Daniel McCarthy, Sheila Puffer and Ann Simmons come from different worlds, but share two things in common: Russia and Northeastern University.
McCarthy, emeritus D’Amore-McKim university distinguished professor of global management and innovation, and Puffer, university distinguished professor of international business, have spent decades researching Russia and its economic transformation. Simmons, the executive editor of Northeastern Global News, spent years as a journalist reporting in Russia most recently as The Wall Street Journal’s Moscow bureau chief.
Their paths arced across continents and decades of political and economic turmoil in Russia to bring them together at Northeastern. The three recently sat down to discuss what brought the country, and themselves, to where they are now and how Russia’s past still plays an overbearing role in its dark present under President Vladimir Putin.
McCarthy, Puffer and Simmons set out to answer a question that is at the center of the current political moment. How did Russia go from a brief moment of post-Soviet hope back to the dark days of the Cold War?
The story starts decades before Putin.
“You’ve got to understand Russia’s background and its history and what they came from,” Simmons said. “People say, ‘Why on Earth would anyone support Vladimir Putin today?’ But it’s understanding what Russians started with, the kind of hardships.”
Simmons first arrived in the Soviet Union in 1984 to attend Moscow’s Pushkin Institute of Russian Language. What she saw was far from the image of a global superpower that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR, projected to the world. She found an oppressive government with a total stranglehold on its citizens, many of whom resorted to spying on each other in an effort to prove their loyalty to the system. The Soviet infrastructure, encumbered by state-led centralized planning, was in shambles. Basic necessities, such as toilet paper, soap and fresh produce were chronically absent or in short supply. Survival depended on one’s ability to stand in line.
“I remember, when I was a student there, having to line up for toilet paper, and the queue would be three blocks long, and people were just waiting,” Simmons said.
03/13/26 – BOSTON, MA. – Ann Simmons, Executive Editor of NGN, hosts a podcast with Sheila Puffer, University Distinguished Professor of International Business Law and Daniel McCarthy, Emeritus University Distinguished Professor and McKim-D’Amore Distinguished Professor of Global Management and Innovation, at EDGE Recording Studios in on March 12, 2026. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
03/13/26 – BOSTON, MA. – Ann Simmons, Executive Editor of NGN, hosts a podcast with Sheila Puffer, University Distinguished Professor of International Business Law and Daniel McCarthy, Emeritus University Distinguished Professor and McKim-D’Amore Distinguished Professor of Global Management and Innovation, at EDGE Recording Studios in on March 12, 2026. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
03/13/26 – BOSTON, MA. – Ann Simmons, Executive Editor of NGN, hosts a podcast with Sheila Puffer, University Distinguished Professor of International Business Law and Daniel McCarthy, Emeritus University Distinguished Professor and McKim-D’Amore Distinguished Professor of Global Management and Innovation, at EDGE Recording Studios in on March 12, 2026. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
03/13/26 – BOSTON, MA. – Ann Simmons, Executive Editor of NGN, hosts a podcast with Sheila Puffer, University Distinguished Professor of International Business Law and Daniel McCarthy, Emeritus University Distinguished Professor and McKim-D’Amore Distinguished Professor of Global Management and Innovation, at EDGE Recording Studios in on March 12, 2026. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
03/13/26 – BOSTON, MA. – Ann Simmons, Executive Editor of NGN, hosts a podcast with Sheila Puffer, University Distinguished Professor of International Business Law and Daniel McCarthy, Emeritus University Distinguished Professor and McKim-D’Amore Distinguished Professor of Global Management and Innovation, at EDGE Recording Studios in on March 12, 2026. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
During a recent podcast conversation, Northeastern’s Daniel McCarthy, Sheila Puffer and Ann Simmons explained how the roots of Vladimir Putin’s Russia begin decades before, in the hardships of the Soviet Union. Photos by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Despite the Soviet Union’s claim that communist rule had made a society where equality was the standard and the same rules applied to each citizen, there were still haves and have nots and the societal structure was in reality one of paternalism with an unspoken privileged class comprised of senior Communist Party officials, factory bosses and members of the intelligentsia.
Puffer, who was in the Soviet Union at the time studying Soviet factory managers for her book “Behind Factory Walls: Decision Making in Soviet and U.S. Factories,” said it was a system not built on merit but connections. The control that the state had on the goods led to an informal, but rampant, system of bartering among Soviet citizens.
“Factory managers’ would have the tolkach, the facilitator, the fixer, and they would be trading bottles of vodka and sending a fixer to Estonia [a Baltics Soviet republic] to get the parts they needed,” Puffer said.
Under Mikhail Gorbachev, who was appointed general secretary by the Politburo, the country’s ruling body, in 1985, the country of, by then, some 277 million people started to undergo a significant transformation.
Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost, or openness, invited more open discussion of politics and opportunities for a free press. He also launched restructuring of the Soviet government political system, known as perestroika, aimed at decentralizing governmental control of the economy and modernizing the USSR, said Simmons, who worked as a correspondent in Russia for Time Magazine in the early 1990s.
A delegation from the Soviet Ministry of Aviation Industry even visited Northeastern to “learn about capitalism,” McCarthy recalled. It made him hopeful that the Soviet Union could transform its economy.
03/13/26 – BOSTON, MA. – Ann Simmons, Executive Editor of NGN, hosts a podcast with Sheila Puffer, University Distinguished Professor of International Business Law and Daniel McCarthy, Emeritus University Distinguished Professor and McKim-D’Amore Distinguished Professor of Global Management and Innovation, at EDGE Recording Studios in on March 12, 2026. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
03/13/26 – BOSTON, MA. – Ann Simmons, Executive Editor of NGN, hosts a podcast with Sheila Puffer, University Distinguished Professor of International Business Law and Daniel McCarthy, Emeritus University Distinguished Professor and McKim-D’Amore Distinguished Professor of Global Management and Innovation, at EDGE Recording Studios in on March 12, 2026. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
03/13/26 – BOSTON, MA. – Ann Simmons, Executive Editor of NGN, hosts a podcast with Sheila Puffer, University Distinguished Professor of International Business Law and Daniel McCarthy, Emeritus University Distinguished Professor and McKim-D’Amore Distinguished Professor of Global Management and Innovation, at EDGE Recording Studios in on March 12, 2026. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
03/13/26 – BOSTON, MA. – Ann Simmons, Executive Editor of NGN, hosts a podcast with Sheila Puffer, University Distinguished Professor of International Business Law and Daniel McCarthy, Emeritus University Distinguished Professor and McKim-D’Amore Distinguished Professor of Global Management and Innovation, at EDGE Recording Studios in on March 12, 2026. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Daniel McCarthy and Sheila Puffer were instrumental in forging connections between the Soviet Union-turned-Russia and Northeastern University through academic exchanges and even a visit from by then former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1998. Photos by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
“Developing economies often have [bartering] as the foundation, and then they try to move to something more formal and that’s what perestroika was about, to move beyond that,” McCarthy said.
The Soviet Union also started exchanging faculty and students with Western universities, including Northeastern. A Northeastern delegation, which included Puffer, negotiated an exchange with Moscow State University. Four Soviet students completed their business degrees at Northeastern, while Northeastern journalism students went to study at Moscow State University. Northeastern maintained its connection with Moscow State and later helped establish an accounting program there, the first of its kind in Russia.
But the more McCarthy worked with Puffer, studying the workings of Soviet enterprises, the more he learned about the sorry state of the Soviet economy.
“You just cannot barter your way into high levels of gross national product and such,” he said.
Ultimately, Gorbachev’s policies were potentially too radical. The destabilizing effect of those policies combined with economic stagnation led to an abortive coup against the Soviet leader, eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and Gorbachev’s resignation as the country’s president – a role he was elected to in 1990 by the Congress of People’s Deputies, the nation’s highest legislative body at the time.
Northeastern continued to play a major role in monitoring Russia’s post-Soviet transformation.
In 1997, the chairman of the Northeastern’s Board of Trustees, George Matthews, established the Gorbachev Foundation of North America, centered at Northeastern and originally led by Puffer. The center, which studied international economic and political issues and the Cold War, invited Gorbachev to give a talk at Northeastern in 1998. That same year, he served as the university’s graduate commencement speaker.
Both Puffer and McCarthy also spent a decade tracking Russia’s attempted shift from state-owned enterprise to entrepreneurship. They watched the opportunity for economic freedom and growth become “freedom for some and nothing for others,” McCarthy said.
Oligarchs, wealthy business owners, rose from the ashes of state-owned factories, concentrating wealth in the hands of a dozen or so powerful people. With them came organized crime to offer “protection” for the country’s entrepreneurs. For most people, “nothing very much changed,” McCarthy explained.
Resentment began to fester among the Russian public as many struggled to embrace the rapid transformation from a socialist to fledgling market-oriented economy, Simmons said. Boris Yeltsin, who served as Russia president from 1991, abruptly resigned in 1999 and appointed a popular, but largely obscure, politician as his successor: Vladimir Putin.
Putin came into power at a time when the Russian people were desperate for positive, meaningful change, Simmons said. He pledged to combat corruption, improve living standards through raising wages and revamping infrastructure, and restore stability to a country reeling from years of financial crisis.
At first, he delivered on that promise.
“The infrastructure development took off. The roads that … had potholes and were really bad, suddenly these were superhighways,” Simmons said. “The shops were suddenly stocked with food that Russians have never seen.”
But the early promise of Putin faded, as Puffer and McCarthy noticed a recentralization of power and control over key industries, particularly the nation’s lifeblood: oil.
“Power corrupts,” Simmons said. Returning to Russia, first in 2014 when she covered the impact of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and then in 2018 to serve as The Wall Street Journal’s Moscow bureau chief, Simmons found a country on the brink of reverting to the Cold War reality she had experienced decades before.
Relations between Russia and the West have further soured with the launch of Russia’s war against Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, in 2022. Inside the country, Putin’s government has unleashed a wave of repression, with surveillance, harassment, and arrest of citizens and journalists becoming common practice. One of Simmons’ own reporters, Evan Gershkovich, was snatched while on assignment in 2023, accused of being a U.S. spy and held in a Russian prison for 16 months. Meanwhile, Russia has been hit by a raft of international sanctions for its unprovoked aggression against Ukraine, hamstringing its economy. Most Western companies pulled out of Russia at the start of the war and have never returned.
For Simmons, it’s been especially “traumatic” and “distressing” to watch Putin steadily tighten his stranglehold on Russia, a country that she said is “bursting with energy and wants to be free.”