Moscow. (Ian Pryde for RIA Novosti) – Russia’s IT sector, like much else in the country, is characterized by screaming contradictions. Russia has an advanced IT solutions industry, and it is no accident that Russian computer engineers and software developers find ready employment in international IT companies at home and…
Read MorePublished in Trendlline Russia, a series of sponsored supplements on the Russian economy commissioned by RIA-Novosti and published with the print editions of The Daily Telegraph (UK) and The Washington Post (USA) in November-December 2006. Appeared in The Daily Telegraph as ‘Selling off the Railways – Russia’s huge railway network…
Read MoreDuring his five-year tenure as prime minister in 1990s, Viktor Chernomyrdin frequently stated that Russia needed hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize its economy after decades of inadequate investment had left the country’s infrastructure and social sphere in a perilous state. The four national projects President Vladimir Putin announced…
Read MoreThe steadily improving relations between Russia and China reached a new high earlier this year when the two countries signed 29 bilateral agreements on energy, telecommunications, information technology, banking and money laundering during President Vladimir Putin’s March visit to Beijing. In some quarters, these new agreements cemented their fears of…
Read MoreDespite the infamous voucher privatization that took place in Russia during the 1990s, large swaths of the economy still remain in the hands of the state, with the government retaining complete or partial ownership of behemoth enterprises such as Russian Railways, Rosneft, LUKoil and Gazprom. It’s all the more ironic,…
Read MoreThe steadily improving relations between Russia and China reached a new high earlier this year when the two countries signed 29 bilateral agreements on energy, telecommunications, IT, banking and money laundering during President Vladimir Putin’s March visit to Beijing. In some quarters, these new agreements cemented fears of a strategic…
Read MoreПетербургский саммит G8 – отличный повод посмотреть, как складываются даже не отношения между Россией и ведущими странами постиндустриального общества, а их представления друг о друге. Надо сказать, что проблемы с пониманием “Другого” есть у обеих сторон. На Западе многие обвиняют Россию в растущем авторитаризме и централизации, в “обратной прихватизации” (на…
Read MoreKazakhstan has a long common border with China to the east and has been exporting Caspian oil to China’s north-western province Xinjiang by rail since the 1990s. In 2005, Kazakhstan exported about 30,000 barrels per day to China via the Alashankoy rail crossing – a far cry from the 200,000…
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