Putin said yesterday that renaming the city of Volgograd back to Stalingrad was a good idea. The Russian Orthodox Church issued an official statement wholeheartedly supporting this plan.
Of course, that’s the same Church that held services every Sunday while Stalin was alive, asking God “to bless and keep in good health out God-given leader Joseph Stalin”.
Russian high-school textbooks call Stalin ‘a good manager’.
The country (I mean Russia and, later, the USSR) have a hall of fame of good managers: Alexander Nevsky (a murderer proclaimed a saint by Russian orthodox atheists, politician No1 of all times in Russia), Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great (a famous murderer and, at the same time, the second most popular politician ever in Russia; Stalin is No3), Nicholas II (another saint murderer), Lenin, and, the last but not the least, Putin.
Nice company of good managers, isn’t it?
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One could in fact in a euphemistic manner describe the GULag and spetsoslentsy as population management systems. I remember seeing a book from Russia in Bishkek praising Beria as a good manager, I forgot the title, two years ago. I will check to see if I can find it next week when I fly out there again.
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With all these great managers, it’s no wonder why Russia is still do desperately poor in spite of all the natural resources and the enormous territory.
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Russia seems to be pretty much a middle income country. Its PPP is listed by the World Bank at $23,589 which is a lot more than I earn. The only formerly socialist states that are listed by the World Bank as richer than Russia on the basis of individual purchasiing are the Baltic states, Slovenia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Russia is about 10 times richer than Tajikistan.
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The World Bank’s data reminds me of this joke that, according to statistics, a regular American has one testicle and one breast. 🙂
Most of the people in Russia are ecstatic if their family managed to make $200 per month. And of course there is a small group of obscenely rich billionaires.
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Is that average or median? Because high inequality can raise the average to a middle income even while the vast majority of people are earning far, far less.
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Exactly. This number sounds high even for a median income in Moscow, which is enormously richer than the rest of the country.
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It is per capita purchasing power so it is an average. Here is a list of PPP from the IMF, World Bank, and CIA. It only shows that the country itself is rich not that the wealth is distributed equitably. For that you need to look at Gini coefficients. Russia is listed by the World Bank as having a more equal distribution of wealth than the US, but worse than the UK and much worse than Ukraine. Russia’s Gini coefficient is actually quite close to that of Ghana.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality
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“Russia is listed by the World Bank as having a more equal distribution of wealth than the US”
– Hilarious. 🙂 🙂
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As far as I can figure it out, the Gini index will suggest a sorta equal distribution of wealth if almost everyone is earning almost nothing and almost nobody is earning almost everything, since with a few exceptions, most people’s income is quite equal.
From Wikipedia: As another example, in a population where the lowest 50% of individuals have no income and the other 50% have equal income, the Gini coefficient is 0.5; whereas for another population where the lowest 75% of people have 25% of income and the top 25% have 75% of the income, the Gini index is also 0.5. Economies with similar incomes and Gini coefficients can have very different income distributions. Bellù and Liberati claim that to rank income inequality between two different populations based on their Gini indices is sometimes not possible, or misleading.
Source of that: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2652960/
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I can understand Russians falling for Putin’s bullshit since they don’t have much collective experience of being able to use political judgement and are trapped in his propoganda web (all the more effective for seeming to have been dismantled).
What breaks my heart is Americans falling for it and thinking he’s some kind of defender of traditional values…. You’ve gotta have a _lot_ of perceptual blinders on to perceive anything valualbe there……
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Exactly! What values? This is a corrupt, cynical regime. Putin and his cronies get stinky rich while feeding everybody else stories about how much better off Russia is than everybody else on the planet.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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