Kapitalizm
Russia's Struggle to Free Its Economy
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
As Moscow bureau chief for Business Week magazine, Rose Brady was on the scene during the fall of the Soviet Union and the key early years of Russia’s transformation from a socialist state to a market economy. Brady interviewed scores of major political and economic figures, entrepreneurs, and ordinary Russian citizens, all of whom confronted enormous changes during the first five years of economic reform. In this compelling book, Brady provides one of the first accounts of Russia’s transition period written by an observer without a personal stake in the reform efforts’ outcome. The author takes readers into the factories, stores, banks, impromptu markets, homes, and schools of Russia, as well as into the corridors of power, to explain how the country’s own brand of capitalism has evolved.
The book describes the shock to citizens when Boris Yeltsin’s government liberated prices in 1992; the early entrepreneurs who scrambled for position as state assets were privatized; privatization chief Anatoly Chubais’s crucial compromises, which altered the shape of Russian capitalism; and the development of an oligarchical system dominated by a handful of financial-industrial conglomerates. Some people have been left behind in poverty, sickness, and confusion as Russia has lurched toward capitalism, Brady concludes, yet by 1997, with private-sector domination of the economy, Russia had achieved an essentially successful economic transformation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brady's vibrant account of the first six years of Russia's post-Communist economic reform explains how a once closed economy became so precariously dependent on the global markets. As Business Week's Moscow bureau chief from 1989 to 1993, Brady collected interviews from government officials Yegor Gaidar, Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov. She leaves chronology and statistics for the appendixes (which include charts listing wages, inflation, poverty level, household income) and allows anecdotes, photos and quotes to paint a picture of the socioeconomic metamorphosis of the country. Bankers and tycoons such as Oleg Boiko, Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, the so-called oligarchs who have asserted their power since Yeltsin's reelection (for which they were arguably responsible), figure prominently, and Brady delicately probes the role of Western financial advisers and their reincarnation into overly bullish investors. Pensioners and the poor, too, speak out: one widowed pensioner laments, "We were just beginning to live when it was Brezhnev's time." The book ends in early 1997, when Russia's future still looked relatively rosy--before the August 1998 financial crisis catapulted the country back into economic chaos. But Brady addresses these recent changes in a postscript. For the most part, she believes that Russia has no choice but to stumble on toward economic liberalization. However, in speculating about Russia's future, Brady offers the cautious "Pozhivyom uvidem. We will live and see."
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