As we discuss Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine it is important, as Robert Skidelsky reminds us, that we do not “lose all sense of history” (Letters, March 4).
But his suggestion that we should look to the proximity of Nato to Russia’s borders for an explanation is too easy.
As an economic historian and biographer of John Maynard Keynes, Skidelsky should look closer to home — to the west’s economic, rather than military, response to the implosion of the USSR. It is not so much the march eastward of Nato in the 1990s that explains the rise of Putin but rather the lack of support for a post-soviet social substructure that would have enabled a proper economic liberalisation. But then why support the development of social market foundations in post-Soviet Russia when these were being dismantled at home?
The free-market Chicago school ideology behind the “shock therapy” exported to Russia in the 1990s wanted to help rather than punish. But still, Keynes would have predicted much the same outcome as that in Germany following the Treaty of Versailles: economic impoverishment followed by brutal dictatorship.
There is no doubt a logic to the shock therapy approach taken to the political economy of post-Soviet Russia. But as Keynes said of an early proponent of that logic — Friedrich Hayek — it is uncanny how “starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam”.
William Dixon
London SE18, UK
Letter: Worth heeding Keynes and the German parallels
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