[Anders Åslund: re: Putin, Soviet Geopolitical Disaster:] RE: 2014-#166-Johnson’s Russia List/Patrick Armstrong

File Photo of Vladimir Putin Sitting at Desk

Subject: RE: 2014-#166-Johnson’s Russia List/Patrick Armstrong
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 19:31:4
From: Anders Aslund <AAslund@PIIE.COM>

Dear David,

Absurdly, Patrick Armstrong attacks me (JRL 166 #6) for translating Putin’s words “крушение Советского Союза было крупнейшей геополитической катастрофой века” with the words “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical disaster of the century.” Well, that is how it should be translated. Google Translate, our new authority, agrees with me (using two synonyms): “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

Armstrong makes the point that the official Kremlin translation is “a major” but that would be the positive form “крупный”, not the superlative “крупнейший,” which Putin used. As any scholar of the Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia knows, such an official softening when translating Russian into English is just too common. That is why serious scholars of Russia make their own translations from the Russian original, though that requires sufficient understanding of the Russian language.

Unfortunately for Armstrong, Putin made his point all too clearly.

With best regards,
Anders Åslund
Senior Fellow
Peterson Institute for International Economics

 

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