Konstantin Sonin is a noted Russian economist and public intellectual (he has hundreds of opinion columns on Russian political and economic issues, mostly in Russian, but some in English). Born and educated in Moscow, he was a professor and vice-rector in the New Economic School in Moscow, then a professor and vice-president in the HSE (Higher School of Economics) University in Moscow. He is currently a professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.It is worth noting that in May 2024 Russian authorities sentenced him (in absentia) to eight and half years in prison for posting information about the atrocities committed by Russian occupying forces in the town of Bucha in Ukraine.Below are my questions with brief answers by Konstantin.§Pranab Bardhan (PB): 1. I understand you are very strongly against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. You even envisage the need someday for a Nuremberg-style trial and punishment for him and his accomplices. Do you think his invasion in 2022 was largely due to massive misinformation, as you have talked about his being in a misinformation bubble surrounded only by his loyalist followers? Don’t you think there were other reasons, like his attempt to teach the Western alliance some lessons?Konstantin Sonin. Photo: Esther Dyson/Flickr/CC BY NC 2.0.Konstantin Sonin (KS): Every sane person is against an unprovoked war. Nobody attacked or threatened Russia in any way. As with Hitler’s aggression against Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands and other European countries, a war of conquest is a crime, pure and simple.Putin’s information bubble led him to believe, against all evidence, that he could get away with it. That he will be able to occupy a country of 40 million people, install a puppet regime and subjugate another nation into a colony. The same bubble led him to believe, against all evidence, that Western countries will somehow tacitly support the planned occupation.This bubble is not in one person’s head. It required the total disintegration of state institutions in Russia. As Hitler was surrounded by incompetent loyalists by 1941, by 2022 Putin was surrounded by either spineless nonentities or corrupt cronies. Neither the former, nor the latter would be able to stop Putin.(PB): 2. Whatever the original reason for invasion, after more than three years of devastating losses of Russian soldiers and resources (not to speak of the suffering and misery in Ukraine), with not much gain to show, how do you explain his continued campaigns of aggression? It cannot be just the tactics of gaining as much of Donbas territory as possible before any ceasefire deal, right? Do you think he has some insatiable revanchist dream, for which no cost is too great?(KS): It is easier to start a war than to finish. With more than 200,000 Russians dead, hundreds of thousands wounded, and hundreds of thousands exiled, what could Putin claim if he agrees to end the war? I am not saying Putin is comparable with Hitler, whose regime committed far more atrocities, but Hitler never negotiated – even when the battlefield situation was favourable.(PB): 3. Tell us your opinion about the resilience of the Russian economy, and of its citizens, and the adaptability of its producers and consumers. Do you think more than resilience it could also be the large failures and loopholes of the Western sanctions regime? What is the general feeling among the intelligentsia who are still in Russia?(KS): We know this from economic history that people adapt. An economic downturn might last a decade or more – and stagnation might last for decades. Russian people are much worse than at the beginning of the war – say their consumption may have fallen 10% – but this is still much better, multiples, of the Soviet-time levels.In many ways, the experience of the Russia-Ukraine war teaches us about wars of the past. A lot of people in Russia keep living the way they were living before the war – or perhaps they live the way Soviet people were living. Dozens of thousands of intellectuals, academics and thought leaders have left, but at least as many intellectuals have remained. Another endurance trial for the Russian intelligentsia…(PB): 4. What do you think will be the long-term effects of the war on the Russian economy and polity? Is the Russian ‘resource curse’ (for oil, gas, etc.) as harmful as, say, it has been for countries like Nigeria? Is a form of crony oligarchic extractive capitalism the inevitable fate for Russia?(KS): The resource curse in Russia was worse than in Nigeria. It resulted – or helped to result – in the state sliding into degenerate authoritarianism under Putin – and a war that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees from Russia. Perhaps the worst case of resource curse ever. Only Venezuela had more refugees, as a share of population, and they have not had that many deaths.On the economic side, Putin’s “restoration of socialism” will collapse as spectacularly as the Soviet one, and I hope faster. The faster the war ends, and Putin’s crony state is dismantled, which of course will entail a return to a market economy without state domination, the better.(PB): 5. What would you say are the main structural differences between an authoritarian Russia and a much more successful authoritarian China? Some people say that Russia is becoming more and more dependent on China on economic, military and diplomatic matters? Do Russian people support such an extent of dependence, however much they may hate the West?(KS): I don’t think there is much gain in comparing China and Russia today.I don’t think that people in Russia will appreciate if they come to realise how dependent on China our country has become. If there were real elections in Russia, this would’ve been a problem for Putin.(PB): 6. Growing up in India I have over the years acquired a deep admiration for Russian society, a society that can generate such great heights of literature, music, dance, art and culture (not to speak of scientific achievements). But even as an outsider I have also felt that these great heights of culture somehow magically arise from a deep well of pain, outrage and the ravages of history. Do you have an opinion on this?(KS): That’s all gone now. Every single big Russian writer of the 21st century is exiled and some jailed. Out best poet, Evgenia Berkovich, the modern Tsvetaeva, is in jail. [Tsvetaeva was a great Russian poet back in 1930s; the Stalin regime harassed her until she committed suicide in 1941].Putin’s government did more harm to Russian science, than Hitler’s to German science. And Hitler’s harm to German science has proved unrestorable. Of course, Russian science was not what Germany’s was when Hitler came to power, but I am speaking relatively. And the worst is yet to come.The best scenario out is that Russia demilitarises the way Japan and Germany did at the end of WWII, and this will be the end of Russian applied natural sciences. [Historically, a lot of great Russian science – from purely theoretical physics to space rockets – has been financed as military expenses. Demilitarisation, badly needed, will harm these fields again.]This article originally appeared on the author’s Substack.