Read Online 1636 The Kremlin Games by Paula Goodlett, Eric Flint, Gorg Huff - Free Book Online

right thing. This is not a matter for men of any rank.”
    The guy turned a little pink and her mom, who was struggling though the letter, started laughing too.
    All in all, though she wouldn’t know it for months, Brandy had managed by accident to make a fairly good first impression on Vladimir.
    In the meantime, after they had said goodbye to Kniaz Vladimir Gorchakov and seen the play, Brandy was left with the letter. Its very sparseness made it clear that this Natalia Whosis didn’t know what or how much she could ask without giving offense. So Brandy put together a female care package. 1995 Victoria’s Secret , a 1993 Glamour , 1997 Vogue , a Better Homes and Gardens plus cold cream, nail polish, eye shadow, and a pair of the stretchy one-size-fits-all pantyhose, with instructions. Brandy considered sending an actual bra, but she didn’t have Natasha’s sizes. So instead they sent a tape measure and more instructions.

Chapter 14
     
     
    Ivan Nikitich Odoevskii didn’t look like a book worm. He was tall and as richly dressed as a prince and a member of the Boyar Duma ought to be. He rode, he was a skilled falconer, but he did love to read. He read anything. Account books. Treatises. Stories. Anything he could get his hands on. His fierce black beard was twitching and his blue eyes squinted as he thought. “It’s complicated, Patriarch. Yes, the up-timers use paper money, but their system is a tortured mix of the government and . . . well, anarchy.”
    “Anarchy?”
    “They have something called federal reserve banks . . .” Vladimir had sent several tracts on economics—not very detailed or all that complete—back to Moscow, which had arrived about the time Boris had gotten back to Grantville. Along with them had come a very rough outline of what Vladimir thought might work for a banking system in Russia. That outline would have the great families issue money, having bought the right from the Czar’s Bank or the Gorchakov Bank. With some vague limitations based on how much their property was worth. Going from those tracts on up-time economics, Ivan Nikitich explained his understanding of how the future economic system worked.
    Patriarch Filaret was a man of no mean intellect, but his eyes were glazing over within a paragraph. He tried to follow the salient points for a while, but finally gave up. “Enough. Can we use it, Ivan Nikitich? Can we use it?”
    Ivan Nikitich sighed like the wind gusting from the north. “Yes. But it is dangerous. The tracts made that clear, even if I could only understand one word in three without talking to that idiot Bernie.” Ivan Nikitich snorted. “And only one word in two after talking to him. The danger is more than the simple temptation to print ever more and more as it loses its value. That’s a danger, true enough. It is made worse by the fact that failing to print enough can hurt the nation even more. That is one thing the excerpts young Vladimir sent taught me. Half of Russia’s troubles are caused by not enough cash.”
    “You needed a tract from the future to tell you Russia is not a wealthy nation?” Filaret snorted in exasperation.
    “No!” Ivan Nikitich almost shouted, then visibly got hold of himself. “Patriarch, what I needed the writings from the future to tell me was that Russia is a wealthy nation. A wealthy nation with what the up-timers call a ‘cash flow problem.’ That Russia has everything it needs to have a booming economy, except the economy.”
    Filaret glared a bit. “Speak sense!”
    Ivan Nikitich sighed. “We have grain. We have timber. We have pitch, not to mention furs of all sorts. We have rivers that in summer give us clear roads from China and India to the Baltic Sea. In hard winter, the sleighs are more efficient than wagons are. What we lack is a means of tying all those things together. Much of our trade is just that. A peasant trades a bushel of grain to another peasant for bit of cloth. It happens that way because neither