High prices will outlast the war
In 1866 nikolai nekrasov, a Russian author, started publishing “Who is happy in Russia”, a four-part poem describing how the abolition of serfdom, enacted a few years before, had failed to enrich most peasants. “The chain has been broken,” its first chapter concludes, and the recoiling ends have hit both sides at once.
A century and a half later his verses are a parable for the ostracism of Russia—and its likely fallout. Crushing the world’s 11th-largest economy, comparable in size to Australia, should not necessarily cause global mayhem. But since Nekrasov’s time, and further still since the Soviet Union collapsed, the chain of dependence linking Russia to the world economy has strengthened and grown more complex.