"but who said that Russia is just a third world country being sucked dry of its oil?"
Maybe I misread, but that did seem to be the tenor of Andie's contribution.
"The argument is that Russia is not creating any new industries or investing in the capital infrastructure necessary for future prosperity. It's growing, but not developing."
It is not developing new industries like China, but then China was an overwhelmingly peasant economy twenty years ago, and is industrialising and urbanising. A lot of Chinese investment is construction, because whole cities are being built. Russia is not developing like that because it industrialised and urbanised in the 1930s.
The Foreign Policy Centre in London does argue that Russia's growth is entirely due to the oil revenues. But then the Foreign Policy Centre's Communications Director Rob Blackwood resigned because the Centre's accepted a £100 000 donations from exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky to say just that. http://www.newstatesman.com/200501310024