Jeff Mowatt on "Surgut without its gilding of “black” gold. Some anti-myths about the “oil Eldorado""

Jeff Mowatt — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:36:32 +0000

Well, that's certainly a mixed picture. It's been nearly a decade since I visited Siberia, Novokuznetsk in my case. Then it was true, that miners made most money and spent it, because the economic crash had left most wary of banks, when the rouble devalued by 1000 times. In those days, not so long ago people were sometimes paid in electrical goods, or fertiliser.

Young people would tell me then that Russians have no rights, they meant economic rights as I now understand. There were single mothers a plenty, and they needed state help because bribing a notary to declare unpaid alimony was all to coomon.

Just after, before I knew him, my colleague now, had been in Tomsk, to leverage an economic development project called the Tomsk Regional Initiative and Microfinance Bank. An unqualified success for the morel colatteral style of microfinance and 10,000 small enterprises as a result.

He saw a few things, a dark skinned man beaten to death in the streets for being just that. he tried to intevene but it was too late. Later someone wanted a relative to gain an important postion in one of the Universities, police were procured to round up female students and threaten repeated rape unless they were willing to bear false witness against the incubent jobholder.

You'll hear little about Tomsk because, for one it worked as a bottom up approach where Harvard and trickle-down had failed, and an incoming Putin allowed it replicated but later local FSB didn't get what they wanted. He was blacklisted for Russian visa renewal.

There was a website for this initiative in Tomsk, but it's now in web archives and all text obliterated. Here's what's left of the story.

http://www.p-ced.com/projects/russia/

Next stop was Crimea but that's another story.

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Jeff Mowatt on "Surgut without its gilding of “black” gold. Some anti-myths about the “oil Eldorado""