EXPECTATIONS were high last week as Alexei Kudrin, a former finance minister and the informal leader of a moderate liberal camp in the Russian establishment, outlined his proposed economic programme in a packed Moscow auditorium. Russia’s top economic officials occupied the front row. Foreign ambassadors sat behind. Journalists stood in the aisles. The setting was the Gaidar Forum, a symposium named after the architect of Russia’s market reforms in the 1990s. The date, Friday the 13th, was perhaps unfortunate.
