dibly low. So, what could have turned a large profit for the state turned into a fiasco that left them with no new foreign money and no real change in the way business is done. Shops and companies are still over staffed and the workers are still apathetic about their jobs. Also, money plays a secondary role today just as it did in the Soviet times. Barter and other nonmonetary transactions are the norm for business in Russia. Enterprises have developed barter arrangements with customers, suppliers, and even employees (Capital and Class, Summer99 Issue 68, p1). This has caused a circle of credit and debt to form that is bad for any developing state. When this happens, nothing can progress because they are buying and selling just to stay in the black, so to speak. The circle is evident in Macroeconomics as well. Russia has been able to integrate into the global economy mainly through providing raw materials, as a debtor state, and an exporter of illegal capital. Thus, it bears all the marks of a third world nation. In response the World Bank and IMF have only been willing to help in return for liberalization while the government has continually promised economic reform while none has happened. This has resulted in an "economy which has become cripplingly unproductive as the old central planning has not been replaced by effective market relations" (Capital and Class, Summer98 Issue 68, p1). Profits are being made but only through the trade and barter agreements mentioned earlier rather than through a true surplus value in production. Russia is in serious economic trouble. They are on a circle that can only lead to further weakness.ConclusionsRussia is in a lot of ways the most significant problem facing Europe and the World in the years to come. The stakes are high not so much in the economic sphere where the actual global impact is low given Russia's increasingly barter driven economy, but in the realm of power considering...
