Commentary
My good friend professor Yuri Maltsev died this week and I’ve spent these mourning days recalling our conversations. He was a leading economist in the old Soviet Union, as the top advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev’s chief economist. He defected in 1989 before the Soviet Union fell apart. We became fast friends just after he landed in D.C., and we spent a year or more together collaborating on many projects.
He was a font of amazing stories about how things really worked in the Soviet Union. Contrary to what U.S. economists were claiming until the very end, it was not a rich country with mighty industrial achievements. It was a poor country where nothing worked. There were no replacement parts for most machines including tractors. He doubted that there would ever be a nuclear exchange simply because most Soviet workers knew that the bombs were all for show. If they ever dared press the button, they would most likely blow themselves up….