There’s an old Russian proverb that goes, “The economy is a good servant, but a bad master.” Apparently, the saying doesn’t apply to Vladimir Putin. The Russian ruble is currently in the midst of an historic landslide; Russia’s central bank jacked interest rates up nearly seven points on Tuesday to counter the currency’s two-day, 20-percent fall. And yet today also brought news that the Russian president had emerged from a public-opinion poll as the country’s “Man of the Year”—for the fifteenth straight year. The survey—conducted by the Russian polling group Public Opinion Foundation on December 7 among 1,500 respondents in …read more
Source: The Atlantic
