Almost everything that is wrong with Washington Post foreign editor David Hoffman's new book about Russia's transformation into a capitalist system, The Oligarchs, can be discerned in one small and apparently meaningless passage on page 91. In it, the erstwhile Moscow bureau chief of the Post (1995-2001) describes former Russian Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais's reaction when, as a young man, the future and now infamous "father of Russian privatization" first read the works of Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek:

Many years later, Chubais recalled the thrill of reading Hayek and instantly gave his own example of how Hayek's theory worked in practice in the United States. "One person is selling hamburgers somewhere in New York," he told me, "while another person is grazing cows somewhere in Arkansas to produce meat that will be used to make those hamburgers. But in order for that person in Arkansas to graze cows, there needs to be a price for meat, which tells him that he should graze cows."

Now, the reaction a sane person is likely to have when reading a passage like this is, What kind of maniac experiences a "thrill" when reading about hamburger distribution? A corollary question that occurred to me, as I imagined this 20-year-old Soviet dreaming guiltily of Arkansas cattle, was, Were there no girls at all in the Leningrad of Anatoly Chubais's youth?

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