Paul Roderick Gregory: Putin hammers another nail in the coffin of the Russian economy
Vice-president of the ice hockey club SKA Saint Petersburg Roman Rotenberg (L) takes a selfie picture with Russia's President Vladimir Putin (C) as Russian businessman and president of the ice hockey club SKA Saint Petersburg Gennady Timchenko (2ndR) stands nearby during an ice hockey match as part of the Night Hockey league tournament in Sochi on May 15, 2015.
As a regular visitor to the USSR and Russia in the late 1980s and 1990s, I remember the utter disaster commercial aviation was back then. Moscow’s three airports seemed deliberately designed to torture ordinary passengers, whereas the elite were escorted to their flights from exclusive lounges. The path from airport entrance to the plane was a confusing maze for uninitiated Westerners. Domodedovo (DME), from which flights to the East originated, was a forbidding hulk of steel located in the middle of nowhere. I recall waiting for a flight from DME to Siberia in a dimly-lit terminal, having no idea when the plane might take off. Moscow’s Sheremetova earned the title of the world’s second worst international airport behind that of Manila.
