EUROPE: "Russia: Uncle Volodya's flagging Christmas spirit; The Russian government is beginning to run out of the goodies that it has traditionally used to buy popular acquiescence," The Economist, 3 January 2009.
The Kremlin doesn't have the resources to play Santa like in previous years.
The security guys (siloviki) are getting nervous about rising incidents of protest in the so-called monocities, where the entire local economy revolves around one big factory. The article says "there are no shortage of these in Russia."
You have to go back to late 19th-century America to find an economy with these characteristics: entire cities defined by the one industry, the one factory cluster. Small towns still suffer this fate here, but in Russia today, we're talking the big ones--very Leninist in its implications for instability.
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