Re: 2014-#220-Johnson’s Russia List (Adomanis on Applebaum)

Map of Russia

Subject: Re: 2014-#220-Johnson’s Russia List (Adomanis on Applebaum)
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2014
From: Martin Dewhirst <martin.dewhirst@googlemail.com>

Anne Applebaum (whom I read but do not know personally) does not need a low-profile person like myself to spring to her defense, but I would guess that she is too busy, and would consider it beneath her dignity, to respond to ill-informed comments on her views expressed by opinionated graphomaniacs. I wonder how many of the ‘Hundreds of books’ on political and economic trends in Russia in the 1990s Mark Adomanis has himself read? For instance, he shows no signs at all of having perused either Andrei Kovalev’s two-volume ‘Svidetel’stvo iz-za kulis rossiiskoi politiki’ (‘Testimony from the wings of Russian politics’) or even Peter Reddaway’s and Dmitri Glinski’s ‘The tragedy of Russia’s reforms: market bolshevism against democracy’. The few people who read and thought deeply about Russia in the 1990s were not in the least surprised when the prospects for democracy in Russia began to get considerably worse as early as in the autumn of 1993. It’s a great pity that even in 2014 the innumerable superficial commentators on the prospects for Russia fail to do the requisite amount of homework.

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