Yegor Gaidar (1956–2009)

I had high expectations for this book. The author was the acting prime minister of Russia in 1992 and was deeply involved in the Russian economy in the 1990s. An analysis of the Soviet collapse based on his personal experience and declassified materials, promising lessons for modern Russia, seemed like a book worth reading. And indeed it is worth reading if you're a professional economist, but I have to note a few reservations for readers with a general interest in Russian politics. Although the author introduces the subject with historical comparisons, he reverts to much more narrow economic analyses in the main chapters.

In the introduction the author writes that the historical picture which currently dominates Russian public opinion is one where a prospering Soviet Union fell victim to catastrophic reform blunders in the 1980s, leading to a chaotic decade in the 1990s. Then, in 1999-2000, people with the country's best interest at heart finally came to power (page xviii). More controversially, he claims to see "striking analogies between the rhetoric of people using post-imperial nostalgia in our country and the standard propaganda of the National Socialists in the last years of the Weimar republic" (page xv).

The table thereby seems set for a detailed analysis of Russian politics and recent history. But in the main part of the book the author in fact only shows how the Soviet Union's economy deteriorated. Moving from oil prices to a broad collection of economic data, he narrates its descent step by step. He shows that the economic collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable and that only brutal repression of dissent could have kept the communist edifice standing. The last Soviet leaders deserve credit for not going down that road, if not for much else.

This is well and good as far as it goes, but beyond these rather obvious conclusions this book offers no lessons which would be relevant for political questions facing Russia in the 21st century. Do the current leaders have a legitimate right to rule, and whom does their rule benefit? How can the partitioning of the Russian state in the 1990s be justified and accepted? How much independence should current autonomous regions in Russia be granted? How should the Russian state use oil and gas proceeds fairly? Can Russian nationalism be benevolent?

Such questions must be answered with broad historical and philosophical analyses. The author's initial diagnosis of Russia's problems hints that he had the capacity to get such a fundamentally important discussion started, but instead he chose to write this book in a specialist vein. It's a real pity that he did not venture out beyond his area of professional expertise and write a more general history of Russia's Soviet inheritance. The lessons from such an endeavour could have made a much greater difference than the economic portrait this book now provides.… (más)