ABSTRACT
The tenth anniversary of the beginning of market reforms in Russia gave occasion to take stock of post-socialist reforms. There was a broad consensus among Russian economists that the results were devastating both in economic and political terms. As Ivan D. Afanasenko (2001: 5) succinctly noted, “the failure of successive reforms … is not a subject of discussion any more”. Vladimir Shemiatenkov’s (2003: 10) characterisation of the present system as “a formless mixture of Soviet red-tapism, late socialist nepotism [blatmeisterstvo], the worst characteristics of Western ‘wild’ [dikii] capitalism and what in former times was often called ‘aziatchina’” was certainly polemical, but it expressed a feeling that was shared by many (Akinin, Shevelev and Pochikovskaia 2004: 892). Worse still, there was a widely shared apprehension that the economic problems of the country bore a “systematic character” (Alekseev 2005: 53). The fact that more than a decade after the beginning of market reforms GDP had not even reached its pre-1992 level (Dynkin 2003: 50), made the high growth rates between 2000 and 2007 1 appear much less impressive, as recovery growth would come to a halt as soon as the pre-reform GDP was reached (Tsvetkov 2006: 23; Khanin 2007: 36). In this context, some authors arrived at the conclusion that when it came to the task of catching-up, Russia’s post-socialist economic system proved to be even less efficient than that prior to reform (Ovsienko and Petrakov 2004: 72; Ovsienko 2005: 54). A further argument in support of the notion of the relative failure of reforms was to be found in Russia’s poor transition performance compared to the countries of Central Eastern Europe (Radygin and Entov 2005: 15; Martynov 2003a: 27; Kudrov 2005: 3). For many Russian economists it was this somewhat humiliating experience in particular that raised doubts about whether the “Western” path of development was viable for Russia. 2
