As a newspaperman covering the economics of transition after 1989, I became interested in the Russian experience of the Nineties, especially after a young Russian immigrant who, having become a Harvard economics professor, took advantage of his appointment as a US State Department adviser to the government of Boris Yeltsin to enter the Russian mutual fund industry with his wife and their pals. Since then I’ve followed the story of US-Russian relations as it has gradually widened into front-page news. A friend pointed me to a fascinating book by a young philosopher about her and her family’s experience in Albania…