Except... he did.

You certainly won't throw in few extra words for me, are you? Fine then...

No other words to really put in.

He uses his sources critically, and puts forth arguements you don't have counter arguements for except.  "This guy is stupid." and a short flirtation at "People from western europe can't understand Russia." that you seemed to back off of.

How many more words could I really add?

A quote where he uses his sources critically might help.

Don't put words into my mouth.

A) See... the whole article?  it's sitting right there and it's not long and basically every paragraph.  He uses his sources

B) "Sources, Kaz, sources. Mention of Gaidar, Transparency International, Freedom House, Shleifer are worth a lot of ":D" as well. Bibliography of research defines it well enough to make a judgement if said research is a worthy material or not, any academic or school teacher will tell you that."

and

"(which is really typical middle-class European political analytic or enthusiast opinion"

come to mind.  You keep broaching these points then backing off them.

Saying Transparency International is a lot of :D then you backed off that you were critisizing it as a source.  Which is it?

1) Er, probably our defenitions of "critically" differs from each other. I read it twice and yet wasn't able to see anything you might have considered "critical use of the sources".

2) Well, an idiot is an idiot regardless of his nationality and discussed subject, mantras differ from one information field (or culture) to another and from subject to subject, but they're still mantras (that's). What I'm trying to say that he's regular writing monkey on political and economic matters, so immensely mainstream it's boring (the reason why I dug into non-mainstream media often, like PCR, Borde, Escobar etc.). While reading I knew exactly what he's going to say and more importantly why, maybe I'm taking too much upon myslef, but it seems I understand things he doesn't (provided he's honest in his opinion, eventually I might elaborate this in details, running through his article with comments). Nothing is interesting or unexpected about him, not sure what exactly attracts your attention to Aslund. Take Glucksmann for example, I mean he's a complete and utter idiot, but at least he is fun :D or used to be... he's getting old, which certainly affects his writing style.

1) To critically use sources means to refrence them and then use them to form your own opinions.

2) Nothing in particular does attract my attention to him, other then the fact that said specific article gives a pretty baseline example of the russian economy.  Most of the actual opinions are relativly pointless over if the russian government will change or not.

The point is, that Russia's economy was built on the reforms of the past, combine with a strong commodities market.  Putin didn't restore a semblence of the economy so much as he did coast to it as reforms completed.

It's like having two apartment managers, one of them gets 85% through building a pool, then the new guy comes in, and when it finishes you thank him for creating the pool, unlike the asshole before him.

It's pretty simply really.  Putin finished earlier agreed on reforms, the economy got better.  He reversed course, and only got buoyed by rising energy costs.

Kaz, I got the idea, you don't need to repeat it multiple times for me. Aslund’s article despite the pretence of being strictly economical is all about politics excluding first few paragraphs. It’s typical and predictable, since Aslund much like our gaming journalists live in their own intellectual and informational ghettos, rarely taking a peek on outside world. There're really not much factual economical information that could be reviewed or critisized, so I critisize what's left.

And, yes, of course, it's build on the reforms of the past, tell me, which economy is built on the reforms of the future? :D It doesn't mean that reforms of the past aren't dead-end with expected and catastrophic results.  Putin achievements are in different field. As I said, it's political article and should be viewed as such, because Putin's decisions that are in the article again are political decisions, which though affects economy. These descisions are mostly last moment reaction to a no-win situation of the late 1990s - early 2000s, so he rightfully might claim the economical results of the last decade regardless of how they might be perceived. And the idea of him getting lucky to get in the office when the "transformation" was over is, pardon me, but a rather bad excuse.

Will publish couple of the reviewes and thoughts of Aslund's sources I was able to find among my old posts, translated and updated for Aslund article. Might come in handy.

Transparency International

Aslund more than 30 times mentioned corruption in one way or another in his rather short article, which certainly makes me believe it’s his single strongest point. The main source behind his assumptions in that regard is Transparency International (TI) report:

Third, it has stayed equally corrupt according to the measurements by… Transparency International (2007)…

According to Transparency International (2007), the only country that is both richer and more corrupt than Russia is Equatorial Guinea. That is hardly a standard worthy of a great, historic European nation.

Indeed, to impede Russia's corruption requires democratization, which has reduced corruption in Ukraine (Transparency International 2007) [the Ukraine is self-sufficient meme though is not persistent here, still worth a word or two, see below – mai].

What we’re trying to actually measure here? The thing is openly admitted by TI (hence the name “corruption perception index”, CPI), though never mentioned nor by Aslund, nor by most other publications, which is already deluding by itself.

Basically the work is a set of numbers on the scale from 1 (most corrupt) to 10 (least corrupt), assigned to each country. The numbers do not represent any facts or complex calculations from factual data, nor anything like that, what Aslund thinks the report is measuring or what the creators seem to indirectly imply. The numbers are derived from a number of polls, in which people are being asked their personal subjective opinion on how they think their country is corrupt, and that’s the only and definitive “measure” of corruption as per Aslund and most other publications on the matter. Whoever uses TI report as a basis of his or her argumentation constantly omits the word “perception”, yet as much consistently writes about corruption itself, not about its perception. Needless to say how far could be social perception from facts (read more on that in Kara-Murza’s “Mind Manipulation”, the definitive work on infowar known under the name glasnost and sociopsychology in general).

But could it has been used as scientific sociological work at the very least? What differs good scientific work from poorly made one is consistent methodology. The problem here is TI do not have any sort of methodology, since they don’t even do the polls by themselves. TI uses different sources such as Freedom House (lol), Global Insight, Institute for Management Development (IMD), World Economic Forum (WEF) etc., not for every each of them I was even able to find any sort of methodology or respondent group review, and what’s been found is rather diverse.

Moreover TI’s logic behind the use of said sources from country to country and one report to another is incomprehensible (say, IMD and WEF used twice in the same report for no apparent reason). They often use different set of sources for different countries and reports, cherry-pick piece of data, while ignoring the rest, and not a word of argumentation why is this, why is that. So much for consistency, lol.

Previously TI used to publish not an average number as of today but a range, where Russia ranged from 0.3 to 5. Obviously TI never thought of using median, so they stick with an average between these two. Why? God knows.

Among mentioned sources, there’s the one, which worth few words as well, it’s Freedom House (FH). It’s been used by Aslund as well:

Second, the country has moved from being partially democratic to authoritarian rule by Freedom House (2007) standards.

Only eight countries in the world are richer than Russia and still not democratic, namely Singapore and seven small oil states (World Bank 2007; Freedom House 2007).

FH is known by funny rating “Freedom in the World” (try to think of methodology for THAT, lol), which referred in Aslund’s work btw. I’m not going to waste time stating the obvious, FH has been criticized by numerous people besides me for having ties to the government despite being an NGO, for being retarded and unscientific etc.

The other interesting point here is what exactly FH knows about corruption around the globe? The “methodology” behind this is as follows. They’ve got an “expert” who judge the situation by the information from “international competent organizations”, among which you may find… TI. So yeah, a circular reference. Watch the hands! TI thinks the corruption is high or low, because FH thinks so, and FH thinks so because TI thinks so. Actually from my experience circular references happen all the time, these kind of NGOs constantly use each other in the manner “I think so because they think so”, – which could be ok if “they” wouldn’t have the same argumentation for their reports of the same year on the same matter, lol.

Funnily enough, but these polls as a measure for reality method is broken from the beginning, since it’s a circular reference by itself. TI or whoever asks people how corrupt you think your country is, people like businessmen etc. answer basing their knowledge on tabloids like Aslund, tabloids publish TI reports. The circle closed up.

Itogi

I understand why Itogi had short-living but spread popularity at western Russian-centric political analytics, it fits the views and was readily accepted. But why do I exactly should pay attention to Aslund's rant? It’s not like I know nothing about Itogi's author, Nemtsov?

Liberal leader Boris Nemtsov (2007) commented upon the renationalization: It is offensive that under Putin the state has taken on the role of plunderer and racketeer with an appetite that grows with each successive conquest.

What remains of Putin's economic legacy is only that he was lucky to reap the benefits of the arduous but productive reforms his predecessor instigated in the 1990s (Milov and Nemtsov 2008).

Claims that Putin and his close friends have stolen billions of dollars from the state or private businessmen abound, but so far Putin has never reacted, which is evidence that he approves of such activities (Milov and Nemtsov 2008).

Let’s closer look at the person in question. Boris Nemtsov – Nizhniy Novgorod ex-governor (1995-97), longtime leader of SPS party, today one of the opposing leaders. At the time of his governorship he didn’t have any problems with fraud elections campaigns like Yeltsin’s in 1996, when everything was made in order to do not allow communist to win presidential campaign, but today he’s hypocritically building much of his rhetoric on supposedly “not fair” elections (be it parliament or presidential) and accusing everyone else in corruption (oh, the irony).

There’s more than enough compromising material on Nemtsov, e.g.:

-          http://lifenews.ru/news/77529 (wide knowledge of Russian profanities is needed to understand this properly). He got butthurt over “bloody regime” dared to publish his private talks, where he slings mud at his closest allies in “opposition”, showing their undercover catfights in all their glory. Not a fake, already confirmed btw.

-          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBTUbsvKEfg (the credibility of the recording is under question, though it's HIS voice, but knowing Nemtsov I readily believe). Here he's during his election campaign for Sochi's mayor, trying to sell Olympics to Koreans. Remember, the man accusing Putin of corruption or whatever ridiculous assumptions he made in Itogi about penthouses Putin owns, lol.

Aslund certainly seem to contrast “liberal” leaders with pro-Putin party accusing the latter of corruption etc. (at the same time making typical mistake, since here being “liberal” is a drastic difference of being liberal wherever else, if anything Putin is somewhat liberal according to classic definition). Yet he doesn’t see the irony of the situation nor from facts of Nemtsov’s past (see above), nor more importantly from the fact that Nemtsov is a flesh of the flesh of the system created after dissolution of the Soviet Union that only favors corruption (since it was the whole point of getting rid of SU by certain part of nomenklatura, i.e. in order to monetize their privileges Soviet system should be gone). The reason behind this is Aslund simply doesn’t know the history, or rather doesn’t understand the historical process behind all factual data he likely aware of after all.

This whole situation known under the metaphor “bees against the honey”.

But let’s put all this kompromat aside, to more important things, i.e. who is Mr. Nemtsov? Not so long time ago Illarionov perfectly described current Russian politikum in his what he called “syslibs” (system liberals) speech. Being syslib himself he knows what he's talking about. Long story short.

Syslibs are last survivors of “The Family” or rather it's last derivative, since strictly speaking only high level oligarchat belongs to “Yeltsin Family” (tight ties with the biz, formal influence over bureaucracy) – it's tier 1.  The prime example is Berezovsky, who has a huge grudge over Putin, whom he created and who got rid of him eventually along with entire tier 1 (hence nationalization and Yukos case as a form of demonstrational trial, again the reasons behind all these are strictly political, Aslund doesn’t understand that). Tier 2 – “Moskowia” (big biz with close connections to the bureaucracy), Luzkhov-Baturina are prime examples, ex-mayor of Moscow, was kicked out of the office in 2010, replaced with functionary Sobyanin. And finally syslibs – tier 3  (complete bureaucrats, servants of tier 1 and 2). The prime example is Minister Kudrin (old pro-Gaidar team, the latter is used as a source by Aslund btw), yet another one who was kicked out of the office recently.

Who's Nemtsov? A typical tier 3. What's going right now? The final battle between pro-Putin party and Family remnants, tier 3. Putin is winning.

You can see the internal conflict showing up on the surface. If previously the TV was practically occupied by pro-liberal party forcing appropriate ideology clichés with little difference from glasnost times, since 2008 it has started to change slowly. In the late 2011 the new phase of media wars has begun and media bigwigs have started to take sides.

Let’s get back to aforementioned Nemtsov kompormat, he finds “Kremlin hand” in these publications. How valid his accusations are? Well, Gabrelyanov, the head of few yellow press outlets, including the LifeNews, which published most of the leaks, has connections to Izvestia, where he became a head of boards of directors in 2011. Izvestia is part of NMG (which includes 1st Channel, 5th Channel and REN-TV among others), NMG means Kovalchuk, Kovalchuk means Putin (lol, we’re getting close to “Ozero” conspiracy theory, but regardless of any theories, it’s fact that Kovalchuk and Putin are buddies). But if it's Putin, it doesn't mean that these outlets are strictly pro-Putin, since we’re talking about internal conflict and Putin doesn’t control everything. It's much more complicated.

For example, REN-TV was considered strongly anti-Putin, Echo of Moscow (belongs to GPM = governmentally funded) is outrageously and blindly anti-Putin, anti-governmental and anti-Russian in general. Well, at least before recent visit of editor-in-chief, Venediktov, to Kremlin, so he'd probably to reconsider his position eventually, lol. He receives his salary mainly from the budget after all. NTV, yet another GPM child, is known for its complex relationships with high authorities even after “Gusinsky case”, mostly because of its current CEO Kulistikov (ex-correspondent of Radio Liberty, which pretty much telling by itself, lol), yet it’s gone all loyal to Putin recently, while other moderate their rhetoric.

Other outlets like RBK (belongs to Prokhorov) or channel Dozhd (belongs to nobody Vinokurov, close buddy of recently kicked out of office Minister Kudrin) are on opposing side. And mind you, if you think that palm trees in Moscow in mid-December on Fox News is too much, you've never ever experienced an alternate reality of Dozhd. The lack of responsibility for whatever the bollocks they say is stunning.

So "Kremlin hand" is an outdated meme, Kremlin is not united, there're different conflicting parties, which is very typical for entire world today.

What is the place of Nemtsov and Itogi in all that mess? Not surprisingly at all, the corruption was used as prime weapon in media wars against UR party first (parliament elections) and Putin eventually (presidential elections). So practically the anti-corruptionists meme has transformed into anti-Putin in a matter of few weeks (who’d have thought, lol?).

Obviously, the story isn’t full without foreign players part, and they gone all berserk trying to force color revolution scenario. The funds were coming from different sources that could be traced down to two primary ones: US Department of State and London (aka Berezovsky) party (remember? tier 1). It’d be too tiresome to list all NGOs that were involved, but Nemtsov is affiliated in one way or another with half of them. DoS line is studied rather well up to exact figurants and paychecks for viral marketeers, sponsored publications, rallies etc., so do your research.

As for the Berezovsky part. Well, he currently resides in London together with his buddie, ex-terrorist, present prisoner of conscience, Akhmed Zakaev (which is not surprising too, since Berezovsky was the main banker of North Caucasian terrorism), currently through Belkovsky subsidizes “anti-corruptionist” Navalniy, pro-liberal opposing Strategy-31 movement and ultra-nationalists DPNI – wide varieties of completely incompatible ideologies. Why? As long as it's anti-Putin, it's ok, lol.

The problem though is a requirement for any color revolution is not a controllable crowd, but a controllable authorities, i.e. authorities should surrender under the pressure from both internal (crowd) and external (diplomatic and military). There’re more than enough examples of color revolutions in Eastern Europe in 2000s, in Georgia, and nowadays in Near East (Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, Syria etc.). It didn’t work out here due to the lack of critical mass of controllable authorities. The drama was finished by visit of Kissinger, he came to negotiate, that’s his role.

With all that’s been said let’s get back to 2008, when the drama only entered its final phase, Nemtsov published his Itogi and Medvedev, on whom were placed hopes of internal and external opposing forces at the time, just won presidential campaign. Since Aslund doesn't understand the f**k out what's written above, so he interprets Itogi in his own way, i.e. Putin just got there in 2000, when “the successful transformation” was over. Since Nemtsov is not a complete dumbf**k like Aslund, he perfectly understands the situation, but what he's really trying to say in Itogi?

He’s reacting on growing popularity of Putin, realizing that syslibs are losing their grip fast. So he didn’t think of anything better but 1) star Perestroika-2 campaign in informational field with all the same clichés, 2) to cry out for help from outside – being a relatively small figure, he’s serving here merely as a delegate of a social and political group. Despite its limited popularity outside Russia, Itogi is even little known in Russia. The reason for this is from the beginning Itogi was aimed at another audience, at people like Aslund. The message here is to make connection between syslibs and external forces that willing to receive certain geschaft from potential game-changing situation. And Aslund willingly or unwillingly, purposely or unpurposely is providing such help on informational, propagandistic field. That’s what writing monkeys do :D

At the end of the day what we’re having here is crash of liberal ideology with completely f**ked up huge cart blanche Russian “liberals” used to have.  Looking back, it was inevitable.