Rethinking Russia's importance on the global stage.

• Author: Adams, Tucker Hart
• Position: The ECONOMIST

I spent the first half of January in the little stanitsa (a village large enough to have a church) of Ust Khopiorskya, deep in the Cossack region of south-western Russia. Ten of us - five Americans and five Russians - traveled the 20 hours by train from Moscow to participate in the Orthodox Christmas/New Year's celebrations, record folk music and collect stories and oral histories from the villagers.

I've been making similar trips for the last eight years, a new twist to my 20 years of exploring the former Soviet Union. I had no particular interest in folk music, but it was the only way I could find to spend time in remote villages. One will never understand a country and its people if she only visits a few big cities.

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Lena, the head of the folklore department at the Russian Academy of Science, and Andrei, the country's top ethno-musicologist from the Moscow Conservatory, have shown me a side of Russia that few Americans are privileged to experience. I always come home thankful and humbled by how much we have in America (and tempted to build a small shrine to indoor plumbing).

On the endless flight home, I read Marshall Goldman's new book, "Petrostate: Putin, Power and the New Russia." Marshall was a young economics professor at Wellesley when I attended college there in the 1950s. Today he is one of our top Sovietologists. His book recounts how Russia, now the world's largest petroleum producer, has become an energy superpower with influence that exceeds its Cold War military power. He also questions Putin's commitment to being a dependable supplier of oil and natural gas, a prescient observation given the recent cutoff of natural gas supplies to the Ukraine and Europe during a bitter cold January.

Russia is feeling the impact of the global recession and declining energy prices. The granddaughter of one of our singers, visiting from Volgograd for the holidays, told us she'd lost her clerical job at Mitsubishi; my friend in Moscow was laid off from her job teaching English to executives at a large Russian company there; one of our Russian students, a composer who works in television and the theater, said contracts for new commercials and productions this spring have been canceled.

Russia is a one-industry economy and is reeling from the impact...