Senate Russia: its impact on the world, and its future

So, with Romney basically calling for a return to the Cold War, and Putin re-solidifying control as well as blocking the West from intervening in Syria, it looks like Russia will be in the news for some time to come. Russia has also finally joined the World Trade Organization.

What ways could Russia be better integrated with Europe and the United States? How can we encourage friendlier relations?

On that note, the more things change, the more they stay the same:

I suspect another reason Cold War rhetoric works so well in Russia is there's a certain segment of the population whose fate has worsened in the past twenty years, and they're nostalgic.

That definitely seems to be the case. Quite recently Stalin scored high in a poll about the greatest Russians of all time. Many Russians feel that Stalin, like some stern but compassionate landlord, had to apply tough love to help Russia become a superpower--and this of course explains away all the purges, the murders, the paranoia. More importantly perhaps, they feel that Stalin was "one of the people": straightforward, incorruptible, humble.

Technically the Stalinist era was mostly pre-Cold War (which started 1945-1947). I'm not sure Russians are keen on a Cold War so much as being an economic power. The Russian Federation is still miles behind the USSR in those terms alone.

ie. the members of the Party that can't pillage the population anymore, or at least, as effectively as communism made it for them?

The USSR never was an economic power. If we look at the living conditions of the populace, besides party members (for which there were few), the average person had problems finding a pair of shoes to buy, a piece of meat a month was a splurge, and simply surviving. They built lots of military crap, and the populace starved. Surviving isn't thriving. Capitalism (for how little they have) has made Russia the best it was since the Bolshevik Rev.

What you are talking about is the distribution of wealth across the populace. It's measured in the GINI coefficient. The size of one's economy has nothing to do with how many people reap the benefits thereof. It's a simple measure of how much economic activity there is. By GDP, the Soviet Union had the second largest economy in the world throughout much of the 1970s, and were prominent even before. They certainly were an economic power.

LoL. Economic power? like I said, I don't care what you produce if it is useless. Build 500k banana statues, and they cost a lot, but they are still banana statues. It's like WWII prosperity...oops, didn't exist, rationed meat, rationed butter, a life of austerity.

What matters is the prosperity of the society + what they can sell afterwards.

Economic powers, don't starve.

1. Income inequality across the former Soviet Union-- Central Asia, Ukraine, etc. moreso than Russia-- is worse than it was during the Soviet period. More people were employed and the state guaranteed some amount of security. Once public services began to be cut (or privatized in extremely corrupt manners), more people experienced hardship. Whatever the faults with the Soviet system-- there were plenty-- I wouldn't dismiss the nostalgia for it as completely unwarranted.

2. Your "starve" remark is empty rhetoric. Past the 1950's, starvation was not really a problem compared to other developed countries. That was due to imports, but many capitalist economies are net importers of food. Millions of Americans go hungry, yet the United States is the largest producer of food in human history and could feed a good chunk of the world's population by itself.

Well they could purchase and eat the food, but they would have to offer something in trade (pay) for that food.

I see you've read the Wikipedia version of The Wealth of Nations.

Now that you mention it, I might have a really old copy of that in a box somewhere.

Add it to the "to read" list.

So basically, the only impact Russia has on the world is that it likes to veto stuff that America supports at the Security Council, and it sells lots of cheap weapons to Third World countries. Oh yeah, and we have to pay them in order to keep their nuclear arsenal secure.

/topic?

Do you think this is good or bad?

I'm not quite sure. Can I use a lifeline?

Oh for God's sake welcome to a book fundamental to understanding political economy. Better yet, welcome to the 21st century!

The Soviet Union produced one of the most useless economic systems ever in the history of mankind. They built crap cars, polluted the hell out of the environment, and a loaf of bread had an out of sight price.

They built a bunch of crap no one wanted and had extreme scarcity of things people did want.

Brilliant. That's what a 5 year plan gets you.

With the U.S. dollar losing its value at such a rapid pace, soon we'll be paying a lot for loaves of bread!

But for different reasons than the Soviets were. The Soviets sucked at allocating the right stuff people wanted and excelled at making surpluses of things not as much in demand.

But as long as the party wanted it.

Small communism can and does work(ask the Swiss communes) but not command collectivism like the Soviets.