> -Except by the increased volume of exportations, all those characteristics,
> -including very high levels spending on research were already present in
> -the USSR by 60´s, but in the end it failed.
I'm not sure it failed, I'd say it was never meant to be a consumer society in the first place, so the arrival of multinational consumer capitalism necessarily meant the one-party state had to radically mutate into a developmental state (China and Vietnam), or hitch its cart to someone else's developmental state (Slovenia and Czech Rep vis-a-vis the EU). Russia will probably have to do a bit of both -- tap EU markets for technology, and create its own neo-mercantilist industrial policy, sort of like southern China vis-a-vis Japan, i.e. funnel its energy-rents into its quite promising manufacturing sector.
-- Dennis