These were Winston Churchill's words about Russia in 1939. The contradictions of the contemporary Russian situation are touched upon in this Dissent article.
I think the author raises some interesting points, but I disagree on some significant empirical facts and also find the interpretative framework the author is working with to be less than persausive. Nevertheless, the Russian conundrum is worthy of serious study among political economists.
Thanks to the work of Boettke and others the riddle is clear enough in principle - too many generations have lived without the benefits of the rule of law or a decent moral framework so it is possible to have healthy macroeconomic numbers while the woodwork of society remains rotten from top to bottom. The intellectual problem has been to locate a theoretical framework for political economy that is broad enough to take enough factors into account and robust enough in the details to stand up to criticism. Outside the classical liberal framework you have wide-ranging social theorists operating off more or less vague Marxist principles so they either have to say nothing about economics or if they do, they make no sense.
Suitable framemworks are available but up to date they have not achieved critical mass because their architects worked independently and never achieved synergy.
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