> However, society here is
> left to do what it wants and pleases. Hardly anyone in Russia cares about
> politics because politics doesn't enter their lives.
Actually, I've felt for some time that the emergence of Bearzilla -- to use a slightly fanciful term for Russia's powerful, fast-growing developmental state -- out of the wreckage of the USSR is one of the most remarkable and underreported stories of the early 21st century. (Note that I'm using "developmental state" in the broad sense of an ensemble of state programs, state ownership in companies, sovereign wealth funds, civic society, R & D, science, education etc., rather than electoral politics).
Russia's social structure is comparable in many ways to Latin America and the more developed regions of Central Asia and North Africa -- reasonably urbanized and with some industrial assets, but ravaged by neoliberalism. So if Russia can successfully defeat the neolib werewolves, there's a chance the rest of the global semi-periphery can do the same, with profoundly liberating consequences for the world-system.
-- DRR