Doing Business with Putin’s Russia: Why it’s Dangerous to Trade with People who don’t Believe in Trade

I spent the 1990s teaching economics at a business school in Moscow. Our students were graduates of FizTech, Mekh-Mat, MIFI—the whole alphabet soup of science and technology schools that had fed the Soviet military-industrial establishment. These young men and women had degrees in things like “laser weapons platform design” that weren’t in much demand in Boris Yeltsin’s new Russia. Now they wanted to become financial analysts, accountants, and business IT specialists.

The students were incredibly bright and had great quantitative skills, but there were ideas in our American-style MBA curriculum that many of them found hard to grasp. Not my subject, economics. None of them had ever had an econ course before, but they ate up equations and models like breakfast cereal. Instead, the hardest thing for some of them to grasp was the idea that business could be something other than a zero-sum game.