Dimanche 2 mars 2008
7
02
/03
/Mars
/2008
19:11
Now comes the tough part in Russia
From December 1999 to the end of 2007, a period overlapping the presidency of Mr. Putin, the value of Russia’s stock market increased from $60 billion to more than $1
trillion.
[...]
Most Russians do not love Mr. Putin per se, but they love Mr. Putin’s Russia. They love being middle class. They love planning for the future. It is no comfort to the politically
persecuted, but average wages in Russia are leaping 10 percent a year, in real terms.
The growing millions of Russian homeowners, vacationers and investors may seem inclined to authoritarianism or just apolitical. But they certainly value a strong ruble, moderate inflation,
affordable mortgages, access to higher education, satellite television, Internet connections, passports, foreign visas and — above all else — no economic shocks.
[...]
So after nearly 10 years of robust growth, the Kremlin faces a quandary. Expectations have been raised, and now many Russians, though wary of upsetting social stability, want not just
high growth, but also a new modernization driven by innovation and broader entrepreneurialism. They want their whole country to reach a Western European standard of living — a standard
that, historically, very few countries outside the region have attained.
THAT Mr. Putin’s Russia should be seen not as a failed democracy but as a triumphant market economy with a “very rough, brutal, and cheerful capitalism” is the argument of “Getting Russia Right” (Carnegie Endowment, $19.95), a short, handy book by Dmitri V. Trenin. (It is also the position argued publicly by this reviewer for more than a
decade.)
“There is,” adds Mr. Trenin, a Russian analyst in Moscow, “a Russia beyond Putin’s.” True enough, though Mr. Trenin does not detail that Russia. Almost no one does.
Russia’s dynamism is spurred not only by greedy cronies at all levels operating in an unaccountable political system, but also by an explosion of consumers.
[...]
First, he again demonstrates that it was not the privatizations under Boris N. Yeltsin that set in motion Russia’s egregious insider enrichment. Instead, he
shows, it was a process begun under the Soviet president Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and subsequently continued, to grant lobbyists preferential
access to commodity export licenses at a time when there was a gap between world prices and very low regulated domestic prices — allowing them to pocket a windfall.
[...]
Though Mr. Putin and Russian elites, no less than their Chinese counterparts, grasp the power of market barometers and fiscal discipline, it is China that American analysts typically offer as an
example of world-transforming economic success. Russia is portrayed almost exclusively as an authoritarian menace.
So here’s a trick: A first step toward understanding Russia would be to read the press and academic accounts on China — and then substitute the word “Russia” for “China.” (This works in
reverse as well.)
China, which unlike Russia remains under Communist Party monopoly, is certainly no less an authoritarian challenge than Russia is. And, like it or not, Russia, too, is something of a
world-transforming economic success.
[...]
But if Russia is to make the transition to a more innovative, entrepreneurial economy, as Mr. Medvedev has stated, it must make other farsighted, complex investments in Russia’s human
capital: education, health care, better conditions for private enterprise.
