You're right however, the 3 million figure seems very high.
Russia is a lost cause. Police/government can (and regularly do) take over any business, especially any small business.
Russia is so corrupt, only a full scale revolution will have a chance at fixing the country.
Everyone would be better off with Putin and the FSB crowd having their own licit and overt wealth, power, and perks, but then using their power to enforce fair laws on everyone else in exchange, vs. the system where they officially don't get as much benefit from their jobs, but extract personal benefit through corruption, and where others in society can use the state as a tool against other people.
(which is why it makes sense to pay police, judges, etc. quite well, and to give them high social standing, in exchange for competence, professionalism, and lack of corruption)
You could probably get that from the top echelon (I don't think Putin is at all corrupt, in the sense of taking bribes or anything like that, and would be surprised if his direct reports did), but it's hard to get that down to the lowest level of law enforcement.
With all that, I still don't think that a "revolution", which is to say a violent seizure of power, followed by the displacement of the current elite, is called for. It would result in years of bloody war. (Do you think the men who own these billion-dollar enterprises built on nothing other than government connections will just settle down and start raising turnips?) And the elite which it brings to the top might be no better. You are unlikely to end up with true rule of law.
The fact is that Russians are not without non-violent means of achieving change. The presidential elections were less corrupt than the preceding parliamentary elections, largely because far more citizens organized and became observers. Putin has had to allow popular elections of governors of Russia's regions, after years of personally appointing them, because of pressure brought about by the outrage over the elections. The idea of destroying everything and building a better version is tempting, but it has produced disaster again and again.
The sad thing is Russia has so much hydrocarbon fuel that they can probably go on like this for a long time. US and Europe having open immigration for talented Russians seems like the best we can do.
Haha. Here's a little about Putin: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8175406/... And here a little about his former minister of health: http://en.novayagazeta.ru/society/8682.html There's much more where that came from. You can pretty much pick any high-ranking official in Russia and start digging.
Thank communism, because corruption was the only way for business to do any kind of transaction
It's all just semantics really:
1) In the US, 'socialism' is a dirty word, but don't you dare mess with Social Security or Medicaid.
2) China's 'communist' regime is called the "People's Republic of China."
3) Burma is now called "Republic of the Union of Myanmar" after a military coup.
4) China and the former USSR are both referred to as "Communist," but the governmental structures seem vastly different.
5) The Khmer Rouge were known as the 'Communist Party of Kampuchea,' but referred to their country as 'Democratic Kampuchea' even though they implemented forced relocation and confiscation of private property.
But it's hard to miss the pattern - we have yet to see well run communist (not socialist) state. Every country that tried communism failed, and either are poor backwater countries (Kuba, North Korea), reverted to capitalism (Central and Eastern Europe), or kept communism on banners only, changing most of economy to capitalism under the hood (China).
We even have a few case studies, where one country is divided into 2 parts, and one half is made communist. Both in East/West Germany, and North/South Korea the differences are quite obvious.
Maybe it has sth to do with the system itself, after all?
I'd recommend this fascinating story from NPR's Planet Money: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/20/145360447/the-secr...
Background: a group of farmers in a small Chinese village secretly agreed to start keeping their surplus crops for themselves.
=============
Before the contract, the farmers would drag themselves out into the field only when the village whistle blew, marking the start of the work day. After the contract, the families went out before dawn.
"We all secretly competed," says Yen Jingchang. "Everyone wanted to produce more than the next person."
It was the same land, the same tools and the same people. Yet just by changing the economic rules — by saying, you get to keep some of what you grow — everything changed.
At the end of the season, they had an enormous harvest: more, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined.
I also think that in modern-day practice, the lines between what we term communist, capitalist, socialist, etc. are much blurrier than we tend to admit. The gp post demonstrates how so-called capitalist countries can enact strongly "socialist" or "communist" behaviors and polices, and vice versa--they just do so with different rationalizations and rhetoric. If you could somehow find an absolute measure for the success level of each country in the world and plot it according to the political system they supposedly espouse, I don't think you'd find nearly as much cohesion compared to if you plotted them according to measures like the strength of judicial and education traditions, beneficial geography, balanced ethnic makeup, and so on. These labels get applied after the fact, they aren't the structural drivers that make various governments and societies function the way they do.
Communism was introduced by force in many countries, in few cases it was introduced to half a country, and the half that stayed capitalist, benefited. You'd need to assume countries with high probability of dictatorship and corruption are more probable to be forced to become communist states by others, and that the difference between West and East Germany, North and South Korea regarding authoritarianism and corruption tendencies are bigger, than the same differences between for example East Germany and Russia, or West Germany and Spain.
I think from the data we have it's more probable, that communism just don't work.
> The gp post demonstrates how so-called capitalist countries can enact strongly "socialist" or "communist" behaviors and polices, and vice versa--they just do so with different rationalizations and rhetoric.
Communism is "from everybody according to their needs, to everybody according to their needs". So salary and employement doesn't depend on productivity, free market doesn't dictate prices and volumes of produced goods and services.
Public road system, army, health care system and free education are implementation details, compared to centrally planned economy.
> Perhaps the pattern arises because societies with pre-
> existing tendencies to authoritarianism and corruption
> are more likely to give rise to communist regimes
Why do you want to over-throw $despot? You must be
an enemy of 'the people.'Marx explicitly advocated a dictatorship. Dictatorship is what they got in the real world, too.
The same happened with recent elections to Duma (over 100% people voted in many regions of Russia).
So you're saying there's a violent class struggle between the populist system and the oppressed business class - and that the only way the downtrodden business owners can rise up and free themselves from their chains is through full scale revolution?
This sounds like it's straight out of Monty Python - but hey, good luck with that.
Aside from a few people who made a lot of money a couple decades ago from rapid deregulation, I don't think business owners in Russia are worried about taxes, reasonable regulation, etc. hurting their businesses -- they're worried about totally random extortion.
Very few businesses would rather operate in Equatorial Guinea or Somalia instead of (heavily regulated country of choice: depending on context, could be Germany, the US, Denmark, ...).
While I'm not supporting his assertion that this is the case, if such a thing were to happen anywhere, well...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_russia
Conditions will deteriorate until the point where there will be a class struggle though.
I do see why it may seem funny and Monty-Python-like, but it's extremely sad. It's a huge country ruled by thugs and talking heads, and they want more and more for themselves, while talking about helping the population.