Russian prognosis -- dismal.

Here are excerpts from an extraordinarily insightful piece by Mr. Jeffrey Tayler about the fate that will befall Russia. It's a masterful analysis of the legacies of the fall of Rome and Constantinople, the Mongol invasion, and the Soviet Union and the present-day impossibility of a vibrant commercial sector's ever developing in Russia:

In Soviet days [the state] lived off the sale of oil, gold, and gas to the West, often extracted from the earth with slave labor . . . . The hypocrisy of Soviet ideology and the slaughter of the Stalin era deadened respect for law and order. . . . No viable notion of common good had survived the Soviet decades, when neighbors betrayed neighbors, children betrayed their parents, and the state enslaved or murdered its subjects, justifying its actions with words about patriotism and peace on earth. . . .

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. . . [The deeds of the tax man] are glorified in TV police dramas modeled after Cops, and a special academy has been set up to train youngsters for a future in tax collecting-a profession that may be edging out contract killer in popularity among teenagers . . . .

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. . . The notion that Russia's path will always remain separate from that of the West has survived the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years. . . .

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Meanwhile, much of Moscow's political elite still views Russia as having a Great Power role to play vis-à-vis the United States-a role that, more than economic reform, seems to captivate the Kremlin. (Under both Yeltsin and Putin, Russia has striven to counter the United States by courting alliances with China and India, selling arms and nuclear technology to Iran, and supporting or at least dealing with Iraq, Serbia, North Korea, and Cuba.) . . . . Russia's gross national product today amounts to just four percent of the United States' GNP . . . . Thus policies aimed at the revival of the state and the pursuance of Great Power ambitions promise only further suffering, exploitation, and decay.

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. . . Overpopulation is pushing the Chinese into the Russian Far East . . . .

"Russia Is Finished. The unstoppable descent of a once great power into social catastrophe and strategic irrelevance." By Jeffrey Tayler, The Atlantic Monthly, May 2001, republished in Johnson's Russia List # 5210, 4/18/01.