ABSTRACT
In designing technical facilities, perhaps with international assistance, to ease the transition to a market economy in the former Soviet Union, it is useful to separate the politics of union formation from the analysis of why countries pool some of their resources. This can best be done by looking at the destruction of the ruble zone within a broader setting. The paper recalls the key features of the economic and monetary union that existed until the U.S.S.R/s dissolution and the aspirations of moving toward market-based economic systems harbored by some of the policymakers of the successor republics and the new generation of policy advisers. How to get from the planning systems to basic market orientation is bound to be complex. To maintain some sociopolitical—and economic—order in the transition, maintaining buoyant interrepublic trade, possibly with foreign assistance, is a must. This could usefully be arranged through a payment facility, regardless of whether the successor re-publics adopt their own currency, and it might be useful to let other former Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) countries as well as Albania and the Yugoslav successor republics choose to join it too.
