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Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski (Vassiliev). 2001. The tragedy of Russia's reforms-market bolshevism against democracy. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001. xvi + 749 pp. Index. Paper. $29.95 (Cloth. $55).
The focus of this book is on the process of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the attempts at market reform and democratization since the late 1980s. Most of the tome revolves around shock therapy in the early 1990s up to the assault on the parliament in October 1993 and again in 1996-1998. Neither author is an economist: Peter Reddaway is a contemporary historian of Soviet and Russian politics and Dmitri Glinski (Vassiliev) is a historian at IMEMO (Russia) with apparently solid roots in the USSR's and Russia's democratic movements. The book's purpose is therefore more explaining why democracy failed to take root because of shock therapy than on economic reforms per se. Aside from the preface, acknowledgments, introduction, epilogue, endnotes (76 pages!), and index, the book contains nine chapters.
The introduction sets the tone: The amount of destruction that unwise economic policies, often relying on western advisers and financial assistance, have wrought in Russia is without precedent in modern world history. For the first time a major industrial power has "dismantled the results of several decades of economic development... and slipped into the ranks of countries that are conventionally categorized as `Third World."' (p. 3). The authors seek to explain the major threat of weakening the Russian state beyond repair, leaving a country with its core functions privatized by illegitimate and unaccountable forces. They argue forcefully that alternative policies were available and can still be put in place to avert the feared outcome.
The first two chapters draw the canvas upon which the evolution of reformism is later projected. They first place the Yeltsin era in a millennium of Russian history, anchored to perennial concerns about raising sufficient state finances for modernization. Russia's failure, in contrast to the west's success, the authors attribute to the rulers having failed to "build on pre-existing social structures ... to reach a common understanding with the most politically organized and active forces of society on the goals, means, and priorities of national development" (p. 24). This leads up to a discussion of the Soviet...