Economic Principals started writing about Russia in July, 2002, with “The Thing’s a Mess,” a glimpse of a story from the kleptomaniacal decade that followed the collapse of the USSR: how a prominent Harvard economist, his wife, and two sidekicks, working in Russia on behalf of the US State Department, covered by high-level friends in the Clinton administration, had been caught seeking to cut to the head of the queue to enter the country’s new mutual fund business with a firm of their own. EP followed the saga through the US invasion of Iraq; Vladimir Putin’s objections; his brief 2008…