This is Planet Money from NPR.

Within just the last month, Russia became the most sanctioned nation in the world.

The US and Europe have now imposed thousands of individual sanctions targeting everything

from Russia's banks to its luxury goods to its vodka even.

But as we've talked about here before, the real economic lifeblood of Russia isn't any

of that stuff.

A huge chunk of Russia's economy is oil, natural gas, and minerals.

And countries are kind of slowly also starting to sanction that stuff.

The thing about sanctions is that they force us to look at what another country's economy

really is.

And I think for a lot of us, this moment was a reminder that the Russian economy is a

lot less like the diversified economy of the United States.

And a lot more like the resource economy of a country like Saudi Arabia.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money.

I'm Kenny Malone.

And I'm Dave Blanchard.

This is not the first time the world has been forced to look a little closer at the

realities of the Russian economy.

Today on the show, we tell the story of the last big time that we had to look a little

closer.

It revealed one of the strangest, like 10-year stretches in modern monetary history.

When the Soviet Union was at its height in the 20th century, it was this big block of

...