(Moscow Times) The ruble-to-dollar exchange rate dominated headlines this week, falling to a record low of 42 rubles to the U.S. dollar. Considering the extraordinary events of recent months, why would anyone but a historian take any interest in looking back to the spring and summer of 1991 to consider what it can teach us about world order, international security, Russia's history and its path to development?
Why is it appropriate to recall the early years of the 1990s now? The reason is that Russia has experienced three major economic crises in the last two decades, but the current one most closely resembles not the two prior crises of 1998 and 2008, but the first that occurred 20 years ago and that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Analysts saw the crises of 1998 and 2008 coming several months in advance, although the public remembers the first crisis as beginning on Aug. 17, 1998, and the second as beginning in October-November 2008, when tensions in the global market quickly spread to the Russian economy and led to a sharp decline in industrial output and a surge in unemployment. […]
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