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Abraham wrote:Funny, Russia used to be a mess and now with Capitalism being all the rage there, it's economy is soaring. (This according to a friend who spends a great deal of time there)

Prostitution and drug use, both very hush-hush in the Soviet era, became open and rampant. Russian society may have lost some of the warped values of the communist era, but it failed to gain any others instead. The Orthodox Church, heavily penetrated by the Soviet secret police, hardly provided a substitute for the spiritual vacuum of the late communist and post-communist era. Instead, it was busy begging for tariff breaks for its vast alcohol and tobacco importing operations. A spiritual leader of the liberal reformers of the Church, Father Alexander Men, was brutally murdered. Other reformers and dissidents in the Church, such as Father Gleb Yakunin and Father Georgi Edelstein, were defrocked or exiled to far-away parishes.

Vladimir Putin is a tough (some say ruthless), competent, non-ideological ruler. Moscow pundits agree that he is more focused than his predecessor. Igor Malashenko, a well-known Russian commentator, recently stated that Yeltsin presided over a "disorganized autocracy," while he anticipates that Putin’s will be an orderly one. A prominent Russian businessman termed the whole of Putin’s generation "ruthless and unprincipled." Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in a view shared by at least one Russian reformist politician, thinks that Putin is a moderate nationalist. There is little doubt that Putin is a statist who surrounds himself with "securocrats" — long-tested collaborators primarily from the intelligence services.

Putin’s speeches and interviews demonstrate beyond doubt that he is acutely aware of Russia’s weaknesses and deficiencies. He understands that Russia’s over-dependence on energy exports, with their market volatility, bodes ill for a country of 150 million people. Putin became aware of Russia’s industrial decline during the 1980s, while he was stationed in Dresden, East Germany, as a kgb intelligence officer. During his stint in the GDR, he was reportedly involved in some "technological acquisitions" (industrial espionage) for Moscow and was a kgb liaison to the East German secret police, the Stasi. Putin is said to have realized that the Soviet Union did not possess the manufacturing base necessary for the early post-industrial age. It could not even manufacture adequate personal computers and mainframes. Given his position at the time, he must have been aware of the inadequacies of the Soviet Union’s late start in the information age. The highly centralized, incompetently run economy was losing to the West.

Putin’s eventual involvement in reformist politics and his current preoccupation with economic growth rates as well as Russia’s technology base do not contradict his security background. His treatise on Russia’s place in the twenty-first century (published on the Russian government’s website) claims that by growing 8 percent to 10 percent a year, Russia can catch up with Western Europe’s current levels of production within 15 to 20 years. Unfortunately, Russia grew only 2 percent during the very favorable economic climate of 1999.

Thus far, Putin’s political and public relations instincts have been astute. He was filmed giving out hunting knives to Russian officers and troops in the trenches of Chechnya the morning of New Year’s Day, when most Russians were sound asleep after having spent the night toasting the new millennium. He sent Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana Diachenko, packing on his first day on the job. The notorious Diachenko not only was her father’s Kremlin advisor, but is also alleged to have spearheaded many of the corrupt financial dealings attributed to the Yeltsin family. He fired Yeltsin’s presidential property manager, Pavel Pavlovich Borodin, who is now being sought by police in Switzerland. He demoted Nikolai Aksenenko, first deputy prime minister in charge of the economic portfolio, to preside over the railways, while elevating a tough debt negotiator, former Finance Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, to the No. 1 economic position. Watching their dynamic new acting president, many Russians quoted their proverb, "a new broom, which sweeps clean."

The first political crisis of the "new broom" occurred when the newly elected Duma met. The much-anticipated "coalition for reform," including the Union of Right Forces, the liberal-left Yabloko, the Fatherland-All Russia Party led by Primakov and Luzhkov, and Putin’s party, the Unity Party (a.k.a. the Bear) failed to materialize. Instead, Putin struck a compromise with the communists. Gennady Seleznev, a fellow Peterbourgeois and a rather docile former Duma speaker, was reelected. The Duma communist faction received the largest number of committee chairmanships, nine, while the opposition coalition got only three committees.

While the liberal factions cried foul, the coalition with the communists made sense for Putin from a number of angles. To begin with, it denied Primakov the important perch of chairmanship of the Duma, from which he could have challenged the acting president. Second, it made the communists appear not to be in implacable opposition to the Kremlin prior to the presidential elections. In addition, the move provided Putin with a manageable chairman within the legislature. And finally, it struck a blow to the cocky Union of Right Forces and its de facto leader, Anatoly Chubais, who had boasted that Putin was in his pocket.

But Putin’s "pact with the devil" dealt a blow to hopes for a reformist agenda. While the communists may well give Putin parliamentary votes, the Union of Right Forces could have provided him not only loyal Duma members but also a relatively competent (by Russian standards) pool of yuppie policy analysts and managers. These experts would have been independent of Boris Berezovsky and his group. In addition, the coalition with the communists served to discredit Putin among the Russian elites and anti-communist voters and did nothing to boost his image in the West. While the deal might be sensible tactically, in the long run it undermines the same reforms that Putin claims he is so anxious to promote. The communist faction in the Duma will not support the private ownership of land, a new bankruptcy law, and tax reform, all of which are at the top of the reformist legislative agenda. Putin will need the voices of the democrats, namely Yabloko, and some of the Fatherland deputies, in order to legislate Russia forward.

Even more worrisome is Putin’s reliance on the St. Petersburg "mafia" of ex-kgb officers to staff his administration. These advisors make the Russian intellectuals nervous. They cite potentially repressive steps, from Internet controls to outright censorship and a crackdown on Russia’s relatively free media. Two cases in point of the tendency toward greater intervention in the media came to light recently. In January 2000, Vladimir Babitsky, Radio Liberty’s correspondent in Chechnya, was arrested by the Russian military and then disappeared. When he finally resurfaced, he was immediately rearrested. The Russian prosecutor’s office is threatening to charge him with treason. In another incident, also in January, Alexander Khinshtein, a Muscovite investigative reporter, was threatened with incarceration in a psychiatric prison for digging into the background and business practices of the controversial tycoon Berezovsky and Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo. This was the first time since the Soviet era that authorities attempted to use psychiatric prisons for intimidation.

Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried, and it will continue to do so despite the best efforts of the die-hard true believers in the Obama administration and the rest of the world. The most recent example of this failure: Euro-Socialism is presently bankrupting the countries that embraced it in Europe. This will result not only in more social and economic upheaval, but also the ultimate demise of the ill-conceived European Union.

The original and current proponents of socialism fail to take into account one very basic but immutable factor: the fundamental nature of the human race.

The most dominant trait mankind has, as do all living creatures, is an innate desire to survive and prosper.

While some may willingly choose to pursue subsistence on their own terms, to the vast majority of the human race, the path of least resistance is the most desired. Thus, mankind is susceptible to financial scams, gambling, crime, and resentment or violence towards those who may have more. But above all, people are very open to the concept of a central authority providing them with the means of livelihood.

A secondary characteristic of human race, again shared by other species, is the need by some within the group to conquer or maintain control over their fellow man. Thanks to modern technology and weaponry, gone are the days when a megalomaniac could by sheer force of determination and arms conquer and impose his will on others.

The mid-19th century saw the Industrial Revolution and the rise in living standards and education for the populace in Europe. It was during this same period that the advent of socialist/Marxist theory occurred. Those that considered themselves superior to the masses, and in the past may have achieved ruling status through the power of intimidation over the illiterate and unwashed, now had to look to other means to achieve control of the levers of government.

The easiest course to assume this power was to promise, in return for the support of the people, that the state through a new ruling class would provide the citizenry cradle-to-grave economic security. Thus, a Faustian bargain encompassing the desire by the majority for ease of survival and others for the need to rule would be entered into. The populace, having committed itself to this compact, would expect never-ending freedom from adversity.

However, within this arrangement is the seed of its own destruction. For socialism to succeed, it must have an economic underpinning that can provide the foundation for massive social spending. The Soviet Union, as early as the 1920s and '30s, proved that complete state control of the means of production was a colossal failure, as it could not produce sufficient wealth to support the population.

Therefore, only the capitalist economic system, which is anathema to a powerful central government and its attendant oligarchy, can produce sufficient wealth to underwrite a social safety net for the general public and finance the agenda of the governing class.

Capitalism, reflective of that portion of mankind choosing to seek subsistence on their own terms, does by its nature celebrate the success of the individual, not the collective. Individuals, separately or together, driven by the motive of self-enrichment, produce goods or services desired by others. In the process, jobs and wealth are created, thus benefiting society as a whole.

A massive tension exists between those who adhere to central government control and swear fealty to socialist/Marxist philosophy and those who produce the wealth of a nation. The state inherently has more power than the individual, and once the radical element of the ruling class assumes power, government begins an inexorable process of injecting itself into the affairs of the individual and producer class (which is always a minority in any society).

Those who believe they have a manifest destiny to rule and are faithful to socialist tenets have a predisposition to control the populace and economic activity through laws, regulations, taxes, and intimidation. Despite the lesson of the Soviet Union and its state control of the economy, every new generation of adherents to socialist ideology believe they can make this fallacious philosophy work and maintain their arrangement with the citizenry.

But the reality is that they cannot, as the economic engine of capitalism will not continue to produce wealth if it is increasingly put under the thumb of bureaucrats and central planners inevitably attempting not only to institute state control of the economy, but to also to regulate the day-to-day lives of all citizens. The motivation of the producer class will be stifled and they will either drop out, join the dependent class or simply move on to other more hospitable countries.

Governments will, as history has shown (most recently in Europe), turn to excessive and unsustainable borrowings and inflation to finance their societal obligations. The contract between the statists and the citizens who were promised cradle-to-grave security cannot be maintained, as the economic underpinning of this arrangement will quickly erode.

Social and economic chaos resulting in dramatically lower standard of living must inevitably ensue, and in some cases, these conditions will lead to violence or revolution. No amount of promises, demonization of capitalism and seizure of the means of production, confiscatory taxes, or printing of money will reinstitute prosperity or security for the populace. This is the path on which President Obama and his fellow travelers have set the United States.

The founding fathers of the United States, one of the greatest confluences of brilliant minds in the history of mankind, understood the basic nature of human beings. They accordingly set forth a form of government and a written Constitution to greatly limit those who seek hegemony over the people, especially those seeking unlimited security from a central government. They recognized that only the individual free to pursue economic happiness would result in a society wherein all would benefit on a sustained basis.

The voters of the United States made a grave error in judgment in 2008; but unlike in many other countries in Europe and elsewhere, this mistake can be reversed, as the citizens of the United States do have the governmental structure to allow the country to step back from the precipice that this nation and many others are presently staring into. But will the general public understand that the socialist path the nation is on is preordained to fail? Will the citizenry change the government before it is too late?