War Stories

In the March/April 2004 issue of Foreign Policy, along with collaborator Andrei Shleifer, a professor of Economics at Harvard University, Treisman published a voluminous essay about Russia entitled “A Normal Country.” It was just about the time that Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB spy, was being reelected president, and the West had to decide whether to fish or cut bait in opposing him. In the article, Treisman argued that while “conventional wisdom in the West says that post-Cold War Russia has been a disastrous failure, the facts say otherwise. Aspects of Russia’s performance over the last decade may have been disappointing, but the notion that the country has gone through an economic cataclysm and political relapse is wrong–more a comment on overblown expectations than on Russia’s actual experience. Compared to other countries at a similar level of economic and political development, Russia looks more the norm than the exception.”