I have included just part of the introduction. Info from Johnson's Russia List.. CHeers, Ken Hanly The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy by Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski 768 pp./6 x 9 $29.95 (paper); ISBN: 1-929223-06-4 $55.00 (cloth); ISBN: 1-929223-07-2 For more information or to place an order: Domestic United States Institute of Peace Press P.O. Box 605 Herndon, VA 20172 Tel.: 1-800-868-8064 (U.S. toll-free only) or 1-703-661-1590 Fax: 1-703-661-1501 International Pricing inquiries and orders for Europe and the U.K. should be directed to: United States Institute of Peace Press c/o Plymouth Distributors Ltd. Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Tel.: 1752-202301 Fax: 1752-202333 Throughout the rest of the world, orders should be sent directly to: United States Institute of Peace Press P.O. Box 605 Herndon, VA 20172 USA Fax: 703-661-1501 CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Reform or Reaction? The Yeltsin Era in a Millennium of Russian History 2. Russian Postcommunism in the Mirror of Social Theory 3. Populists, the Establishment, and the Soviet Decline 4. From Russian Sovereignty to the August Coup: A Missed Chance for a Democratic Revolution 5. Catching up with the Past: The Political Economy of Shock Therapy 6. Yeltsin and the Opposition: The Art of Co-optation and Marginalization, 1991-93 7. Tanks as the Vehicle of Reform: The 1993 Coup and the Imposition of the New Order 8. The Imperial Presidency in a Privatized State, 1994-1996 9. Market Bolshevism in Action: The Dream Team, Shock Therapy II, and Yeltsin's Search for a Successor Epilogue: Market Bolshevism, A Historical Interpretation Notes Index ******* INTRODUCTION The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy By Peter Reddaway ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) and Dmitri Glinski ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) United States Institute of Peace Press [www.usip.org] 2001 768 pp. Washington, D.C. Few would dispute that the events of 1989-91 that originated in Moscow and culminated in the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the emergence of Russia as its main successor state marked a watershed in recent world history. Yet the true meaning and consequences of these events are subjects for a worldwide debate that is only beginning to unfold. While many Western observers--and a few fortunately positioned Russians--exulted in these changes and in the glowing prospects they saw for a new world order, Russia from at least 1990 has been sinking--from the socioeconomic, demographic, cultural, and moral points of view--into turmoil and decay. From late 1991-early 1992, a period marked by the first application of the medicine of radical deregulation, privatization, and an economic austerity regime prescribed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF)--a course of "treatment" that was known, perhaps for lack of a better term, as "shock therapy"--the country's disease became markedly more severe. Whether the eventual bottoming out and upturn in the economy of 1999-2000 can be sustained remains to be seen. The amount of destruction has exceeded that of the comparable American experience during the Great Depression and the industrial loss inflicted on the Soviet Union in 1941-45 by World War II. To give but a few figures: from 1991 to 1998, Russia's gross domestic product (GDP) declined by 43.3 percent; in particular, industrial production fell by 56 percent, and the agricultural decline was even larger. (For comparison, from 1929 to 1933, U.S. GDP shrank by 30.5 percent; between 1941 and 1945, the Soviet GDP declined by 24 percent.) Meanwhile, capital investment in the Russian economy fell by a spectacular 78 percent between 1991 and 1995, and this decline has continued ever since. Of all the country's economic activities, its high-technology industries--which are strategically important for the economic development and survival of major industrial nations--suffered the worst. Thus, for example, production in electronics fell by 78 percent between 1991 and 1995. Closely related to this collapse of domestic production, imports in 1997 made up half of the Russian consumer market until the ruble's 1998 collapse reversed the trend. Inflation, which soared to 1,354 percent in 1992, was gradually but never fully tamed--declining to 11 percent in 1997, but rising sharply again in 1998 to 84 percent, and then declining again. It cut the average real incomes of working Russians by 46 percent in 1992; incomes managed to improve until 1998; but in 1998-99, the population's real disposable income dropped by a third. Behind these figures lurk qualitative changes in Russia's identity and its place in the world. Thus Russia has been precipitously losing its status as an intellectual great power--a status it enjoyed for a much longer time, and with much more benefit for itself and the rest of the world, than it enjoyed its status as a military giant. The number of Russian scientists (who once accounted for one-fourth of the world's total) has shrunk from 3.4 million to 1.3 million from the late 1980s to the present. Although Russia's economic reformers may believe that they saved money by cutting the funding for academia to one-twelfth of what it was in 1985, Russia's net financial loss from the decline of its science amounts, by some estimates, to $500-600 billion annually. For the first time in recent world history, one of the major industrial nations with a highly educated society has dismantled the results of several decades of economic development--however tortuous, costly, and often misdirected it may have been--and slipped into the ranks of countries that are conventionally categorized as "Third World." To make this experience even more dramatic, this comprehensive national collapse occurred at the same time as the nation's leaders and some of their allies in the West promised Russians that they were just about to join the family of democratic and prosperous nations. The consequences of this disastrous experience will not disappear in the foreseeable future. Moreover, some of them have dynamics of their own and are spreading fast across Russian borders. The major threat is that the Russian state may well become weakened beyond repair, while its core functions are being privatized by illegitimate and unaccountable forces, including corrupt officials and organized crime. According to estimates by the Russian State Statistics Committee, unregistered and untaxed economic activity accounts for some 25 percent of the national economy, while the Ministry of Interior estimates the sum at no less than 40 percent--figures surpassing the boldest dreams of the most fervent advocates of laissez faire. A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) maintains that organized crime syndicates and criminal capital flight originating in Russia "constitute a direct threat to the national security interests" of the United States. The CSIS experts may have been somewhat alarmist, but they concluded that Russia may in certain respects be evolving into a "criminal-syndicalist state." A survey of Western business executives conducted by Control Risks Group in November 1997 identified Russia as the world's most corrupt country, while surveys by Transparency International rate it only slightly better. Yet numerous critical observers inside and outside Russia fail to perceive that many of the roots of these unwelcome developments can be found in the reform policies designed and carried out from 1991 on--policies that the leading Western participants hailed and fostered with enthusiasm.
