> > Boris Kagarlitsky said years ago that the old Soviet
> > elite was a
> > model of flexibility - they went from being
> > Stalinists to social
> > democrats to pure neoliberals in just a few years.
>
> It's a nice soundbite, but simplistic. One, the Soviet/Russian
> elite weren't/aren't a monolith. I think it's more that different
> elites came and went rather than the entire elite switching its
> ideology en masse. In any case, Russia has never had a pure
> neoliberal economic policy. A country that gives benefits to over
> half its population, subsidizes the economies of several other
> countries, and has half of its economy owned by the state is not
> operating according to neoliberal principles.
I think of Putin the economic manager as a competent taxman, which may be in part because he was once a (presumably competent) mid- ranking KGB man and self-described patriot:
<blockquote>In terms of privatization, Vladimir Putin's administration auctioned off only a small share of economy, some 0.3 percent, or 100 times less than his predecessor. However, Putin's privatization netted the state nearly four times more in revenue - over $4 billion. . . .
Instead of triggering a wave of de-privatization, as predicted by the opponents of the Putin administration, hard data show that the Yukos affair had the intended effect of tightening tax compliance among the major oil producers. Year on year, effective corporate tax rates paid by Russia's five oil majors increased from 8.4 percent in 2003 to 33 percent in 2004. At the same time, foreign capital inflows went from around $23.5 billion in 2002 to $60 billion in 2004, while capital outflows averaging $20 billion per annum in 1998-2001 decreased to $6.6 billion on average per annum in 2002-2004.
(Constantin Gurdgiev, "Putin's Real Reforms," 16 June 2005, <http:// www.techcentralstation.com/061605A.html>)</blockquote>
Collecting more taxes from oil companies is what Chavez has pursued. What Putin lacks and Chavez has is commitment to participatory democracy, but that's probably because Russians have yet to recover from decades of depoliticization on which state socialism in the USSR (unlike Cuban socialism) depended.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>