1. Put this into the context of the many countries mired by this same conundrum: how do you pay for democracy when voters despise politics and won‘t join parties?

2. A budget surplus of $56 billion is projected for next year, hard currency reserves are the third–largest in the world at $277 billion and the economy is growing at a healthy clip of 6 percent to 7 percent annually, transforming the once–dour capital into a gaudy, glitzy boom town. «Eight years ago, the problem was ‘how do you pay back the debts when you don‘t have the revenues?‘ Now the question is ‘how do you spend this money without it being inflationary?‘" said Roland Nash, an analyst with Renaissance Capital investment bank in Moscow. «It‘s a fantastically different problem to the one they had eight years ago,» he said. «Who would have guessed they would have this metamorphosis?»