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7 - Crisis Management

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Steven Rosefielde
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Stefan Hedlund
Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
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Summary

Order of Economic Liberalization

Russia's post-1986 odyssey is the saga of the Kremlin's passage from an authoritarian Reform Communist physical management system to authoritarian Market Muscovy, with many seemingly portentous subplots that aren't. Most analysts for diverse reasons wanted to believe that Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin were engaged in a struggle to construct democratic free enterprise or social democracy in the land of Rus and scripted their narratives accordingly. Their stories were studded with wicked communists, the VPK, secret police, and reactionary chauvinists conspiring to restore autocracy and central planning and valiant democrats such as Gorbachev and Yeltsin determined not to let this happen. The battlefield was liberalization and transition. Villains strove to preserve the old order by urging gradual marketization, while westernizers insisted on shock therapy as the only sure way of breaking with communism. They demanded the immediate dissolution of the Communist Party and the termination of central planning, ministerial directives, guaranteed enterprise sales, state contracts, state-funded managerial bonuses, state ownership, price and exchange rate fixing, the monopoly of foreign trade and banking, as well as VPK and KGB economic oversight, arguing that dislocations would be surmounted by the invisible hand and expert western advice and assistance. Academician Stanislav Shatalin envisioned full transition in 500 hundred days, while others forecast a shallow recession swiftly reversed by ascending the J curve. But this wasn't essential.

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  • Crisis Management
  • Steven Rosefielde, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Stefan Hedlund, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
  • Book: Russia Since 1980
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511814846.010
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  • Crisis Management
  • Steven Rosefielde, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Stefan Hedlund, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
  • Book: Russia Since 1980
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511814846.010
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Crisis Management
  • Steven Rosefielde, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Stefan Hedlund, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
  • Book: Russia Since 1980
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511814846.010
Available formats
×