Replies

I very much appreciate your thoughtful analisys but it lacks insight into a nature of Russian political processes and related discussions. Putin is actually in a long time dispute with the left and he sounds pretty much libertarian while at it.
Russia for example pursues a very conservative fiscal policy and his reforms from the very start were about to reduce big government. There was legal reform which brought courts to pretty much Western standards and he also was behind a 13% flat income tax.
That oil economy is not really true as well. The share of mineral extraction in total Russian economy is just marginally above that of US. It is true that the energy business was historically taxed excessively in Russia which made it the biggest contributor to the federal budget. It is actually changing now.

I'm glad to hear a correction to my information.

A quick Google reveals that Russia's petroleum amounts to about 30% of GNP and mining another 11%. I don't know how much more is natural gas?

For the USA petroleum is about 17% and mining about 15%.

Here is an old article (looks like 2014) that suggests:

It is hard to put a number on this, but by various estimates it has ranged between 10 and 13 percent of GDP in recent years. So our overall figure is now up to 67—70 percen

What do you make of this analysis?

Would you not say that Russia's "very conservative fiscal policy" is very much dictated by the price of oil? No oil revenue no possibility to spend. Nevertheless, he has increased the military-hardly a libertarian bent.

I hope you are right about the courts, I've never heard of such a thing I am dependent on headlines which show the jailing of some oligarchs and the murder of others as well as reporters, and so forth.

Do we know whether his flat income tax of 13% is a product of libertarian philosophy or is it simply a way of keeping a lot of money in the pockets of his apparatchiks and crony oligarchs?

Finally, my impression of Putin is very much conditioned by his behavior in Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine, Syria and Iran. Again, I do not see this in libertarian terms but as historically consistent with Russian history.

Your thoughts? I think you are probably much more informed than I am so I would really like to know your thoughts.