Be happy. Be joyful. Contemplate the fluffiness of innumerable wide-eyed baby pandas.

[fivemack]

The United Russia party apparently secured a 99% majority in Chechnya, on a 99% turnout.

The Putinjugend are holding a victory rally in Moscow as I type.

It appears that the secrecy of the ballot was not universally respected; for example 'those voting for United Russia were entered into a prize lottery in the city of St Petersburg'. One wonders how they could tell.

It's always instructive to compare Russian and Chinese propaganda. At the moment, Chinese propaganda is filled with apologetic remarks about monetary policy and the need for action on climate change, and the occasional panda. The Russians seem not to bother with propaganda, the state of affairs is presented unapologetically by former KGBniks, with a very strong 'what are you going to do about it?' tone.

Modest-proposal mode: lift immigration restrictions against Russians, so at least they can get out. Get Ukraine into the EU as soon as can be arranged. Build nuclear power plants, fund ITER, insulate, conserve; and long for the day that we can tell the Russian government, as the Saudi despots, that they are welcome to drink their oil and breathe their natural gas, for we their former addicts have no need for it. In what-if mode, wish that Yeltsin had blasted the KGB to ash as thoroughly as the Stasi and Czech StB were dismantled.

In other news, Livejournal has been bought by СУП, 'an international online media company with established partnerships with businesses across the globe. It was founded in the summer of 2006 by an international management team with Russian seed capital'.

Comments

[jojomojo.livejournal.com]

I have to say European energy policy does rather worry me, especially as I may want to move back within a few years ;p

Any chance, do you think, of a fall in oil prices at some point in the next decade or so? Seeing as the Russian economy is pretty much dependent on it, it seems that'd put a nice big spoke in the Russian economy and thus (possibly) in its government.

One has to think a whole bunch of nuclear reactors might be a wise way to go, but one also has to doubt how feasible that is when opposed by all those well-meaning Green activist types. Shades of Ken McLeod.

One has to note, also, I suppose, that at least the Russians do have elections for now, even though they have about 18th century levels of corruption.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Eighteenth-century levels of corruption were, if I remember my lessons about rotten boroughs from twenty years ago correctly, dodgy means applied by particular people to get themselves into office. Russia is a country-wide party-list system (it used to be a half-and-half system, with some number of the seats picked from regional lists, but Putin changed that roughly at the time he started appointing regional governors), so you're getting a very top-down application of Party power to the aim of the re-election of the Party.

Which happens everywhere to some slight degree, but at least in principle in England you have employment tribunals which strongly discourage your boss from explicitly sacking you because you voted incorrectly, election-watching organisations with some degree of both power and independence, and a media such that at least one newspaper will gleefully report corruption benefiting the party it doesn't support. As far as I can tell from the reporting, none of these exist in contemporary Russia.

Institutions, it turns out, matter.

Oil is down 10% from its speculated heights of last month, but Chinese and Indian demand is unlikely to diminish in the medium term, and the geological impression seems to be that enormous new oil-fields are not particularly likely to be found in any term.