Putin Advisor Illarionov Quits, Says Russia Not Free (Bloomberg.com)

Russia is re-nationalizing its industries, vowing to use energy as a foreign policy tool, and strengthening its connections to China.

My father is an economist whose specialty was the agriculture of the Soviet Union. His work took him to the Soviet Union many times, including two extended stays with me included. (For one year I even attended Soviet preschool.) Dad ended up as chief of the Centrally Planned Economies Branch of the Agriculture and Trade Analysis Division of the USDA Economic Research Service. This job fizzled out in 1997: after Dad had "won the cold war" (he is proud of his photograph with Gorbachev, whom he met once and with whom he was too shy to speak!) the need for the job gradually diminished. Ironically, the import of Dad's job was that we (the U.S.) used (and still use; this is the motivation for agricultural production subsidies) our agricultural products as a foreign diplomacy tool in the same way as as Russia has just declared it will use energy.

After my own visits to Ukraine (totalling 7 months) in 1998, 2000-01, and 2002-03, I wasn't so sure that the Soviet Union was truly dead. I figured its leaders may just be "playing possum:" They would let the nation open up widely enough and long enough to bring in sufficient Western capital to modernize their infrastructure to their satisfaction, and then reclaim power and nationalize everything again.

On the bright side, perhaps in such a scenario such jobs as Dad's old one would come back. But he'd agree with me that this is small consolation to anyone who cares about those people who have been and will be victimized by those least meritorious of robber barons, those Soviet-era bureaucrats who became the post-Soviet oligarchs and kleptocrats.

A nation has a right to self-determination, but the problem I see is that, at last count, many of the people running former Soviet nations--including apparently Russia's president Putin--were unreformed or just-barely-reformed instruments of a regime widely regarded as extremely corrupt. Perhaps even worse, 70 years of Newspeak do take their toll on the minds a populace. If you're not concerned about that, please re-read Orwell's 1984.

While the reconstitution of a Soviet Union seems unlikely, it also seems likely that many rough years are ahead unless the citizens of CIS nations can elect more reform-minded leaders. I wish good luck to my friends in Ukraine, and to "Tolya Bolya" and the rest of my 1976-77 class of my Detsky Sad, which I assume was the one nearest Moscow's Timiryazev Agricultural Academy.