What a dire article over at Bloomberg by one Catherine Hickley, comparing the issues of the possible break-up of the Eurozone with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Here’s how not to write such things.

First, it seems to me to stretch things a bit to describe the post-Soviet space in 1992 as a ‘currency zone’. The ruble was not a normal currency in any sense that mattered, and by 1992 (after the USSR had been officially dissolved) it was just a matter of time before all the former republics started to take control of their own money.

The Soviet experience tells us “an exit like this is messy and leads to loss of income and inflation, and people are right to be scared of it,” said Harold James, a professor of history at Princeton University whose books include “The End of Globalization: Lessons From the Great Depression.” “It isn’t an attractive analogy at all because the Soviet Union states all had serious troubles for the whole of the 1990s.”  

What? No it doesn’t. The former republics did not ‘exit’ the Rublezone – the arrangement simply toppled over.

While differences between the Soviet Union and the EU are greater than their similarities, there are parallels that may prove helpful in assessing the debt crisis, historians say. Both were postwar constructs set up in response to a collective trauma; in both cases, the founding generation was dying out as crisis hit and disintegration loomed.

What?! The founding generation of the USSR were long dead by 1991, most of them murdered by Stalin decades earlier .

The vision that knitted together the states of the Soviet Union was Communism. When that founding principle was cast into doubt, partly through the advent of democracy in the former satellites of eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, faith in the central Soviet government evaporated.

What? A vision that knits states? That’s an early but strong contender for Idiotic Mixed Metaphor of the Century. The collapse of the USSR was all because ‘faith’ in the central Soviet government had been lost? Whose ‘faith’? Who lost it?

“Once a certain ideological vision of the future is belied by events, you have a problem. Such a loss of confidence in its ideology was devastating for the Soviet Union.”

What? It wasn’t a loss of ideological confidence that destroyed the USSR. It was the fact that that communist ideology created a system that simply didn’t work, leading to (for example) shortages of even basic food.

The lesson for the EU is that it should be watching closely what Germany is doing, and be wary of calls for a smaller euro zone, or a “two-speed Europe,” Krastev said. Unions don’t break up because of troubles in peripheral countries, they break up from the core, he said.

Well, that’s probably true.

“Disintegration doesn’t occur because everyone wants to go their own way,” said Krastev at the think-tank in Bulgaria. “It happens because politicians envisage a closer, optimal union. This crisis is already reducing the borders of solidarity. The EU space is going to be renegotiated.”

So disintegration happens because politicians want integration? Interesting. Even though we ought to be wary of a "two-speed Europe" (why?) it’s going to happen anyway?

As the Soviet states reverted to old national borders, fiscal union disintegrated. Though the Russian central bank was the only one of the 15 national banks with a license to print rubles, all of them could issue credit.

Runaway deficits and hyperinflation followed. Ukraine had an average quarterly inflation rate of about 100 percent from the second quarter of 1992 through the third quarter of 1993, according to Patrick Conway, a professor of economics at the University of North Carolina, in his essay “Currency Proliferation: the Monetary Legacy of the Soviet Union.”

I can’t see that this has any parallels at all with what the EU now faces. Back then Russia was the only part of the former USSR capable of tackling these issues seriously, and it sensibly forced through a move to stop the other republics free-riding on ‘its’ currency. Germany looks unlikely to resort to such drastic means, and in any case 100% unlike the former Soviet republics all EU states have the technical capacity and recent experience to set up and run their own currencies to a high standard.

The trouble is, as the ruble experience shows, that a joint currency requires its own glue that goes beyond common economic interests, Krastev said.

“A currency is about trust,” he said. “There is a need for an emotional sense of shared citizenship to have a common currency. It is good to have a shared sense of belonging.”

Again, true. And nothing whatsoever to do with what the Soviet Union was all about. In the EU for all its faults there is substantive pluralism as between the different member states – that indeed explains why it is so poorly run. In the USSR Moscow ran the show – such as it was – with an iron grip. Money represented something philosophically different.

Conclusion? Don’t waste our time with trite, misplaced historical comparisons.