What Future for Russia? Liberal Economics and Illiberal Geography.

The whole history of our state has been a search for ways to settle and provide stimuli to settle Siberia. Thanks to the industrialization and mass settlement of Siberia … Russia's population is scattered across a vast land mass in cities and towns with few principal connections between them…. One-third of the population has the added burden of living and working in particularly inhospitable climatic conditions…. Costs of living are as much as four times as high as elsewhere in the Russian Federation, while costs of industrial production are sometimes higher. Introduction Having experienced a probably unprecedented economic decline throughout the 1990s, Russia finished the decade and entered the new millennium with unexpectedly good economic news. After the 70 percent drop in the ruble's value in August 1998, Russian domestic production picked up. The multiplication of world oil prices since then – between January 1999 and summer 2000, the price of oil increased from $9 to $35 per barrel, while in early 2003, on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the price approached $40) – has filled Russian state coffers to an unanticipated extent, enabling the state to finance the war in Chechnya and still meets its external debt-servicing obligations as well as wages and pension arrears at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]