Even before the crisis, the expert advisers that Medvedev cultivated in his personal entourage had been calling for a new course.22 In the wake of the crisis their message was even louder. What had made Russia so vulnerable in 2008 was its lopsided integration into the world economy: on the one hand, its excessive reliance on oil and gas; on the other hand, the corrupt culture of capital flight, in which Russian oligarchs sluiced money in and out of the country through the off-shore banking system.
