Andrew Meier

Many years ago, when I was still living in the Moscow kommunalka a few blocks from the Kremlin with my friends Andrei and Lera, they took me to visit a dacha far outside town. It belonged to a friend of Lera's, an old Jewish woman, the soft-spoken matriarch of five generations of women. She had lived several lives, had survived the ravages of World War II and Stalinism. If anyone, I thought, she would know.
What was the difference, I asked, between Stalin and Hitler?
"Hitler," she replied without pause, "killed only his enemies."
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On June 6, 2002, it officially declared Russia a free market economy. The optimism was shared by few Russians. The poverty line after all still cut through a third of Russia's households. Per capita GDP, at twenty-one hundred dollars in 2001. True, stocks were up again, but who owned stock? The capitalization of Russia's entire stock market, moreover, equaled less than a sixth of General Electric's. True, the fall of the Soviet bloc had opened new markets for the men who now controlled Russia's oil and gas, but the rest o the populace discovered only the downside of globalization: the onslaught of foreign brands and the competitive advantage of exporters East and West.