Indigenous Libraries and First Nations Cultural Entrepreneurship

摘要

Back in the early 1990s, when the Soviet bloc economies were hauled-brutally and all too often, rapaciously- into the "real world" of the market economy, great wealth magically appeared in the hands of a few very clever criminals who looted Russia and its dominions, largely the old Warsaw Pact's energy and metallurgy industries. Oligarchs made impossible fortunes based on their connections to former Soviet apparatchiks. The upshot beggars belief: Billions continue to vanish from Russia. The true horror of the collapse of the Russian economy is still playing out in the allegations swirling around the U.S. presidential administration and its alleged ties to immense- and immensely dubious-Russian wealth. In the midst of that chaos and social agony for tens of millions of people east of the old Cold War borders, a handful of economists wondered how economic engineers were able to restructure the old, centrally planned economies of the Warsaw Pact.