For companies such as Severstal, which exports nearly 20 percent of its output, the benefits of devaluation are obvious: All of the costs that go into producing steel in Russia—iron ore, manganese, nickel, labor, electricity—are priced in rubles. That means the companies’ costs relative to their international competitors’ have plummeted. At the same time, any steel they sell abroad is priced in either U.S. dollars or euros—both of which have risen in value against the ruble. When the companies bring those sales dollars home, they are worth far more in rubles than they were a year ago.The same phenomenon applies in a big way to Russia’s vast energy sector. Moscow exports huge amounts of oil and gas, and brings in dollars for it. That’s why Rosneft, a huge oil producer with close ties to Putin’s Kremlin, reported a revenue increase of 18 percent last year, compared with an increase of less than 1 percent for its international competitors, according to Bloomberg data. This is a big part of the reason why Russia’s tax revenue has not fallen off a cliff, mitigating somewhat the pain of last year’s crisis. Russia’s oil output is still near record highs—one of the reasons, along with continued full-tilt Saudi output, that prices remain so weak.