----- Original Message ---- From: "dredmond at efn.org" <dredmond at efn.org>
Russia has indeed expanded its welfare state, but my guess is the extraordinarily high popularity of Putin and now Medvedev reflects their success in transforming Russia into a developmental state. Putin and Medvedev are both pragmatic modernizers, through and through -- smart, tenacious, capable, and genuinely committed to electoral democracy and the transformation of Russia into a continental-sized version of Finland. Here's the blueprint, which has interesting parallels to many of the developmental states of today's global semi-periphery:
http://eng.kremlin.ru/speeches/2009/09/10/1534_type104017_221527.shtml
-- DRR
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