Russia after Putin?

Great Debates
21

He hasn’t been seen since March 5th. Speculation abounds. Not much (read: anything) on pro-kremlin (read: All) .ru news sites here in St. Petersburg. Most of the speculation comes from the NYT, BBC and my brother. I’m surprise Wolf Blitzer isn’t all about this - no recent airline crashes.

The rumours are, to wit:

He went to Suisse to be with his gymnast baby-momma after their love-child was born
Flu (or worse - I’ve heard pancreatic cancer too)
Coup
Nothing at all (Stupid Flanders: nothing at all…)

And that may be the case. It’ll all be known tomorrow, certainly by the time Wall Street can price it in. He’s supposed to meet with the Kyrgyz dict- president here on Monday. One of the Kremlin TV channels already reported - on Friday - that meeting happened. Tomorrow. Time travel is a bitch.

22

I think he’s walking the Appalachian Trail.

23

Putin has emerged.

If he saw his shadow, that means eight more weeks of winter.

24

And you can thank Jeffrey Sachs and his neo liberal ilk for helping destroy that opportunity for Russians to embrace proper government

25

Well, now we have some polling data, finally. Russians today are more likely to list Soviet-style communism as their preferred form of government (35%) than either liberal democracy (10%) or their current system (30%). And when asked to choose between “state planning and distribution” and “free markets”, central planning wins 55% to 25%.

If you want to know what comes next after Putin falls, I’d say that should give us a pretty clear idea. Liberal democracy is the most unpopular it’s been since 1995.

26

Well, if Russia starts experimenting with socialism again, almost certainly it will not be the doctrinal revolutionize-the-whole-world kind that made the Bolsheviks appear such a threat to Western civilization in 1917.

27

Russians respect power. Even at the expense of certain social and personal freedoms. Especially those freedoms most often desired by minorities. That isn’t going to change significantly with the new generation of millenials either. Far too large a proportion of them feel nostalgic for a Greater Mother Russia they never knew but would like to return to.

28

Vladimir Putin, Jr. If not a natural offspring, then a clone out a facility buried deep in the Ural mountains.

29

Russians never do anything by half measures.

30

Not even democracy?

31

That is correct. They optimize it until to anyone outside looking in, it looks like an oligarchy.

Even at the height of communism, voting was a requirement of being a Russian citizen.

32

Their attempt at democracy didn’t come anywhere near half measures. They’d have had to work three times as hard to reach half-assed.

33

From what I understand of their manufacturing during the Breshnev era, Quality Control was a half measure at best. Though their constant bragging of having the best of everything in the entire world was certainly full measure propaganda.

34

The best thing that could happen to Russia and Putin’s reputation is if he were to pull a Solon and then disappeared.

35

The problem with the Brezhnev era manufacturing (Alec Nove argues) wasn’t really that they didn’t enforce quality control, it’s that in the absence of market pricing, they didn’t have any good way to define what ‘quality’ was. What they really had was ‘quantity control’, where various quantitative metrics were supposed to serve as proxies for what the economy needed, and that worked well enough to a degree, but not well enough to match the standard of living of western countries or even Central European ones. The issues with quantitative metrics substituting for qualitative/subjective ones is that you get things like truckdrivers choosing to drive to excessively remote locations and carry excessively heavy loads in order to rack up their kilogram x kilometer quotas, and so forth.