ABSTRACT
Working in a summer house day and night in August 1990, a team of 13 Soviet economists, together with representatives of all the Soviet sovereign republics but one, drafted a program that was intended to lead the USSR toward a market economy. The Shatalin program was adopted in September 1990 by the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Republic. The Shatalin program suffered from major inconsistencies, which weakened its credibility even before it was dropped as a workable scheme. The establishment of an inter-republican economic coordinating committee is by no means an adequate compromise between the diverging aims of giving economic independence to the republics and strengthening central control. The implementation of the October program, due to the very vagueness of the "main directions," allows for various solutions, as will be pointed out below; many of the Shatalin plan's observations, if not its policy prescriptions, may yet find concrete form.
