learn_russian | Заслуга

Hi guys,

I wonder if you could help me out with this passage, an article about Khodorkovsky from Rossiyskaya Gazetta. It is at the very beginning of the article:

10 лет, шатаясь, падая, качаясь, кое-как поднималась российская экономика. И вот только в последние 2-3 года начала более или менее ровно идти в гору. Говорят, что все дело в ценах на нефть, что заслуга Президента и Правительства невелика. Не согласен - и именно сейчас мы можем оценить, как велика была заслуга власти. ВЛАСТЬ НЕ МЕШАЛА! Власть не делала глупостей. Это высшее достижение почти для всякой власти, это фантастическое достижение, неслыханное достижение для власти русской.

Highlighted in bold is what i don't understand. Reading that sentence alone, seeing as global oil pices are not set by the governemnt I would say that it means the governemnt did not have a very big impact on the economy - that it's influence was negligible. So заслуга means fault or influence. But reading on through the rest of the paragraph that interpretation doesn't fit. The author says the governemnt didn't interfere in contradiction of the first statement. So does заслуга невелика mean that the governemnt did not deserve any better, that the governemnt should not be rewarded with a good economy?

The problem is that that interpretation would make the first sentence a contradiction of itself ie it was all to do with oil prices and the governemnt didn't deserve much better than it got. The point is that oil prices are not under the control of the governemnt.

Is it just a badly constructed argument? I'd be really grateful for your help.

Thanks.

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From:

icamel.livejournal.com

заслуга - contribution here.

The whole point is that the great contribution of the government was that government didn't contribute, did not barging into Russian economics. Borderline claim.

merry1978.livejournal.com

Заслуга here means contribution or merit.
You should also note that the sentence highlighted is given like a citation of some common opinion, which is disputed by the author.

Говорят, что все дело в ценах на нефть, что заслуга Президента и Правительства невелика. Не согласен.

They say, that the reason is the oil prices, that the contribution of the Government and the President is small. I do not agree.

And then the author claims that the government should be praised as it didn't do any harm to the economics. That it should get merit for not making the situation worse.

The whole passage is rather sarcastic, of course.

pinky-the-cow.livejournal.com

Well. Try harder to follow the original text and don't expect much clarity if you isolate things on a whim.

There's an attempt to conjure up some short-circuited logic to back one's thesis: government did well.

First he (she?) sets up the scenery: 10 years of struggling growth, last 2-3 years of steady growing.
Then he provides a springboard for the thesis, a selected playing-the-role-of-the-weak argument from some negative kind of people: Говорят, что все дело в ценах на нефть, что заслуга Президента и Правительства невелика. (They say, everything is due to oil prices, and that the President and the Government had little to do with it.)
Then he displays a supposedly-ingenious way of rebuking this sore people argument by: Не согласен - и именно сейчас мы можем оценить, как велика была заслуга власти. ВЛАСТЬ НЕ МЕШАЛА! Власть не делала глупостей. Это высшее достижение почти для всякой власти, это фантастическое достижение, неслыханное достижение для власти русской. (I disagree — and it's now that we can appreciate it, how large was authorities' credit. THE AUTHORITIES HADN'T BEEN INTERFERRING! The authorities didn't do stupid things. It's a highest achievement for any authorities, it's a fantastic achievement, an achievement unheard for russian authorities.)

The author seems to be an alternatively gifted propagandist, a servile one, but his Russian isn't self-contradicting within the excerpt.

Говорят, что все дело в ценах на нефть, что заслуга Президента и Правительства невелика. (They say, everything is due to oil prices, and that the President and the Government had little to do with it.)
The last "it" is, as well as the "everything", from the first part, the economy growth from the context, which escaped your attention due to narrowing things too much. This "it" definitely can't be tied to the "oil prices" here.

If it were tied, the things should've been more like this:

Говорят, что все дело в ценах на нефть, в которых заслуга Президента и Правительства невелика.
Говорят, что всё дело в ценах на нефть, а в них заслуга Президента и Правительства невелика.