#6334 #6335
[Third Issue of the Day]
#6
From: "Fred Andresen" <fred@andresen.com>
Subject: Re: 6331-RUSSIA'S UNCERTAIN ECONOMIC FUTURE
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 2002
Dear David,
I wrote you earlier today and just now thought of the most historic and most current appraisal of the economy of Russia. We do not need a 463 page academic appraisal of Russia when it is obvious the following economist had it absolutely right from the start:
The eminent economist said, "The economic system of Russia has undergone such rapid changes that it is impossible to obtain a precise and accurate account of it.... Almost everything one can say about the country is true and false at the same time." John Maynard Keynes 1925
When Keynes made that observation, Russia was nearing the completion of the cruelest and most senseless civil war ever to ruin a promising country. It was Lenin's dream, his untried political theory which he perpetrated on a people he did not love, in order to satisfy a selfish penchant for proving himself right. It was like trying to balance a pencil on its point. It took seventy years, covering most of my life span, for its wrongness to become evident to all. Such a waste of human potential the world has never seen!
Russia today, like much of Eastern and Central Europe, is straining to go forward against the pull of the past, the temptation to return to the 1920s, to settle old scores, to beat dead horses. As Tatyana Tolstaya has said, "For us, the best time is always yesterday."
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