ABSTRACT
Economics lay at the heart of post-Soviet Russian state building because it was the Russian leadership’s main response to the legacies of Soviet power. Radical economic reform – popularly known as ‘shock therapy’ – promised both to deal with the economic collapse of the late Soviet years and to secure democracy by destroying the remnants of the Soviet elite, the nomenklatura, and creating new sources of support for Yeltsin and for a democratic state.1
