Well, while polling and results are being debated elsewhere, let me instead turn back to Russia, and try the possibly less accurate entrail-reading on what the signs portend for their production of oil and gas in the near term.

It was just last week that Leanan pointed to the Bloomberg piece which was already noting a slight fall in both oil output and exports, from this country which is, currently, the world's largest crude oil producer.

Average daily oil output during the month was at 9.711 million barrels a day, or 41.07 million tons, down 0.4 percent from 9.751 million barrels a day in September, according to the Energy and Industry Ministry's CDU-TEK unit. Exports dropped 9.4 percent to 4.94 million barrels a day as the government raised export duties to a record. . . . . . Exports to countries outside the Commonwealth of Independent States fell 6.5 percent to 4.2 million barrels a day. Russia raised export duties to oil to a record $237.60 a ton ($32.41 a barrel) from Oct. 1, up 9.8 percent from the previous duty of $216.40 a ton.

And yet, today the Russian Deputy Prime Minister said that they would not cut production, but would rather boost production at the same rate as at the beginning of the century. However, there are questions about what is going to happen with the planned export of LNG to Japan and Korea from the Sakhalin 2 development, given the problems that Shell is having with that project. At present most of the production is supposed to be heading to meet those two countries needs.