It’s not easy to find a disinterested and well-informed view of the Russian economy these days. I don’t know a better source among economists than Kenneth Rogoff, of Harvard University. The former chief economist of the IMF (2001-03) has no axe to grind as far as I can tell, beyond a certain taste for good housekeeping and global order. (His wife, Natasha Lance Rogoff, produced Sesame Street for Russian television in the Nineties.) An early diagnostician of the severity of the 2008 financial crisis, he was author, with fellow Harvard professor Carmen Reinhart, of This Time Is Different (Princeton, 2009). …