The Long Path to Present-day Russia

Two accounts of growing up communist

As a newspaperman covering the economics of transition after 1989, I became interested in the Russian experience of the Nineties, especially after a young Russian immigrant who, having become a Harvard economics professor, took advantage of his appointment as a US State Department adviser to the government of Boris Yeltsin to enter the Russian mutual fund industry with his wife and their pals.

Since then I’ve followed the story of US-Russian relations as it has gradually widened into front-page news. A friend pointed me to a book that has appeared last month about the experience of living in Albania in the early Nineties. That book, in turn, reminded me of a somewhat older account of coming-of-age as an economist in communist Hungary during the Sixties and Seventies.