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And on the last day of 1999, while the West partied one last time like it was 1999, Yeltsin resigned his Presidency and handed over the impossible Russian mess to his little known forty-seven year old prime-minister Vladimir Putin.
And this new Russian acting President went straight to work doing the exact opposite of what the hired consultants from The Economic Science™ had advised his finance ministry to do. Mother Russia would not conjure herself into a deeper financial morass from which she could never escape, but instead began the long and arduous process of producing her way out of her quandary. And she had a tremendous amount of surplus useful stuff to export like oil, food, and natural gas that could kindle demand for her failing currency and pull her from the brink of economic and existential oblivion.
