The first Russian theorist of economics, Ivan Tikhonovich Pososhkov, a Muscovite peasant's son who lived at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries and is known for his remarkable work "The Book of Poverty and Wealth, That Is, a Declaration of Whence…
"The post is a hole hewn by foreigners, through which they see plainly all our affairs of state and of trade." And therefore the post "must be abolished as soon as possible. The Russian people know nothing of foreign goods or of their prices, so let the foreigners know nothing of ours."
By present-day Russian standards, the idea looks remarkably timely. A case of being woken once more, three hundred years on
