Word: russianizing
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...political creature quite familiar in countries at Russia's level on the economic ladder - the authoritarian modernizer. Combined with his clampdown on political and media freedom and his ruthless war in Chechnya, Putin has delivered a solid economic performance that has seen investors turning bullish on a Russian economy that grew by 7.3 percent last year. Buoyed by high oil and natural gas prices, Russia's economy looks positively rosy right now compared to Yeltsin's final years. And Putin's brusque, businesslike and sometimes competitive dealings with the U.S. on geopolitical questions has earned him plaudits at home from...
...President Bush, after his first meeting with Putin three years ago, claimed to have looked into the eyes of his Russian counterpart and "gotten a sense of his soul," deciding that Putin was a man he could trust. But for many other Western commentators from all ends of the ideological spectrum, Putin is more akin to a risen ghost from Russia's nasty past. His government's relentless campaign to squelch political opposition and silence independent media; its hounding of the "oligarch" business tycoons whose control over vast swathes of the economy create a potential alternative power center...
...Russia has built the nuclear energy infrastructure that has allowed Iran to pursue its strategic ambitions, and it may have helped arm Saddam Hussein long after UN sanctions forbade it. Putin recently instructed his defense industry to pursue technologies that would allow Russian missiles to confound the Bush administration's planned missile-defense shield, thereby maintaining the deterrent capability of Moscow's own strategic arsenal. The arrest late last year of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, owner of the massive Yukos oil company, was interpreted by some as a sign that the former KGB colonel-turned-President even planned to reassert state control...
...Russian president is essentially a nationalist, who believes a strong (read authoritarian) state is necessary to the country's survival and prosperity. There are no indications that he plans to revive the disastrous central planning of the Soviet-era economy; he remains a strong advocate of market economics. Indeed, the stellar performance over the past decade of the oligarch-owned corporations in the energy sector will be the strongest deterrent to restoring any sort of public ownership - Putin and his minions know better than to kill the goose laying the golden egg. After all, the KGB had been first among...
...Sheldon Harnick songs (has any opening number done a better job of introducing a show's themes, setting and characters than Tradition?); most of Jerome Robbins' original choreography; and Joseph Stein's solid book (based on Sholom Aleichem stories) about a Jewish milkman and his marriageable daughters in the Russian village of Anatevka, in the days before they are uprooted and forced to migrate to America. But Leveaux has ditched the old-fashioned scene changes and set the show on an open stage, with bare trees silhouetted against a translucent blue and orange backdrop. He got Bock and Harnick...