Country with biggest surface in the world, everything possible available from oil via minerals to taiga, enormously vast forests. Everything to make a country rich and wealthy. But already befor war, economy about same size than Italy.
What most people miss, including a lot of famous policy makers, is that you can have no sustainable, virtuous Capitalism without a strong tradition of rule of law. Contracts have to mean something to both parties or you can't do business. In fundamentally corrupt cultures, business can't function efficiently. For business to function efficiently, there has to be reliable, and most importantly, predictable rule of law. You can't function if you never know if some crony is just going to take all your stuff. You get invited to sell at a discount to a friend of Vlad. Or else.
Russia was pushed to soon by zealots into raw Capitalism before they has a stable government or reliable rule of law. So what you ended up with was not virtuous Capitalism, but a Kleptocracy run by a handful of Oligarchs. Russia is what you get when Capitalism turns malignent.
Frankly, I am not convinced they will ever work right. The West has over a thousand years of various forms of Democracy or limited Monarchy or Parliamentarism. Of rule of law over men.
The fundamental psychological framework of a Russian is that there needs to be a single strongman with unlimited power and absolute rule. They've never truly had anything else. I'm not convinced that deep down the society even wants that. Their culture does not have the same political DNA as Western Europe and America.
Mexico has the same problem. They should be dripping in wealth. But their entire culture has always been fundamentally based on corruption.
The difference in America is our country was formed by independent family farmers being granted autonomous plots that they and their decedents owned directly, importunity.
Many of the colonies were private corporations with a Royal OK.
In Mexico\South America land was granted by a King by Royal Decree. These were noblemen and Royal gov officials. There as no broad citizen egalitarianism. A vast landowner and everyone else was a slave. Mexico is what America would have been like if it had all been like the South based on a plantation economic system instead of flatter economic strata of thousands of small yeomen farmers.
The differences in the initial economic models had huge implications over our development over time. All the Spain based cultures in Mexico and SA just have a harder time getting to the First World status because of corruption. Plus we had the Magna Carta in our cultural history and Spain didn't.
Oh strayed off topic. Coffee and a puff will do that to you.
