Russians: Too distrustful ... or naive?

[Carl Remick]

There was an interesting article in the New York Times magazine Sunday
-- by John Lloyd, the Financial Times' former Moscow bureau chief --
entitled, "Who Lost Russia?"  It appears online at the Times web site --
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990815mag-russia-crisis.h
tml -- under the less provocative title, "The Russian Devolution."
Bascially, the punchline of the article is that it's the *Communists*
who lost Russia because "Communism worked best in destroying most
remnants of civil society, leaving a people deeply distrustful of
everything, especially one another."  What makes this particularly
preposterous is that all the evidence in this piece leading up to that
comment indicates that, if anything, Russians were *too trusting* to be
able to resist the capitalist flimflam men who have taken over their
country and crippled its economy.

Carl