Twenty years after the implosion of the USSR, the successor Russian government is still trying to have it both ways, freeing up and privatizing sectors of the economy while retaining control of those deemed, for whatever reason, as strategic, and the Transneft pipeline monopoly remains one of those. But the larger world is changing. While Russia vies with Saudi Arabia for the title of largest oil producer in the world, producing an average of 9.93 million barrels of oil per day in 2009, which translated to 12 percent of the world's oil exports, competition is rising in the wings everywhere from Africa to Brazil, where the governments do not regard their oil companies struggling to boost their overseas market share as a renewable commodity to be fleeced by an increasingly inefficient government monopoly. It will be interesting to see what develops.