Russia’s Yen to Rebuild a House of Cards

The ability to “read the play” is a quality often ascribed to successful politicians, businessmen and sportsmen. The term refers to the ability to predict events and then to take an advantageous position in expectation of the prediction coming to fruition. In the sporting arena it is best seen in champion tennis players like Lew Hoad whose anticipation allowed him simply to “materialise behind an opponent’s ball” (as my brother Peter once neatly put it), and modern Aboriginal footballers with their uncanny foreknowledge of the way an oblong ball is about to bounce.

I was thinking about reading the play (or if you like, prescience) recently when reading the wonderful  memoir Last Boat to Astrakhan by Robert Haupt (left), an Australian writer and traveller who he died at the age of 49 just before this book was published and who spent five years in Russia between 1990 and 1996. Towards the end of this time, he took a boat trip down the Volga River from Moscow to the…