From the editorial office. The Russian Journal continues to publish reviews of leading Russian economists and political scientists for the proposal of the director of the Institute of Globalization Problems to use Chinese experience in modernizing the Russian economy. Readers are invited to get acquainted with the position of an economist and a famous specialist on modernization of Joseph Diskin.

The outgoing 2009 in the field of culture was heterogeneous. Of course, it was in that which could even please the most exquisite gourmet from culture, and what upset even the most non -election viewer. But, first, about what delighted. 1. The NET festival survived, despite the crisis. This year, the best theater festival of Moscow not only did not slow down, but also expanded its program by including parallel projects in it. Of course, the audience still needs rebooting, and not one.

If the past Russian Kinoad, the results of which we have already summed up , can be considered almost the most interesting for all the post -Soviet time, then for foreign cinema he became truly crisis. Moreover, he became crisis not in the economic, but in the aesthetic and ideological sense (we are not about ideology, but about elementary ideas). Art & shock About the cinema always claim that it is in a crisis.

Review of: Peter T. Leeson. The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009 * * * There is something in the pirates that makes their image attractive and romantic, something that allows them to maintain a prominent place in the mass culture since the Golden Age of Piracy at the beginning of the 18th century, when about 2,000 naval robbers-more than 15% of the number of personnel of the British Navy-trained in the open sea.

For Russia, the outgoing year was the year of important achievements. In 2009, Russian President Medvedev created a fundamentally new vision of Russian domestic and foreign policy. The developing economic crisis and the consequences of the war with Georgia convinced the head of the Russian state that the political recipes of the previous time were outdated and did not meet the interests of the power led by it.