ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter examines views held by neoliberal advisers to the Russian reformers in the 1990s about the nature of communism and the command economy. The great majority of those asked to work alongside the new post communist governments of Eastern Europe were western academics, primarily young economists working within the neoliberal tradition. They included leading figures such as Jeffrey Sachs, Andrei Shleifer and Anders Aslund (to name but a few). The first thing that strikes one about their work was their almost exclusive focus on what economic theory considered to be the basis for successful capitalism and their remarkable lack of interest in the history of the Soviet Union and the actual realities of the soviet command economy. Their interpretation of the ills of communism was derived almost entirely from academic works written in the west deploring state planning and extolling the benefits of the free market. The accounts of the workings – and failings – of the soviet system to be found in these works were usually gleaned from official proclamations. The somewhat paradoxical result was that reformers tended to rely on accounts of the soviet system that were derived from the system itself and based on its propaganda. The reform programmes that were proposed were, therefore, informed by an understanding of soviet Russia as seen through the eyes of the communist regime. The foreign advisers to the Russian government operated, moreover, with a very specific picture of what a ‘natural’ market based economy should look like and it was against this ‘optimal model’ that the command economy (as it was portrayed in official propaganda) was constantly assessed. In order to understand how those leading the transitional effort formulated their priorities, we need to try to understand how they viewed what they were doing and how they came to identify the key goals of the reform effort. We also need to discover whether the official (and seemingly sacred) tenets of the command economy, such as party control and public ownership of the means of production, were realities or, at least in part, legal fictions. In short, we need to ask whether the reformers, native and foreign, understood what precisely it was that they were trying to change.
