Russia – Page 8 – artdiamondblog.com

An “Entrepreneur’s Visa” to Let the Future Sergey Brin In

(p. A19) . . . , there is one way to create a lot more jobs without spending federal money. Let’s import them. More precisely, let’s import the people who create them: entrepreneurs.

A bipartisan bill that would begin to do just that was introduced on Feb. 24 by Sens. John Kerry (D., Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R., Ind.). Their “Startup Visa Act” would create a new, two-year visa for immigrant entrepreneurs whose firms attract at least $250,000 in financing from American angel investors or venture capital firms.
. . .
Here’s a way to improve on the Kerry-Lugar plan. Create a true “job creator’s visa,” one tied directly and only to job creation by new immigrant entrepreneurs. The visa could be a temporary one for immigrants already here on another visa who establish a business. It could then be extended if the firm hires at least one American non-family resident. The visa should become permanent once the enterprise crosses a certain job threshold (such as five or 10 workers). But it would not be tied to financing.
. . .
Google was founded by Sergey Brin, a Russian immigrant, and American Larry Page by borrowing funds from their own credit cards. Why on earth would we want to create an entrepreneurs’ visa that couldn’t let in the future Sergey Brin?

For the full commentary, see:
ROBERT E. LITAN. “Visas for the Next Sergey Brin; To create more jobs, let’s import more employers.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., MARCH 8, 2010): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated MARCH 7, 2010.)

“A Regime that Survived through Myth and Fear”

(p. 4) It’s an old Soviet joke.

Three Russians are in the gulag. The first one says, “What are you in for?”
The second one replies, “I called Zbarsky a revolutionary.”
“That’s funny,” the first one says. “I called Zbarsky a counterrevolutionary.”
“That’s funny,” the third one says. “I’m Zbarsky.”
Vern Thiessen’s new play, “Lenin’s Embalmers,” which starts on Wednesday at the Ensemble Studio Theater in Clinton, opens with the ghost of Lenin telling this joke as a parable of the mordant doom pervading the Communist state he created.
In real life the joke wasn’t specifically about Zbarsky. You could insert any of Stalin’s thousands of lackeys turned victims. Certainly Zbarsky would do. Boris Zbarsky was a real person, one of the two biochemists who, after Lenin died in 1924, were ordered by the Kremlin to devise a way of preserving his body forever.
He and his colleague, Vladimir Vorobiev — the play’s main characters — succeeded spectacularly, won fortune and power, then fell from grace into the terror, like many others who served a regime that survived through myth and fear.
. . .
The new work, written as a stylized dark comedy, takes only a few liberties with history. It has Zbarsky and Vorobiev arrested after they’re tricked into betraying each other. In fact Mr. Vorobiev died in a hospital, under mysterious circumstances, in 1937. Mr. Zbarsky was arrested in 1952; he was freed two years later, after Stalin’s death, and died of a seizure soon after. Still, betrayals and trumped-up confessions were common in the era.

For the full review, see:
FRED KAPLAN. “He’s Had Work: Preserving the Face of a Revolution.” The New York Times, Arts&Leisure Section (Sun., February 28, 2010): 4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated February 23 (sic), 2010.)

Global Warming Creates Benefit of Arctic Shipping Shortcut

“A German ship, following a Russian icebreaker, is about to complete a shipment from Asia to Europe via Arctic waters.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) MOSCOW — For hundreds of years, mariners have dreamed of an Arctic shortcut that would allow them to speed trade between Asia and the West. Two German ships are poised to complete that transit for the first time, aided by the retreat of Arctic ice that scientists have linked to global warming.

The ships started their voyage in South Korea in late July and will begin the last leg of the trip this week, leaving a Siberian port for Rotterdam in the Netherlands carrying 3,500 tons of construction materials.
Russian ships have long moved goods along the country’s sprawling Arctic coastline. And two tankers, one Finnish and the other Latvian, hauled fuel between Russian ports using the route, which is variously called the Northern Sea Route or the Northeast Passage.
But the Russians hope that the transit of the German ships will inaugurate the passage as a reliable shipping route, and that the combination of the melting ice and the economic benefits of the shortcut — it is thousands of miles shorter than various southerly routes — will eventually make the Arctic passage a summer competitor with the Suez Canal.
“It is global warming that enables us to think about using that route,” Verena Beckhusen, a spokeswoman for the shipping company, the Beluga Group of Bremen, Germany, said in a telephone interview.

For the full story, see:

ANDREW E. KRAMER and ANDREW C. REVKIN. “Arctic Shortcut Beckons Shippers as Ice Thaws.” The New York Times (Fri., September 10, 2009): A1 & A3.

“A Shortcut Across the Top of the World.” Source of caption and map: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

“Atlas Shrugged is a Celebration of the Entrepreneur”

“The art for a 1999 postage stamp.” Source of image: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. W11) Many of us who know Rand’s work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that “Atlas Shrugged” parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.
Rand, who had come to America from Soviet Russia with striking insights into totalitarianism and the destructiveness of socialism, was already a celebrity. The left, naturally, hated her. But as recently as 1991, a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club found that readers rated “Atlas” as the second-most influential book in their lives, behind only the Bible.
For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises — that in most cases they themselves created — by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.
. . .
Ultimately, “Atlas Shrugged” is a celebration of the entrepreneur, the risk taker and the cultivator of wealth through human intellect. Critics dismissed the novel as simple-minded, and even some of Rand’s political admirers complained that she lacked compassion. Yet one pertinent warning resounds throughout the book: When profits and wealth and creativity are denigrated in society, they start to disappear — leaving everyone the poorer.

For the full commentary, see:
STEPHEN MOORE. “DE GUSTIBUS; ‘Atlas Shrugged’: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years.” Wall Street Journal (Fri., JANUARY 9, 2009): W11.
(Note: ellipses added.)

“The Authorities Were Shocked” at Private Airport Success

“Investors renovated a terminal at Domodedovo and oversaw construction of a train line to Moscow.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B9) MOSCOW — A heated battle for passengers between the Russian capital’s main airports offers an unlikely model of competition for the aviation industry.

In most cities, airports are monopolies. Even in cities that have more than one, including New York, Paris and Tokyo, airports are usually owned by the same operator. That means airlines can rarely make the kind of choices passengers take for granted, such as choosing an airport for its efficiency, shopping or lounges.
Not so in Moscow, where two international airports, Domodedovo and Sheremetyevo, owned by rival organizations, battle for business. The result is lower fees, better service and fast-improving facilities all around.
Domodedovo Airport, for example, recently convinced several top airlines to make it their Russian base, thanks to a major modernization that added more than 20 new restaurants, jewelry boutiques and a shop where passengers can rent DVDs to watch in booths.
Sheremetyevo Airport responded by building a fast rail link to Moscow, complete with a Starbucks at the airport station.
Moscow’s airport rivalry highlights a paradox of the global aviation industry: Airlines compete fiercely with each other for customers, but they face many monopolist suppliers, such as air-traffic control systems, fuel distributors and airports. Resulting costs and poor services get passed on to travelers.
. . .
During Russia’s privatization drive of the 1990s, local investors bought Domodedovo, which was previously Moscow’s airport serving Soviet Central Asia. The investors, grouped into an upstart charter-airline operator, East Line Group, renovated a terminal at Domodedovo and oversaw construction of a train line to Moscow.
East Line charged airlines landing and operating fees that undercut Sheremetyevo by around 30%. For passengers, Domodedovo’s rail link guaranteed a 40-minute trip to downtown Moscow. Private Russian carriers, largely frozen out of Aeroflot’s base at Sheremetyevo, expanded quickly at the spacious Domodedovo.
East Line’s big break came in 2003, when British Airways announced it would switch from Sheremetyevo to Domodedovo.
“The authorities were shocked that a major airline would leave the government airport,” recalls Daniel Burkard, BA’s former country manager for Russia.

For the full story, see:
DANIEL MICHAELS. “Moscow Points the Way With Airport Competition; While Most Nations Sport Monopolies, Rivalry Between Two Russian Gateways Ushers in Improvements for Carriers, Travelers.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., DECEMBER 1, 2008): B9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

Boris Yeltsin’s “Laissez-Faire Populism”

Source of book image: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. E1) Yeltsin’s grievance against the Communists began before he was born, in an all-too-common history of family heartbreak that Mr. Colton pieces together with a good deal of original reporting. The Yeltsins were dispossessed for the bourgeois crime of having built a farm, mill and blacksmithing business. Yeltsin’s grandfather died a broken man. His father was charged with the catch-all crime of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” for grousing at his job on a construction site, and sent to a forced-labor camp for three years.

When Yeltsin joined the Communist Party, it was not out of devotion to the professed ideals but because a party card was a requirement for promotion to chief engineer in the construction industry. And when he moved into the hierarchy, he was already a man who chafed at party orthodoxy. No radical, he “nibbled at the edges of what was admissible,” Mr. Colton writes, pushing for market prices in the local farm bazaars, encouraging entrepreneurial initiative in the workplace, complaining that the top-down system smothered self-reliance.

For the full review, see:
BILL KELLER. “Books of The Times; The Making of Yeltsin, His Boldness and Flaws.” The New York Times (Weds., May 7, 2008): E1.

(p. 222) For Yeltsin’s contemporaries, deliverance from Marxist scripture and Soviet srtuctures took many forms. For him, it was an ease with the market and recoil against the overbearing state. Mikhail Fridman, who became one of Russia’s first billionaires as a banker and oilman, makes the point well:

Yeltsin as an individual who had inner freedom . . . instinctively moved toward the market as the end. That is because . . . as my namesake Milton Friedman says, “Capitalism is freedom.” . . . [Yeltsin thought] it was necessary to give people freedom and they would make out well. How exactly to do that he did not know. [But he did know] that it was necessary to free people from control: We were squeezing them dry. He thought that if we let them go they could move heaven and earth. . . . This is the level on which he thought about it. . . . He took a dim view of all these [Soviet] controls. [He felt that] the controllers had long since believed in nothing.

. . .
(p. 525) Stewart, working as a photojournalist, taped Yeltsin’s remarks on August 24, 1990, in Dolinsk. She calls them “laissez-faire populism.”

Source:
Colton, Timothy J. Yeltsin: A Life. New York: Basic Books, 2008.
(Note: ellipses and bracked words in Fridman (sic) quote were made by Colton; other ellipses were added by me.)
(Note: the quote from p. 525 is from endnote number 38.)

McCraw on Communist Versus Capitalist Imperialism

From McCraw’s summary of an article entitled “The Function of Entrepreneurs and the Interest of the Worker” that Schumpeter published in 1927 in a labor magazine :

(p. 384) By the end of the war, every nation in Eastern Europe and most in Central Europe had fallen under the control of the Soviets. They stripped industrial machinery, works of art, gold, and other movable assets from many of those countries and shipped them all to Russia. The total amount stolen equaled in value the aid to Western Europe under the American-sponsored Marshall Plan, the largest foreign aid program in history.

Source:
McCraw, Thomas K. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007.

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Hero of Freedom, RIP

I heard last night that Aleksander Solzhenitsyn had died late that on that day, August 3, 2008.
Like all of us, he had his flaws. But he had strong moral courage in standing up against the enslavement of the masses by the communist tyranny of the USSR. For that he paid a huge price, partly in the form of the years of forced labor in the prison camps that he carefully documented in his massive The Gulag Archipelago. (I must admit that I never read The Gulag, although I believe my father, to his credit, read every page.)
I remember my mentor Ben Rogge reading The First Circle and highly recommending it to us. The book’s title is based on Dante’s Inferno which describes the nine circles of hell, where each successive circle assigns increasingly horrendous eternal punishments, for those guilty of increasingly terrible sins. In the first circle, good people born before Jesus, are allowed to pursue their interests much as they had on earth. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, for instance, engage in eternal dialogue.
In Solzhenitsyn’s version, Stalin allows a group of scientists to have better living conditions, and somewhat more freedom than ordinary Soviet citizens, so long as the scientists make progress on projects that enable Stalin to extend his power.
One of the revelations in the book is that those who imposed the tyranny, had motives that were not always evil. One bureaucratic candidate for villainy, for instance, did bad things, in order to protect his family. At the top there is Stalin, but he is portrayed as insane.
The point is one that Rogge often made—people are pretty much the same everywhere. What mainly explains the differences in different societies are different institutions that provide differing incentives and constraints.
It is a fitting tribute to Solzhenitsyn that the first unabridged English translation of The First Circle will soon be published.
I salute Solzhenitsyn for his insights, and even more, for his courage at standing up against an evil system.

Putin’s Russia Portrays Stalin, Not as Monster, But as Strong Ruler

(p. 5) STALIN has undergone a number of transformations of his historical image in Russia, interpretations that say as much about the country’s current leaders as about the dictator himself.

In the West, Stalin is remembered for the numbers of his victims, about 20 million, largely his own citizens, executed or allowed to die in famines or the gulag. They included a generation of peasant farmers in Ukraine, former Bolsheviks and other political figures who were purged in the show trials of the 1930s, Polish officers executed at Katyn Forest, and Russians who died in the slave labor economy. Stalin’s crimes have been tied to his personality, cruelty and paranoia as well as to the circumstances of Russian and Soviet history.

While not denying that Stalin committed the crimes, a new study guide in Russia for high school teachers views his cruelty through a particular, if familiar, lens. It portrays Stalin not as an extraordinary monster who came to power because of the unique evil of Communism, but as a strong ruler in a long line of autocrats going back to the czars. Russian history, in this view, at times demands tyranny to build a great nation.

The text reinforces this idea by comparing Stalin to Bismarck, who united Germany, and comparing Russia in the 1930s under the threat of Nazism to the United States after 9/11 in attitudes toward liberties.

The history guide — titled “A Modern History of Russia: 1945-2006” — was presented at a conference for high school teachers where President Vladimir V. Putin spoke; the author, Aleksandr Filippov, is a deputy director of a Kremlin-connected think tank.

For the full commentary, see:

ANDREW E. KRAMER. "WORD FOR WORD | NEW RUSSIAN HISTORY; Yes, a Lot of People Died, but …" The New York Times , Week in Review section (Sun., August 12, 2007): 5.

(Note: ellipsis in title in original.)

Reducing Nickel Pollution is an Entrepreneurial “Business Opportunity” in Russia

Vladimir Stratyev in front of a lake containing nickel dust from the nickel factory in the background. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A4) NORILSK, Russia — A former Siberian gulag with a population of about 210,000, this decrepit city has some of the worst air quality in the world. It is surrounded by dead trees, as far as the eye can see, poisoned by acid rain.

But to Vladimir M. Stratyev, the eye-stinging haze is an unalloyed blessing, for Mr. Stratyev is, in effect, a miner of air pollution. For him the smog of Norilsk is a mother lode.

The smelters here produce one-fifth of all the world’s nickel, a key alloy of stainless steel, while emitting 1.9 million tons of sulfur dioxide a year, more than the entire country of France. They also spew out 10,800 tons of heavy metal particulates.

. . .

Spotting a business opportunity, factory officials have brought in a contractor, Poligon, to extract the metals from one of these deposits, known euphemistically as “technogenic sources of ore.”

Mr. Stratyev, the supervisor of a mining crew, uses a dredge and bulldozer to scoop up the black sludge, rich in nickel that once fell from the sky. He gathers it in mighty piles from a large pond that lies directly downwind from the smelters and returns it to the factory from which it came.

“They should put a monument up to us,” Mr. Stratyev said, standing in front of the dredge he just used to mine air pollution from the bottom of a pond. “We’re solving an ecological problem.”

. . .

The pollution mining began five years ago, according to Aleksandr I. Korolev, a deputy chief engineer at the factory. “It’s a year-round operation,” Mr. Korolev said of the work, which has accelerated recently because of high metals prices. “The pond does not freeze,” he said, because of the chemicals and the inflow of warm effluent from the factory.

For the full story, see:

ANDREW E. KRAMER. "NORILSK JOURNAL; For One Business, Polluted Clouds Have Silvery Linings." The New York Times (Thurs., July 12, 2007): A4.

Source of map: online version of the NYT article cited above.

Strong Global Support for Free Markets

Source of table: "World Publics Welcome Global Trade — But Not Immigration." Pew Global Attitudes Project, a project of the PewResearchCenter. Released: 10.04.07 dowloaded from: http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=258

(p. A10) WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 — Buoyed and battered by globalization, people around the world strongly view international trade as a good thing but harbor growing concerns about its side effects: threats to their cultures, damage to the environment and the challenges posed by immigration, a new survey indicates.

In the Pew Global Attitudes Project survey of people in 46 countries and the Palestinian territories, large majorities everywhere said that trade was a good thing. In countries like Argentina, which recently experienced trade-based growth, the attitude toward trade has become more positive.

But support for trade has decreased in recent years in advanced Western countries, including Germany, Britain, France and Italy — and most sharply in the United States. The number of Americans saying trade is good for the country has dropped by 19 percentage points since 2002, to 59 percent.

“G.D.P. growth hasn’t been as dramatic in these places as in Latin America or Eastern Europe,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, referring to gross domestic product, the total value of the goods and services produced in a country. “But worldwide, even though some people are rich and some are poor, support for the basic tenet of capitalism is pretty strong.”

For the full story, see:

BRIAN KNOWLTON. "Globalization, According to the World, Is a Good Thing. Sort Of." The New York Times (Fri., October 5, 2007): A10.