Photo from The BBCFrom The Strategy Page:
March 10, 2009: Last year, the government prosecuted nearly 4,000 officials for corruption. This included hundreds of senior provincial and city officials. There's still a lot of corruption, but each year there's a little less. However, economic problems have overshadowed corruption. The global recession has cut Russian exports 40 percent, and the GDP is poised to shrink by more than ten percent this year. Rising unemployment means more unrest in the streets. One bright spot in all this is the revival of agriculture. Russian exported 14 million tons of grain in the last year. Until the communists took over in the 1920s, Russia had long been a major exporter of grain. But the communist command economy screwed that up, and it took a decade after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, for agriculture to find its entrepreneurial feet again.
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My Comment: A blunt and acurate assessment of Russia today.