[lbo-talk] Russia's Managed Democracy

[Dennis Redmond]

> Russia's Managed Democracy
> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n02/ande01_.html
>
> Perry Anderson
>
> 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
> over-reliance on volatile world prices familiar in First and Third
> World countries alike – over-valuation, inflation, import addiction,
> sudden implosion. Although it still possesses the only nuclear
> stockpile anywhere near the American arsenal, its defence industry
> and armed services are a shadow of the Soviet past. In territory, it
> has shrunk behind its borders at the end of the 17th century.
> Its population is smaller than that of Bangladesh. Its gross
> national income is less than that of Mexico.

Russia has nearly 500,000 scientists, as well as industry and factories
galore. Its arms industry is highly competitive (just ask the Israelis who
got spanked by Hezbollah), and its market GDP measured in euro is
considerably larger than that of Mexico. And any culture which could
produce a film as splendid as "Nightwatch" has what it takes to survive
and thrive in the 21st century.


> 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 18th or 19th century, but face a vast,
> quasi-unified EU continental bloc, from which they are formally – and,
> to all appearances, permanently – excluded.

Nonsense. They'll join eventually, along with Turkey and many others. The
EU isn't an old-style empire or even a US-style federal state. It's a
multinational state, and the doors are open.

-- DRR