Россия потеряла статус сверхдержавы: ее экономика почти полностью зависит от экспорта природных ресурсов, у нее нет сети военных альянсов, а внутри страны фиксируется высокий уровень неравенста, пишет Барак Обама

Барак Обама (Фото: Brian Snyder / Reuters)
В продажу 17 ноября поступила книга экс-президента США Барака Обамы (2008–2016) «Земля обетованная» (A Promised Land). В книге Обама описывает годы своего президентства. В одном из фрагментов книги, который пересказывает ТАСС, он заявил, что «Россия больше не является сверхдержавой», и называет причины потери страной этого статуса.

«России при ядерном арсенале, уступавшем только нашему [американскому], не хватало широкой сети альянсов и баз, которые позволяют Соединенным Штатам проецировать свою военную мощь во всем мире. Российская экономика продолжала уступать экономикам Италии, Канады и Бразилии, а также практически полностью зависела от экспорта нефти, газа, минералов и вооружений», — оценил Обама положение России на момент своего президентства.

Кроме того, Обама в книге обращает внимание на высокие показатели коррупции, социального неравенства и низкую продолжительность жизни мужского населения в России.

Трамп обвинил Россию в краже информации о гиперзвуковых ракетах при Обаме
Политика
Первый том книги A Promised Land был выпущен издательством Penguin Random House. Первая часть насчитывает 768 страниц и переведена на 25 языков. В 2017 году, через несколько месяцев после выхода Обамы в отставку, издатели Penguin Random House заплатили за право публикации его мемуаров $60 млн.

Ранее у экс-президента США уже выходило несколько книг — «Мечты моего отца» (Dreams From My Father, 1995 год), «Дерзость надежды» (Audacity of Hope, 2006 год) и «О тебе пою: послание к моим дочерям» (2010).

Автор
Георгий Тадтаев
Барак Обама
мемуары
Россия
США
сверхдержава

Подробнее на РБК:
https://www.rbc.ru/politics/17/11/2020/ … pplication

Отредактировано Шовинист (2020-11-17 17:07:01)

trip to the Gulag.
And yet, with each year that Putin remained in power, the new Russia looked more like the old. It became clear that a market economy and periodic elections could go hand in hand with a “soft authoritarianism” that steadily concentrated power in Putin’s hands and shrank the space for meaningful dissent.
Oligarchs who cooperated with Putin became some of the world’s wealthiest men. Those who broke from Putin found themselves subject to various criminal prosecutions and stripped of their assets—and Kasparov ultimately did spend a few days in jail for leading an anti-Putin march. Putin’s cronies were handed control of the country’s major media outlets, and the rest were pressured into ensuring him coverage every bit as friendly as the state-owned media had once provided Communist rulers. Independent journalists and civic leaders found themselves monitored by the FSB (the modern incarnation of the KGB)—or, in some cases, turned up dead.
What’s more, Putin’s power didn’t rest on simple coercion. He was genuinely popular (his approval ratings at home rarely dipped below 60 percent). It was a popularity rooted in old-fashioned nationalism—the promise to restore Mother Russia to its former glory, to relieve the sense of disruption and humiliation so many Russians had felt over the previous two decades.
Putin could sell that vision because he’d experienced those disruptions himself. Born into a family without connections or privilege, he’d methodically climbed the Soviet ladder—reservist training with the Red Army, law studies at Leningrad State University, a career in the KGB. After years of loyal and effective service to the state, he’d secured a position of modest stature and respectability, only to see the system he’d devoted his life to capsize overnight when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. (He was at that time stationed with the KGB in Dresden, East Germany, and he reportedly spent the next few days scrambling to destroy files and standing guard against possible looters.) He’d made a quick pivot to the emerging post-Soviet reality, allying himself to democratic reformer Anatoly Sobchak, a mentor from law school who became mayor of St. Petersburg.
Moving into national politics, Putin rose through the ranks of the Yeltsin administration with breathtaking speed, using his power in a variety of posts— including director of the FSB—to pick up allies, dole out favors, gather secrets, and outmaneuver rivals. Yeltsin appointed Putin prime minister in August 1999 and then four months later—hobbled by corruption scandals, bad health, a legendary drinking problem, and a record of catastrophic economic mismanagement—surprised everyone by vacating his office. That made Putin, then forty-seven, the acting president of Russia and provided him with the head start he needed to get elected to a full presidential term three months later. (One of Putin’s first acts was to grant Yeltsin a blanket pardon for any wrongdoing.) In the hands of the shrewd and the ruthless, chaos had proven a gift. But whether out of instinct or calculation, Putin also understood the Russian public’s longing for order. While few people had an interest in returning to the days of collective farming and empty store shelves, they were tired and scared and resented those—both at home and abroad—who appeared to have taken advantage of Yeltsin’s weakness. They preferred a strong hand, which Putin was only too happy to provide.
He reasserted Russian control over the predominantly Muslim province of Chechnya, making no apologies for matching the brutal terrorist tactics of separatist rebels there with unrelenting military violence. He revived Soviet-style surveillance powers in the name of keeping the people safe. When democratic activists challenged Putin’s autocratic tendencies, he dismissed them as tools of the West. He resurrected pre-Communist and even Communist symbols and embraced the long-suppressed Russian Orthodox Church. Fond of showy public works projects, he pursued wildly expensive spectacles, including a bid to host the Winter Olympics in the summer resort town of Sochi. With the fastidiousness of a teenager on Instagram, he curated a constant stream of photo ops, projecting an almost satirical image of masculine vigor (Putin riding a horse with his shirt off, Putin playing hockey), all the while practicing a casual chauvinism and homophobia, and insisting that Russian values were being infected by foreign elements. Everything Putin did fed the narrative that under his firm, paternal guidance, Russia had regained its mojo.
There was just one problem for Putin: Russia wasn’t a superpower anymore.
Despite having a nuclear arsenal second only to our own, Russia lacked the vast network of alliances and bases that allowed the United States to project its military power across the globe. Russia’s economy remained smaller than those of Italy, Canada, and Brazil, dependent almost entirely on oil, gas, mineral, and arms exports. Moscow’s high-end shopping districts testified to the country’s transformation from a creaky state-run economy to one with a growing number of billionaires, but the pinched lives of ordinary Russians spoke to how little of this new wealth trickled down. According to various international indicators, the levels of Russian corruption and inequality rivaled those in parts of the developing world, and its male life expectancy in 2009 was lower than that of Bangladesh. Few, if any, young Africans, Asians, or Latin Americans looked to Russia for inspiration in the fight to reform their societies, or felt their imaginations stirred by Russian movies or music, or dreamed of studying there, much less immigrating. Shorn of its ideological underpinnings, the once-shiny promise of workers uniting to throw off their chains, Putin’s Russia came off as insular and suspicious of outsiders—to be feared, perhaps, but not emulated.
It was this gap between the truth of modern-day Russia and Putin’s insistence on its superpower status, I thought, that helped account for the country’s increasingly combative foreign relations. Much of the ire was directed at us: In public remarks, Putin became sharply critical of American policy. When U.S.-backed initiatives came before the U.N. Security Council, he made sure Russia blocked them or watered them down—particularly anything touching on human rights. More consequential were Putin’s escalating efforts to prevent former Soviet bloc countries, now independent, from breaking free of Russia’s orbit.
Our diplomats routinely received complaints from Russia’s neighbors about instances of intimidation, economic pressure, misinformation campaigns, covert electioneering, contributions to pro-Russian political candidates, or outright bribery. In the case of Ukraine, there’d been the mysterious poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko, a reformist activist turned president whom Moscow opposed. And then, of course, there had been the invasion of Georgia during the summer of 2008.
It was hard to know how far down this dangerous path Russia planned to go.
Putin was no longer Russia’s president: Despite dominating the polls, he’d chosen to abide by Russia’s constitutional prohibition against three consecutive terms, swapping places with Dmitry Medvedev, his former deputy, who upon being elected president in 2008 had promptly installed Putin as his prime minister. The consensus among analysts was that Medvedev was merely keeping the presidential seat warm until 2012, when Putin would be eligible to run again. Still, Putin’s decision not just to step down but to promote a younger man with a reputation for relatively liberal, pro-Western views suggested he at least cared about appearances. It even offered the possibility that Putin would eventually leave elective office and settle into the role of power broker and elder statesman, allowing a new generation of leadership to put Russia back on the path toward a modern, lawful democracy.
All that was possible—but not likely. Since the time of the czars, historians had noted Russia’s tendency to adopt with much fanfare the latest European ideas —whether representative government or modern bureaucracy, free markets or state socialism—only to subordinate or abandon such imported notions in favor of older, harsher ways of maintaining the social order. In the battle for Russia’s identity, fear and fatalism usually beat out hope and change. It was an understandable response to a thousand-year history of Mongol invasions, byzantine intrigues, great famines, pervasive serfdom, unbridled tyranny, countless insurrections, bloody revolutions, crippling wars, years-long sieges, and millions upon millions slaughtered—all on a frigid landscape that forgave nothing.
— IN JULY, I flew to Moscow for my first official visit to Russia as president, accepting the invitation Medvedev had extended at the G20 meeting

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