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Marhsall Goldman is a Professor of Economics Emeritus at Wellesley College and Senior Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University. In his book, Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia , Goldman chronicles Russia’s dramatic reemergence on the world stage, illuminating the key reason for its rebirth: the use of its ever-expanding energy wealth to reassert its traditional great power ambitions. In the article below Goldman reflects Russia’s role in increasing energy prices.

As energy prices rise to record heights, most consumers are unaware that it’s not only OPEC members who are the beneficiaries, but Russia which today actually produces more petroleum that Saudi Arabia. Russia has been the world’s largest producer of petroleum several times in the past including at the beginning of the twentieth century and again in the 1950s. But its role today when energy prices are at record levels has made Russia an especially important economic and political power, more so than ever before in the country’s history.

In more recent times, the bounty brought in by Russian petroleum exports has transformed Russia from near bankruptcy in August 1998 to levels of prosperity unmatched not only in Soviet but Czarist history. The Russian government today has built up nearly $500 billion in foreign currencies—not bad considering that less than a decade ago, in 1998, Russia’s treasury was effectively empty. Moreover the Russian company, Gazprom, the world’s largest producer of natural gas has just recently become the world’s second largest corporation as measured by the combined value of its corporate stock, a distinction that until just recently was held by General Electric. Today only Exxon-Mobil is larger than Gazprom, but Prime Minister Putin has promised that he will do all he can to help Gazprom reach first place. More than that Putin has begun to question why it is that the dollar is the world’s currency standard. As the US dollar loses value, the ruble has strengthened, gaining 20 per cent in recent weeks.

Not surprisingly both Putin and his protégé, Dmitri Medvedev his successor as President, have begun to demand that the ruble be included as a world currency (not bad considering that only a few years ago the ruble was not even convertible into other currencies) and that Russia have a say in selecting the leaders of international financial groups such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Given the likelihood that energy prices will remain at high levels for some time to come, it is likely that Russia will seek to use its new wealth to reassert itself as both an energy and a political superpower.

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How much did the Hudson River School painters alter what they saw? Did they move mountains and trees around to make a better landscape composition?

The quick answer is that they moved rocks and trees, but not mountains.

Thanks to the work of John J. Henderson and Roger E. Belson of the White Mountain Art and Artists organization of New Hampshire, you can see for yourself. Mr. Henderson has taken photos from the same vantage points that the 19th Century artists used, giving us a remarkable chance to compare each painting with the scene that inspired it.

It’s hard to be exactly sure what foregrounds the artists were looking at 150 years ago, but it’s clear that they drew the mountain contours very carefully. They may have increased the height a bit, but they were faithful to the silhouette.

The issue of mountain contours was a hot topic among 19th Century landscape painters. Asher B. Durand (1796-1886), one of the co-founders of the Hudson River School, and its most influential writer, addressed the subject in his Letters on Landscape Painting (1855). The artist, he said, may:

“…displace a tree, for instance, if disagreeable, or render it a more perfect one of its kind if retained, but the elevations and depressions of the earth’s surface composing the middle ground and distance, the magnitude of objects, and extent of space presented in the view, characteristic outline, undulating or angular, of all the great divisions, may not be changed in the least perceptible degree, most especially the mountain and hill forms. On these God has set his signet, and Art may not remove it when the picture professes to represent the scene.”