Such a Beautiful Dream: How Russia Did Not Become a Market Economy

It all really was such a beautiful dream. In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, hopes were riding high that Russia would now finally be able and willing to cross that great and long-tormented divide?to secure full integration into the West. What was at stake here went far above even the dazzling hopes for a new world order that had marked the Gorbachev years, and that had resulted, in 1990, in the award of a Nobel Peace Prize to the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The dream of the emergence of a "new" Russia entailed so much more than disarmament, friendly relations, and even a new era of serious cooperation. Out from under the rubble of the crumbled Soviet edifice would emerge a country that embraced Western liberal values. On this solid foundation, a rapid transition would be undertaken to democracy and a rules-based market economy. Francis Fukuyama's proud pronouncement of the "end of history" may be viewed as symbolic of the general thinking at the time.1 It was a tall order indeed. Centuries of Russian intellectual brooding over relations to Europe, over feelings of moral superiority versus technological inferiority, would now be relegated to the dustbin of history, as would decades of Soviet Communist ambitions to stand up against the West in general and the United States in particular. How distant this all seems today, and how tempting it might be to ridicule the hopes for an instant and successful Westernization. This article has no such ambition. The notion of a "dream" is used here