Vladimir Putin’s recent government reshuffle has produced a flood of oftentimes contradictory assessments, but there’s general agreement that the appointment of Andrei Belousov as minister of defense is a plus for the regime. He’s been called a “respected economist,” a “technocrat,” and, my favorite, a “fan of Rembrandt.”

Which is to say that Belousov is supposedly no mere thug, like so many of Putin’s shadowy pals, but a genuine professional — the right man for the job of eliminating rampant corruption within the armed forces and integrating the military economy into the civilian economy (or vice versa).

In fact, Belousov is almost certain to fail. His appointment is thus less a stroke of genius by Russia’s self-elected president than a sign, yet again, of the great leader’s incompetence.

Start with the fact that Belousov graduated from the Faculty of Economics of Moscow State University in 1981 — with distinction, no less. Note the year: The late 1970s and early 1980s were the period of High Brezhnevism — what Mikhail Gorbachev later called the “era of stagnation.”

While the USSR excelled in the hard sciences — as these were immune to contamination by Soviet ideology — Soviet economics, like the Soviet study of history and law, wasn’t quite the empirically and theoretically driven discipline practiced in the West. It’s for that reason perhaps that the liberal........

© The Hill