
(Leon Aron, resident scholar at AEI.)
EXTRACT: Putin’s statist ideology has also been felt by the main foreign investors in Russia’s oil sector. This past fall, the Kremlin halted or threatened to halt operations by Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, France’s Total, and the Russian-British TNK-BP. Notwithstanding official explanations for this move–from environmental violations to cost overruns to disappointing output–it is an open secret in Moscow that the government’s prime motive is to pressure the companies into either surrendering a share of production to the state or handing back their development licenses.
By Leon Aron
Publication Date: November 29, 2006
Leon Aron is a resident scholar at AEI.
“Is Russia Going Backward?” That was the question posed by the title of an article that I completed in late August 2004 and published in the October 2004 Commentary. My qualified answer was no. Having supported Russia’s democratic, free-market revolution at every critical juncture during more than a decade of upheaval–from the election of Boris Yeltsin as president of what was still Soviet Russia in June 1991 and the rejection of the hard-line coup two months later, to the referendum in March 1993, Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996, and the toppling of the Communist-led plurality in the Duma in 1999–the Russian people, I argued, were not turning their backs on the reforms they had stoically sustained. They were simply ready at last for the new Russian state to be strong enough to help them. read more
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