Nobody Knows How 21st-Century Russians Will Respond to Crisis
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Economies grow and contract, currencies rise and fall. In the past what's marked a crisis as a particularly Russian one isn't nuclear weaponry, as Paul Krugman argued yesterday, but denial that there's anything wrong at all.
So far the award for denial goes to Anatoly Artamonov, the governor of the Kaluga Region, in western Russia. On Tuesday, Artamonov banned public use of the word "crisis." The country has hit an "inconvenient moment," as Artamonov put it, that requires an "internal audit" of investment policies. "There probably is a crisis," he said, "But we're banning its utterance." If the Soviets were that honest about Orwellianism they might have survived the century.