It's likely.
Jim D.
Well, I think that is part of it. There is only so much you can get people to do by
yelling davai! (come on!) at them. For the life of me I can't think of why the
Soviet government didn't start to increase wages in reaction to performance of the
employee. (There was the so-called ceiling that
They are accurate descriptions of contemporary Russian rural life, I would say, or at
least broad swathes of it. I mean, I don't want to say that every single Russian male
peasant is an alcoholic wife-beater, but an awful lot of them are.
There's been a good deal of historical reasearch into
The big growth was during the NEP and then under Stalin's forced modernization (i.e.,
in the latter, work was motivated through 1) threats of violence and 2) appeals to
ideology). By Brezhnev time, the ideology has lost its appeal to most people and
nobody was getting shipped off to Siberia for
Good point. I remember reading somewhere that the poor land and the dependence of
produce on the short growing cycle led to poor health of livestock (because there was
little to feed them with). Wasn't grain something like 80% of the peasant diet? Meat
was something of a luxury.
Chris this
Note the order of popularity of Russian leaders.
Apr 21 2004 7:59PM
Young people differ on Lenin's role in history - poll
MOSCOW. April 21 (Interfax) - Forty-percent of respondents aged 18 to 24, polled by
ROMIR monitoring on April 15-20, 2004, said Vladimir Lenin played a positive role in
No. 1 = Putin
No. 2 = Stalin
-Original Message-
From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 07:16:45 -0700
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Lenin in Russian public opinion
Lenin's popularity appears to have declined from 2003, when Lenin was named the
third
I am no expert, but I believe this to be the case. One of Gorbachev's many blunders
was to increase wages a great deal without a corresponding increase in consumer goods,
resulting in huge lines.
-Original Message-
From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Thu,
-Original Message-
From: Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
4. Here I am guessing: Probably an excessive believe in the affluence of
the United States system.
Yes yes yes. They assumed reports of poverty in the West were Communist propaganda.
5. Gorbachev opening up the criticism of
Russian peasants in the quasi-feudal tsarist era would work intensively for the three
months or so of the year when the ground was usuable for agriculture, and then sit
around on their asses the rest of the year, in any case.
Capitalism may be more progressive than feudalism, but then I
Oh yeah. But there is little question as far as I know that the Russian peasantry
worked in a cycle of frenzied activity alternating with relative lethargy. Actually
there has been a lot of speculation that this is the reason for Russian culture's
non-existent work ethic and tendency toward
Near as I can tell, there was a lot of hard drinking and fist-fighting going on. :) Of
course you could always get drafted to do whatever the tsar wanted you to do.
Who knows? That way of life is dead. But in any case it was determined by the
conditions of agrarian life in a climate in which
Screening Soviet history
New focus is film by Stalin kin
By MILA ANDRE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Circle May 9 on the calendar.
Not just because that's when several films by an accomplished Moscow-trained director
named Vissarion Jugashvili will be shown here for the first time, but because the
As far as Stephen Cohen is concerned, I only wish I had this
knucklehead's email address at NYU (unlisted), so I could tell him a
thing or two.
---
Whatever. Cohen is one of the only Western writers on Russia worth reading. He's
almost the only one to get the Affaire Khodorkovsky more-or-less
Actually the bus driver would be paid more than the doctor. Bus driving was a
relatively prestigious profession. I know people who wanted to be bus drivers when
they grew up b/c of the status involved.
I below repost a comment my friend Sasha (Moscow State University, class of 1981) made
when
2003 RUSSIAN GDP REACHED 79% OF PRE-REFORM LEVEL
MOSCOW, 12 April (RIA Novosti)-A report, The Macroeconomic Situation in
Russia for the 1999-2003 period and early 2004, published on the Russian
Government's Web site on Monday, shows that the country's GDP exceeded the
1993 level and real incomes
Russky Telegraf, a newspaper owned by one of Russia's most
influential billionaire financiers with major oil interests, said the
film is provocative and dangerous.
It must be a pretty tiny paper, or regional. I've never heard of it. Which financier?
Independent television NTV had offered
Financial Times (UK)
April 7, 2004
A map of Russia's new empires
By Andrew Jack
Russia's business tycoons first concentrated on accumulating their vast
wealth, then boasted about it, and have since tried to downplay it as they
fear a political clampdown against them under President Vladimir
conservative are right (wing and correct), liberals are bleeding
hearts... michael hoover
--
These words mean something completely different in this part of the world:
conservative = communist. Don't even get me started on how inappropriate the
left/right political dichotomy a la the West is
Just a quibble. Kag writes:
And a blow for Russia, too. You can't call Russia a democratic state, but at
least we don't deny a third of our citizens their rights, like Latvia.
Russian national politics holds a contradictory position, between liberal
declarations of equality and the daily
Zinn reduces
the past to a Manichean fable and makes no serious attempt to address the
biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S. history: why have most
Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they
live?
--
What's so daunting about that question? Don't most people
He's writing under duress, and it might not even be him at all, but even so... In two
parts.
The Indisputable Crisis of Russian Liberalism
By Mikhail Khodorkovsky
(snip)
I do not mean to say that Anatoly Chubais, Yegor Gaidar et al. set themselves the
objective of deceiving the country. Many
is Matt Taibbi when you need him.
-Original Message-
From: joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 10:34:47 -0800
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Milan Rai on UN occupation of Iraq
Chris, I think you won.
Joanna
Louis Proyect wrote:
Chris Doss wrote:
I
Actually it's the kind of pompous Western bloviating the eXile likes to mock.
Dagestanis are just like Kurds! I don't know Dagestan from a hole on the ground,
but they must be just like Kurds, cause, well, I don't know, they just are! They
speak Dagestani there in Dagestan, they shore do!
I believe I will get a yahoo account.
To answer the question, the issue is not Chechen independence per se, but what Free
Ichkeria did with its independence and what it is believed it would do again given
the chance; devolve into a militant Islamist failed gangster state specializing in
force
in the Far East and around Lake Baikal.
-Original Message-
From: Chris Doss [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 11:46:03 +0400
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Computer outsourcing to Russia.
Well, yeah. There's no comparing Moscow and say Yakutia. They're different
And Russia's reaction to being invaded (twice) should have been what? How should
Russia react to thousand of its citizens being kidnapped and tortured? What should the
Dagestani reaction be to attempts to force it to become a medieval Islamist state?
Reply:
If it is unacceptable to you, then
-Original Message-
From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 09:10:24 -0500
I should probably clarify that the First and Second Chechen Wars are completely
different matters. The first was a bone-headed move by Yeltsin against a national
After the Soviet Union collapsed, 14 regions become independent nations.
After Dzhokhar Dudayev was elected president of Chechnya, he declared
independence. But Boris Yeltsin refused to accept this and sent in
troops. After Chechen rebels drove off the Russian troops, a full-scale
invasion was
this with a balanced piece of analysis on August 18).
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/4546.html
-Original Message-
From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 11:07:09 -0500
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Milan Rai on UN occupation of Iraq
Chris Doss wrote: Lord
Blagov is usually quite good. I am surprised to see him get so monocausal.
Here, he writes:
It has been often said that disputes over oil transit are behind the
tragedy in unruly Chechnya - seen as the biggest security threat in the
region.
Russia has been keen to use its Baku-Novorossiisk
The Times (UK)
March 29, 2004
Yukos: has a deal been done?
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed oil tycoon and critic of President
Vladimir Putin, has today performed a volte-face and thrown his support
behind Russia's leader. Jeremy Page reports from Moscow.
Has Mr Khodorkovsky struck a deal with
The opinion polls in Chechnya show (rebel leader) Aslan Maskhadov and (pro-Moscow
Chechen president) Aslan Kadyrov as being viewed with about equally phenomenal levels
of dislike. Maskhadov has an about 1% approval rating. It's rough being a warlord. :)
As I recall the polls showed more
1) I don't know how the hell Tahoo is going to compete with Yandex.ru and Rambler.ru,
which are entrenched in the Russian market and giant.
2) I don't get how computers are a luxury in Russia. Most everybody I know has one.
Hell, you can use one in an Internet cafe in Moscow for $1 an hour,
Incidentally there is an interview with Kadyrov right here (edited by moi):
http://www.untimely-thoughts.com/index.html?cat=Aug%202,%202003type=3art=138. As far
as I know it is the only time he has ever been interviewed by a Westerner. It is
pre-2003 election.
You mean on the part of the Chechen population? Hard to say. My impression is that the
majority of the population is very tired of being caught in a cross-fire bewteen
trigger-happy, panicky Russian conscripts and jihadi nutballs and will accept anything
that will get them out of the situation.
Well, yeah. There's no comparing Moscow and say Yakutia. They're different worlds.
It's like comparing New York and Appalachia. Worse.
-Original Message-
From: joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 09:26:59 -0800
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Computer
Russia raises growth forecast
AFP
March 25, 2004
MOSCOW - Russia's economy chief has raised the nation's growth forecast for
the next year by more than one percentage point only days after President
Vladimir Putin scolded him in public for moving too slowly on reform.
Russia's Economic
It is not just anarchists or autonomists that have problems with this.
Leo Panitch and the rest of the crew at SR are for socialism in the
abstract but think that the Russian revolution and every other
revolution that was inspired by it were disasters.
---
It's certainly not an opinion held by
I didn't catch the earlier part of this thread, but what scale are we talking here?
The world's largest oil producer is Russia.
-Original Message-
From: Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 12:41:45 +0100
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Will the oil run
Yeah. No. 2 exporter though. All Russian oil profits are from exports.
The largest average daily producer, but not the largest proven reserves
and not the largest exporter.
Michael
Ho-hum.
From Microsoft's SLATE magazine:
We shall strengthen the multiparty system. We shall
strengthen civil society and do everything to uphold media
freedom, Putin said after a campaign in which he arrested a
political opponent,
How did Khodorkovsky become a political opponent? Are
The Russian word for irony is ironiya. The word for iron is zheleznoye. So no pun.
-Original Message-
From: Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 12:58:09 -0600
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] FW: Today's Papers: Putin
Devine, James wrote:
The pictures are
Hi Michael,
Caveat emptor: I am not an economist. However, these are my two kopecks' worth.
There is no doubt that a great deal, possibly the majority, of the economic boom has
been the result of high oil prices. The federal treasury gets the great majority of
its money from sales of
From the very fine Moscow News.
http://www.mn.ru/english/issue.php?2004-9-12
Maybe I should add that this could in theory be rectified by cracking down on the
informal economy, but this is not in the interests of the bureaucracy, who exist in
large part as rentiers on private business (i.e. they get paid for looking the other
way).
-Original Message-
From: Chris
The strategic relationship with China idea goes back to the 1998 Primakov Doctrine put
forward during the reign of Boris the Drunk, but has really developed under Putin as
part of 1) the Shanghai Six group providing collective security in Central Asia and 2)
the trilateral relationship between
I wrote:
---
I edited several articles on this subject a while back. My memory is fuzzy, but as
far as I recollect there was no US role. It was competitive lobbying by LUKoil and
Yukos; Yukos was favoring developing (completely hypothetical) shipments to the US
(and we all know what
Heh. Peter is one of my best friends. He buys me beer. I thereby endorse this post
emphatically! :)
-Original Message-
From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 10:50:07 -0500
Subject: [PEN-L] Bonapartism now and then
The Passionless Campaigner
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