ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the circumstances that have shaped efforts towards, and opposition to, economic reintegration. It examines the relationship of the USSR to the global economy. The chapter shows that the USSR exhibited a peculiar combination of economic backwardness alongside its well-developed industrial structure and society. The USSR’s relative isolation from the international economy was ideological in origins. The global economy added to the burdens on the Soviet state in the late 1980s and early 1990s and did little to rectify it from its course towards collapse. As the Soviet system fell apart, particularistic exchange and soft budget constraints changed character and developed. The role imagined for the international economy in the transformation of post-Soviet economies was thus great. Radical reform was thus simpler and more direct in promising benefits from reintegration with the global economy. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
