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Tirelessly, Kremlin’s propaganda machine keeps informing its citizens of how wonderfully Russia is doing without all the Western stuff. Someplace, they say, Russian inventions and scientific discoveries are waiting in total readiness – as are the enterprises eager to make much better things than the evil Westerners.
A simple test question avoided by Propaganda TV: where were these wondersome technologies and the competitive industry prior to February 27th 2014 when Putin’s special forces launched their attack in Crimea?
Trading freely all over the world, a company with top technology has multiple hundredfold the options of a poor and – globally speaking – scarcely populated Russia. And: how many well-known Russian companies are there, except for Gazprom?
It’s one thing to pump oil and sell it for cash to those able to build super-yachts, good cars and, let’s say, tasty canned fish and (lactose free) cheese. Another matter to shape a society where people are motivated to invent and make good things – while doing their utmost best at each and every detail in both quality and price, so as to please the buyer.
A remarkably vital component, here, is that when one gets something good done, the fruit of his labour is not snatched from him. In the free world, we keep arguing what is the optimal percentage of state taxes. The Russian reality being: once you make something of value, KGB trained guys soon show up and take it all away. A society of robbers can never be as creative and effective as a free one.
When, by Putin’s grace, Dmitri Medvedev spent some time being president of Russia, the talk was about modernising of Russian economy, and of nanotechnology. And that’s just what it came to – talk. Regrettably, Russian science is in a ridiculous state as related to population and the talent present. And in the research that does happen, it is not free thought and measurable results that dominate, but a hierarchy of the feudal kind. When it comes to science and research, Russia shares the league of Pakistan.
For years on end, a foreign policy goal of Russia’s was to become member of World Trade Organisation (WTO). By annexing Crimea, Mr Putin did indeed increase his domestic popularity (for a time), but managed to explicitly bin the decades-long toil by both Russia and dozens of partners (incl. Estonia) to integrate the Russian people into the world creating and producing new value.
Those of us familiar with daily life in the USSR will recall the reality captured by a pun on «who discovered the shaver?» The answer: «Comrade Sidorov, in the trash can at US Embassy.» Not that in every nation we should re-invent the wheel. Rather, it’s all about cooperation and sharing.
It’s such a pity that a nation next to us, made up of wonderful, talented and gifted people, seems inclined to support their homeland being turned into a kind of a larger North-Korea – not into a part of the world of the free. Clearly, KGB-economics are being grossly overestimated.