Why Putin's Russia is weaker than the USSR, in one chart

1. Why Putin's Russia is weaker than the USSR, in one chart

   Vox ‎- 5 hours ago

   Since Russia invaded Ukraine, there've been a lot of comparisons between Putin's Russia and the Soviet Union. There's a lot wrong with that ...
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3 hours ago - Why Putin's Russia is weaker than the USSR, in one chart - Vox - Zack Beauchamp - Thu Sep 04 00:00:00 PDT 2014.
Why Putin's Russia is weaker than the USSR, in one chart
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Since Russia invaded Ukraine, there've been a lot of comparisons between Putin's Russia and the Soviet Union. There's a lot wrong with that comparison, ...
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2014 
 
 
 
Why Putin’s Russia is weaker than the USSR, in one chart
Updated by Zack Beauchamp on September 4, 2014, 11:00 a.m. ET @zackbeauchamp zack@vox.com
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No can haz USSR?Chris Jackson
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Since Russia invaded Ukraine, there've been a lot of comparisons between Putin's Russia and the Soviet Union. There's a lot wrong with that comparison, starting with one fairly obvious point: the Soviet empire wasn't just Russia. The Soviet republics in the USSR itself and the "Iron Curtain" client states in eastern Europe were key contributors to Soviet power. And Putin can't draw on them in nearly the same way as his Soviet predecessors.
To see just how much that matters, check out this chart of former Soviet-aligned economies from JP Morgan. Michael Cembalest, the investment firm's Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy, put together a list of important economic indicators for each country — GDP, trade rate, etc. This isn't a trivial amount of wealth: Cembalest notes that, together, these countries roughly equal Russia's current GDP, and their trade volume is 2.5 times larger.
What he found is that the bulk of economic power in the former communist bloc now isn't Putin's to command, and often is aligned against him. Most of that power is now in NATO and/or EU countries, like Poland and the part of Germany that used to be East Germany, or countries where Cembalest judges Russian influence to be fairly limited.
Each bar in the chart measures an economic factor across all of the countries that were once part of the Soviet Union or under its direct or indirect control, except for Russia itself. The bars are divided, by color, between states that are closely integrated or aligned with modern-day Russia (red), states that aligned against Russia (blue), and states that fall somewhere in between (orange and yellow).

(Michael Cembalest/JP Morgan)
So Moscow still has some degree of influence over much of the resource wealth and arable land that it did in the Soviet era, but much more important economic assets like trade, banking, intellectual property, and pure GDP have since shifted to Western alliances. That is a pretty stark indication of just how much weaker Russia is today without those important states, mostly in eastern Europe, that have since embraced the West.
"While the Russian Federation may be plotting an increasingly divergent course from the West," Cembalest concludes, "the economic and political independence achieved by most Soviet Bloc countries in the early 1990's does not appear at risk of being meaningfully reversed or morphing into USSR 2.0." He's almost certainly right.
To learn more about the crisis in Ukraine, read the full explainer, and watch the two-minute video below:
CARD 15 OF 24LAUNCH CARDS
Is the Ukraine crisis a new Cold War?
Not really. The Cold War was a global struggle for hegemony between two, roughly co-equal powers. It divided Europe between west and east and then divided much of the world. It included bloody proxy wars on just about every continent, and raised a very serious risk of global thermonuclear war.
None of that is true today. The US is many times more powerful and influential than Russia; neither America nor the Western world nor democracy itself are at any real risk. More to the point, almost the entire world opposes Russia's annexation of Crimea. President Obama has described Russia's actions as the behavior of a weak country. He is broadly correct, although Russia is clearly still strong enough to annex neighboring territory.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is certainly acting as if his country is in geopolitical competition with the West. He's become much more aggressive about asserting Russia's influence: he fought a brief war with the former Soviet republic of Georgia in 2008, set up a Eurasian trade union he wants to become a competitor to the European Union, and is arming and protecting the Syrian government as if that country's war were a Cold War-style proxy conflict. Putin clearly wants to reclaim some of Russia's past greatness, which in practice has meant asserting Russian power and positioning himself as a legitimate competitor to the Western world.
Still, this competition is limited to former Soviet republics and Syria. It is nowhere near the global conflict of the Cold War.
Everything you need to know about the Ukraine crisis24 CARDS / EDITED BY MAX FISHER UPDATED SEP 3 2014, 11:01Am          end quote from:Why Putin's Russia is weaker than the USSR, in one chart