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The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy, Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001), 768 pp., $55 cloth, $29.95 paper.
The passing of a decade of Russian statehood promises a spate of assessments on "whither Russia." Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski's The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy is one of the first, and as the title suggests, the authors are troubled by the developments of those first ten years. Despite all the talk of global partnership and Russia's "plus one" status in the Group of Seven, President Yeltsin's primary legacy has been a system of "market bolshevism"-a unique form of bureaucratic, statist, bootleg freemarketeerism that has created the new rules of the Russian economy Market bolshevism (or "kapitalizm," as Rose Brady has called it) represented an effort by the Yeltsin elite to stabilize its position while simultaneously quashing prospects for the grassroots revolution that brought it to power, and its effect has been to exact a heavy economic, social, and cultural toll on Russian society.
To arrive at this conclusion, Reddaway and Glinski spend most of the book examining the varied efforts at "reform" made by just about everyone in, around, and against the Yeltsin presidency Reddaway and Glinski's portrayal of Russia's political factions relies on an analysis of key players' interests, which they show to be only tenuously related to any one ideology. Rightly rejecting a traditional leftright spectrum, the authors juxtapose the ostensibly centrist tendencies of politicians as diverse as communist leader Gennady Zyuganov and ultranationalist Vladimir...