John Nye: evaluation

Transcript context

…I’m not predicting this, but let’s take this as a hypothetical. Isn’t it then a fairly well-defined national unit? They have a lot of human capital, still some good systems of training. Look, but that’s different. If Russia could hand over two-thirds of its land mass and keep a large chunk of what we think of as western Russia, I think it would develop a lot faster. But that’s exactly what will not happen. Look, forget about handing anything over to the Chinese. The Russians don’t properly develop Vladivostok. They don’t properly develop the Russian Far East. Why shouldn’t Vladivostok, for example — just to take it off the top of my head — be as fully developed as San Francisco is for the United States? In some sense, it’s the other outpost. You have the eastern leaders and you have the western leaders. What you don’t see is, you don’t see cities in Russia on the eastern part which are as advanced, as successful, as commercial, and as dynamic, both intellectually and commercially, as Moscow and St. Petersburg. And their inability to permit that or encourage it — or in fact, in my view, their tendency to discourage it because, for various complicated reasons — is part of what holds Russia back. But if we’re trying to think through Russian culture, clearly there are some things they’re very good at. The history during World War II of disassembling and then reassembling factories in the east — that was astonishing. Mobilizing manpower, building certain kinds of tanks pretty quickly and effectively. Then in other areas, the performance is much weaker. Do you have an integrated theory of Russian culture that at least partially fits in what the country’s very good at and very bad at?…

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