In Building a Ruin, historian Yakov Feygin offers readers a fascinating peak behind the curtain of the politics surrounding Soviet economic reform from the Nikita Khrushchev to the Mikhail Gorbachev eras. Focusing on what he calls the “Cold War politics of Soviet economic reform,” Feygin illuminates how “the transformation of the Cold War from a military-industrial to a socio-economic conflict changed the horizons of economic policy making” (3) and thrust economic experts into influential roles in shaping the policies. By emphasizing the contingency of Soviet policy and mapping the possible options at pivotal decision points, Feygin assembles a compelling case against path dependence in Soviet economic reform.

Building a Ruin shines especially brightly in its analysis of the Khrushchev years. As part of the broader Soviet strategic recalibration toward peaceful socio-economic competition, Khrushchev identified living standards and economic performance as primary theaters of the Cold War with the United States. “The Soviet Union’s new task would be to beat American capitalism at its own game—prosperity and productivity,” Feygin writes (39). Khrushchev sought to increase productivity to drive economic growth while maintaining the Stalinist prioritization of producer goods. The plan elevated a cadre of economists to measure and compare Soviet progress to that of the US, and think tanks such as Gosplan’s Institute for Scientific Economic Research and the Institute of World Economy and International Relations proliferated across the Soviet system. No longer consigned to “debating the placement of commas” as during the Stalinist era, Feygin’s protagonists had earned policy relevance and influence. Khrushchev’s failed drive to transform the Soviet economy into a consumer paradise has long existed in the literature, but Feygin draws on a rich array of archival material to reconstruct the politics of reform in impressive detail and to introduce economic experts who will be unfamiliar to many non-specialists.

By the early 1960s, however, it had become clear that Khrushchev had not solved the fundamental problem of increasing productivity. The USSR had invested “in the productive sector without a corresponding expansion of the supply of consumer goods and services,” leading to diminishing returns on investment, Feygin explains (65). In other words, the Soviet Union had become ensnared in something resembling the “middle-income trap.” A battle raged during the subsequent Aleksei Kosygin reforms to determine the direction of the Soviet economy in which conservatives outmaneuvered radical reformers. The former feared that the latter’s desire to use profit and price levers to guide to the Soviet economy threatened the positions of entrenched political elites, and they stymied the initiatives. “The Kosygin Reforms took the USSR’s politics to the limit of what was possible,” Feygin argues. It would have challenged “the very basis of the Soviet project itself” (128).

A “conservative consensus” crystallized in the 1970s that preferred political stability over economic experimentation. Instead of implementing economic reforms that might lead to a “full political reconstruction of the Soviet elite,” Leonid Brezhnev sought to harness a “scientific-technical revolution” (STR), which would become a calling card for Soviet officials for the rest of the USSR’s existence and finally allow Soviet socialism to surge past the capitalist world (130). In this telling, stagnation was a political choice rather than an economic reality. A chapter on “détente economics,” which takes as a point of departure that the “two superpowers would coexist in their respective positions and increasingly recognize themselves as subject to the same global trends” (153), examines experts’ thinking about Soviet planning and its place in the world during the 1970s but seems somewhat disconnected from the rest of the narrative.

Although most scholarship on perestroika begins with the rise of Gorbachev, Feygin locates the collapse of the conservative consensus in the wake of the failed 1979 reforms. He identifies continuities between the interregnum Iurii Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko years and Gorbachev’s initial policy of uskoreniye (acceleration), which “rejected the political content of the conservative consensus but accepted its assumptions about growth and economic priorities” (183). With the Law on State Enterprises that Gorbachev supported, “the cohort of economists trained in the 1960s and working in the shadow of the defeat of the Kosygin Reforms finally had a General Secretary behind them” (208). Feygin charts the “end of Cold War economics” in the final years of the 1980s and the post-Soviet legacy in a short afterword.

“What brought down the Soviet Union?” asks the inside cover of the book’s jacket, but this is not really the question that Building a Ruin answers. Indeed, the brief treatment of Gorbachev ends with the early perestroika reforms, and while the breaking of the political conservative consensus is suggestive, Feygin does not explicitly link the political economy with the Soviet collapse. Furthermore, while the author provides a close reading of the experts’ views about the Soviet economy, most of the economic history unfolds offstage, and Feygin does not focus on the impacts of the reforms themselves.

Instead, the real value of the book is its analysis of the purpose of the Soviet command economy, the politics surrounding attempts to reform it at key decision points, and the agency that experts had in diagnosing problems and offering solutions. The impact of the Cold War on Soviet economics is particularly compelling in the Khrushchev material, though the global conflict disappears somewhat from the rest of the narrative as domestic political imperatives take center stage.

Feygin’s rigorous archival research, careful reconstruction of the politics of reform, and engaging prose should attract a range of readers interested in Soviet and Cold War history. It should also interest scholars and policymakers contemplating China’s future trajectory, a topic that Feygin teases on the penultimate page of the book, as they study a scenario reminiscent, in the author’s telling, of the Soviet Union of the early 1960s.