But look closer and the picture is less rosy -- a mixture of stagnation and decline -- with nobody in Russia's political or economic elite seemingly able to halt the downward slide that hastened the Soviet Union's defeat in the Cold War.

On the plus side, the first post-Soviet decade has witnessed the beginnings of independent life in many spheres, following the collapse of the Communist monopoly of power and its planned economy.

A failed putsch by Soviet hardliners in August 1991 signed the death warrant for an ailing Communist system that President Mikhail Gorbachev had already placed on the sick list with his "perestroika" (restructuring) initiative from 1985 onwards.

Freedom and free enterprise sprouted in the post-1991 hothouse atmosphere, with the collapse of totalitarian controls and a new generation of entrepreneurs acting as the shock troops of President Boris Yeltsin's blitz on the Soviet system.

The first wave of reforms brought hyperinflation and food shortages, and the ensuing chaos almost sparked a civil war after Yeltsin, in 1993, turned heavy artillery on the Russian parliament building, the scene of his heroic resistance to the August coup two years earlier.

But the dawn of democracy also saw many pro-Yeltsin reformers nurturing unrealistic hopes of an economic miracle that would have taken Russias income per head above Spain's by 2010.

Devaluation, default and a banking collapse in August 1998 dispelled the mood of optimism, and prompted much hand-wringing in the United States, where Congress and the Clinton White House answered the question "Who lost Russia?" with a bout of finger-pointing.

Needless to say, reports of Russia's demise were premature -- and are now just a dim memory.

For the first time since the end of the Communist era, Russia has a balanced budget, a trade surplus and vast reserves that send politicians and financial analysts into raptures.

President Vladimir Putin has taken much of the credit for the modest economic successes of the past two years, notwithstanding the unusually helpful conditions -- and rocketing world oil prices -- but even he recognises that Russia still lags behind its Soviet-era performance levels.

Some economists look wistfully westwards, acknowledging that even to match the prosperity of the European Unions poorer members such as Greece and Portugal, Russia needs to grow by eight percent a year for the next 15 years.

"The current numbers give a rather good impression. But compared to 1991, we are 10 or 20 years behind," argues Oleg Bogomolov, an economist at Russias Academy of Sciences.

Gross domestic product (GDP) in 2001 is almost 30 percent down from where it was in 1992, while industrial output has fallen by 35 percent, and capital investment by 70 percent, while nearly one Russian in three has to get by on less than the basic minimum.

In the political arena, doom-mongers point to the costly and debilitating war in Chechnya -- the second in a decade -- and the Kremlin's clumsy attempts to clamp down on press freedom as evidence that Soviet strongarm tactics are still highly regarded by Russia's masters.

Significantly, Putin the ex-KGB spy reinstated the Soviet anthem last year in a bid to appease the millions of Russians who still hanker for old certainties as opposed to the more blustery atmosphere of post-Communist pluralism.

Putin's unprecedented move, in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks on the United States, to recast Moscow as a trusted partner of the West has shocked many nationalists but is really only a belated acknowledgement of Russia's lost superpower status.

The sad state of its once-proud army remains one of Russia's weakest links 10 years on, and few here agree about how to fix a force that nowadays scares its allies as well as its enemies, for all the wrong reasons.

The sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine in August 2000 was only the most painful reminder that much of Russia's military and civilian infrastructure is leaking and rusting and rotting.

Already widespread in the Soviet Union, corruption has poisoned most areas of Russian life, while ordinary citizens have witnessed a terrifying explosion of criminality and contract killing.

Murder aside, Russians risk quite simply dying out, due to the collapse of the birthrate and rising mortality levels caused by their cigarette-smoking, vodka-swilling lifestyles that are further endangered by an exponential increase in tuberculosis and AIDS.

Experts have warned of a "demographic disaster" amid talk of the population falling from its current 145 million to 55 million by 2075.

All rights reserved. � 2000 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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