Yo,
>
>I had no idea what your earlier response to my response to Doug’s questions
>was to suppose to mean – the reason I didn’t reply.
Would I was trying to suggest is that Putin and the FSB are estatists, who want to make Russia into a global instead of just a regional great power. To do this, you need a populace that isn't on the verge of falling apart, which is one reason that I suspect that pay so much attention to those opinion polls. Putin has a populist image, as you know. -- (Pls don’t cite the Moscow Times to me as an “authoritative source”). --- It was a good op ed... ---
>
>Clearly a class interpretation can be made for Russia – but who is
>representing the lower/working class? The Communists?
--- Well, the working class doesn't have to figure into every single Marxist analysis... I agree, as an aside, with Kagarlitsky when he said that the Russian working class is actually a kind of hodgepodge of classes: They often grow their own food (making them into a variety of peasant) and engage in small scale barter (petty trading) as well as being classically working class. ---
The leadership of the Communist Party has decried Khordorkovsky’s arrest! You and I have both agreed in this forum to the point of bothering everyone else that Russia does not have meaningful left. --- Yup. --- A group for ex-KGB thugs can run Russia better?
--- Well, I don't thik being ex-KGB is necessarily negative. Since the KGB is supposed to have been the least ideologically, most competent and most patriotic part of the Sov gov., it might even be a plus.
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