Hot off the presses at NYT:

A prominent and well-connected economist who has openly supported opposition figures has resigned from several posts and abruptly left Russia under mounting pressure from investigators, officials of the university he leads said on Wednesday.

The economist, Sergei Guriev, has been questioned repeatedly in a case that stems from a report that he co-wrote that harshly criticized the treatment of Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the imprisoned oil tycoon and one-time political rival to President Vladimir V. Putin.

A centrist figure who is at home among Russia’s power brokers, Mr. Guriev drew attention a year ago for publicly declaring his support for the anti-corruption blogger Aleksei Navalny.

I’ve read Guriev’s papers in the past but his name seemed particularly familiar. I realized the Mikhail Golosov has presented a joint paper with Guriev and others at the Nemmers Conference just last week. Some people think Stalin’s policies were necessary to push labor from the countryside to industry and hence the hardship they caused, while cruel, had some long term positive economic impact. Chermukin, Golosov, Guriev and Tysvinki argue, using data they collected and a two sector growth model, that Stalin’s policies reduced welfare significantly in the long run.

This guy is hardly a radical.

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