NO ONE FLIES AEROFLOT:

[I]t's hard to call something an accident when it happens so regularly. Barely a month goes by without something falling from the Russian sky: Rockets, satellites, MiG fighter jets have all come crashing down in the past year. In June a plane crashed into the runway in the northern capital city of Petrozavodsk, killing 44. In July a plane began to break up in flight just outside of Tomsk in western Siberia, killing six. And most notably, a Russian plane ferrying the Polish president and half his government to a commemoration last spring of the Soviet massacre of Polish officers crashed in the fog outside of Smolensk, killing everyone onboard.

Such anecdotes generate the kind of harrowing statistics that underlie a systemic collapse. This year serious accidents occurred at a rate of three per million flights-more than 12 times the global average. "Russia's safety record is about as bad as it was in Soviet times," says Boris Rybak, a former aviation industry consultant who now runs a Moscow p.r. agency.

Some of the blame falls on the Soviet- era aircraft and those that came out of Russia's lurching post-Communist period. (The aircraft that crashed outside Smolensk, an 18-year-old 42D model from an obscure Russian manufacturer, Yakovlev, had been due for a rehaul in the ensuing months.) But the Berlin Wall fell more than 20 years ago, and Vladimir Putin's ascendant dynasty began in 1999, in lockstep with Russia's energy gold rush. The planes falling from the sky prove more the symptom of a deadly trade policy that offers a global case study in the perils of protectionism.

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