Responding to these concerns, though, in a "coattails" effect, the president is expected to carry pro-Kremlin parties back into power in 2003 - a modicum of elections-inspired bribing is inevitable. State wages and pensions will outpace inflation. The energy behemoths - major sources of campaign financing - will be rewarded with rises in tariffs to match cost of living increases.
Russia faces more than merely a skewed wealth distribution or dependence on mineral wealth. Its difficulties are myriad. On cue from Washington, it is again being hyped in the Western press as a sure-fire investment destination and a pair of safe geostrategic hands. But the dismal truth is that it is a third world country with first world pretensions (and nuclear weapons). It exhibits all the risks attendant to other medium-sized developing countries and emerging economies.
External debt repayments next year will exceed $15 billion. It can easily afford them with oil prices anywhere above $20 and foreign exchange reserves the highest since 1991. Russia even prepaid some of its debt mountain this year. But if its export proceeds were to decline by 40 percent in the forthcoming 3-4 years, Russia will, yet again, be forced to reschedule or default. Every $1 dollar decline in Ural crude prices translates to more than $1 billion lost income to the government.
Russia's population is both contracting and ageing. A ruinous pension crisis is in the cards unless both the run-down health system and the abysmally low birthrate recover. Immigration of ethnic Russians from the former republics of the USSR to the Russian Federation has largely run its course. According to Pravda.ru, more than 7 million people emigrated from the Federation in the last decade.
Russia's informal sector is a vital, though crime-tainted, engine of growth. Laundered money coupled with reinvested profits - from both legitimate and illicit businesses - drive a lot of the private sector and underlie the emergence of an affluent elite, especially in Moscow and other urban centers. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, Goskomstat - the State Statistics Committee - regularly adjusts the formal figures up by 25 percent to incorporate estimates of the black economy.
Russia faces a dilemma: to quash the economic underground and thus enhance both tax receipts and Russia's image as an orderly polity - or to let the pent-up entrepreneurial forces of the "gray sectors" work their magic?
Russia is slated to join the World Trade Organization in 2004. This happy occasion would mean deregulation, liberalization and opening up to competition - all agonizing moves. Russian industry and agriculture are not up to the task. It took a massive devaluation and a debilitating financial crisis in 1998 to resurrect consumer appetite for indigenous goods.
Farming is mostly state-owned, or state-sponsored. Monopolies, duopolies and cartels make up the bulk of the manufacturing and mining sectors - especially in the wake of the recent tsunami of mergers and acquisitions. The Economist Intelligence Unit quotes estimates that 20 conglomerates account for up to 70 percent of the country's $330 billion GDP. The oligarchs are still there, lurking. The banks are still paralyzed and compromised, though their retail sector is reviving.
Russians are still ambivalent about foreigners. Paranoid xenophobia was replaced by guarded wariness. Recently, Russia revoked the fast track work permit applications hitherto put to good use by managers, scholars and experts from the West. Foreign minority shareholders still complain of being ripped-off by powerful, well-connected - and minacious - business interests.
With the bloody exception of Chechnya, Putin's compelling personality has helped subdue the classic tensions between center and regions. But, as Putin himself admitted in a radio Q-and-A session on December 19, this peaceful co-existence is fraying at the edges.