[fsloth]

Most official output from russia needs a really heavy filtering. But to use the word 'bandit state' - I think it's a bit more complicated than that.

To me, a bandit state echoes a temporary institution that is held up mostly through the use and threat of direct violence. To my eyes elements of the current status harken to a russian tzardom hundreds of years back.

Strong autocratic leaders have always been a part of the political apparatus and the fatalistic psyche of the population drive individuls to yield, survive and pour their energies to something else than politics. It is also notable that russia is a typical country suffering from the curse of oil which itself is empirically a really hard thing to avoid or heal from which twists the dynamics even further.

I would suggest three brief bodies of text to explore the problem of russia to those who are not familiar with them:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

Kennan's long telegram: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/documents/episode-1/ke...

And thirdly, a bit longer work that reads like an autobiographic surrealist version of Catch-22, a description of the soviet system which trained most of those now in power (Suvorov:"Inside the soviet military"): http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/index.html