Participants

Discussion

The roundtable discusses Tobias Rupprecht's forthcoming book The Tragedy of Soviet Market Economists. It offers a revisionist account of Russia’s post-Soviet marketisation from the perspective of the advisors and ministers who oversaw this transformation. Based on extensive interviews with economists and research in state and private archives, the book shows how a significant minority of economic liberals emerged from late Soviet academic and dissident circles who sought to chart a new path, believing free prices and private property were the foundations of a ‘civilised country’. The book provides a vital challenge to the dominant narrative that neoliberal advisors and international organisations imposed harmful reforms on Russia after the collapse of Communism. Liberal reformers faced a profound dilemma – one for which Western advisors had no solution either: Should they commit to democratic political activism and risk irrelevance, or align themselves with those in power and be co-opted by an authoritarian state determined to re-assert its imperial strength?