[lbo-talk] Russia's economy

[Marvin Gandall]

Russia's growth is being fueled (n.p.i.) by oil and gas but does that make 
it's economy as shaky as has been suggested on this thread rather than 
laying the basis for further advance? The Putin government has utilized the 
global commodities boom to reasert state control and consolidate, 
restructure, and modernize the lumbering old Soviet commanding heights, so 
that the country now has a bevy of world-class companies (Gazprom and 
Rosneft in energy, Severstal and Evraz in steel, Rusal in aluminium, Norilsk 
in nickel) serving as bulwarks against the foreign takeover of Russian 
resources which appeared destined under Yeltsin. It's also used the boom to 
retire the foreign debt and to build the largest FX reserves outside Asia, 
anchoring the currency and protecting the economy against future shocks. 
These are not small accomplishments.

Politically, it seems to me the Putin regime has played the same historical 
role in relation to emergent Russian capitalism as the TR administration in 
relation to the bucaneering US robber barons. Russia doesn't have a fully 
matured bourgeois-democratic political and judicial system, and Putin has 
manipulated it to advance his program, but unlike his predecessor - recently 
eulogized by the Western media as post-Soviet Russia's leading democrat - he 
hasn't shelled parliament and set it ablaze either. I'm with Chris (and 
Gorbachev) in thinking that the Putin adminstration has been the best of the 
political choices currently on offer in Russia - resembling the Chinese 
leadership in many respects.