ABSTRACT
Introduction The book begins by exploring the theoretical foundations of the strategy adopted by the advisers to the Russian reformers for effecting a transition to capitalism at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It argues that the theory of transition employed by foreign advisers and the Russian government rested on two essential pillars: first, the belief that capitalism and free markets provide the best basis for economic development; and second, the belief that the institutions of communism were inevitably economically inefficient and that these inefficiencies had led to the near collapse of the command economy. Accordingly, this part of the book is divided in two chapters. The first chapter traces the evolution of the neoliberal ideas that underlay the initial reform effort, focusing in particular on neoliberal ideas about the role of law; the second examines the reformers’ understanding of the nature of the communist command economy that they were seeking to transform. The first part of the book therefore addresses a number of questions: What did the reformers, both those outside and those within the former USSR, think the process of transition to capitalism would entail? What role did they think law would have to play in this process? How did they see the society they were trying to reform? In trying to answer these questions the book begins to explore neoliberal ideas about the nature of capitalism and about the role and functions of law in a modern market capitalist economy. It is argued that the particular neoliberal conceptions held by reformers about the role of the state, the function of regulation, and the role of the market in the economy underlay the legal reforms undertaken during Russia’s post communist transition. These choices in turn shaped the trajectory of post communist transition, pushing it in the direction of rapid reform, so-called ‘depoliticisation’ and the creation of a minimal state, operating with a minimalist legal framework centred on property rights and the law of contract.
