We research fellows of the Institute of Economic Forecasting (Russian Academy of Sciences) and members of the French-Russian monetary seminar never thought that we had to advocate our long-time partner and friend Jacques Sapir (professor, director of CEMI EHESS).

We Russian researchers were under the illusion that freedom of academic discussions in France is strictly inviolable. But it turned out that it was a mistake. There are people in France that consider soft censorship in academic discussions to be acceptable. These people are members of Scientific Council of OpenEdition web portal including director of the Center for Open Web Publications Marin Dacos, and they decided to disable Jacques Sapir’s blog. From their point of view it is necessary to disable Jacques Sapir’s blog “for being partisan political tribune unconnected with academic and scientific context”.
Honestly speaking it looks like poor anecdote. First of all we don’t understand how is it possible to conduct research in social sciences skipping economic, social, international and other policies? Secondly, why the web portal claims to be “open edition” for scientists when in actual practice this web portal is closed for some researchers due to political reasons?

For our part we inform that we are always ready to invite Jacques Sapir to publish his articles on the web portal of the Institute of Economic Forecasting, although we do not always share his political views. In this context we decided to present the most recent article by Jacques. The paper is dedicated to the European monetary policy and economic development. It was published in Studies on Russian Economic Development academic journal.

Director of the Institute of Economic Forecasting, prof. Victor Ivanter
Academic secretary of the French-Russian monetary seminar, prof. Oleg Govtvan
Vice director of the Institute of Economic Forecasting, prof. Dmitry Kuvalin