ABSTRACT
In Moscow…the plan for economic transformation to capitalist markets was described by officials and the press in a representationally impoverished form as, simply,‘the big bang’ (English original). This mystical, invisible, sonar boom, imported by economists from Harvard, was supposed to provide for three hundred million Russian people [sic] some kind of cosmic rebirth out of the ashes of seventy years of Soviet rule. Heralded as the beginning of the new era, it seemed to the average citizen, on the contrary, to lead society ever deeper into a black hole.
