"Strange People" in the Politburo: Institutional Problems and the Human Factor in the Economic Collapse of the Soviet Empire

To the chagrin of Egor Gaidar's many admirers among the liberal intelligentsia, the former premier is not at all popular in today's Russia (as they say in Moscow, "beyond the Garden Ring"). In fact, the party that he led until 2004, called Russia's Democratic Choice from 1993 to 2001 and then the Union of Right Forces, consecutively lost every election, both when it was actually in power (1993) and, especially, when it was in opposition. The reputation of the "father of shock therapy," who "robbed" many Sberbank customers, remains amazingly resilient, even as many heroes and anti-heroes of the first years of independent Russia have long ago been totally forgotten.¹

The reason for this is due largely to the self-representation of the former prime minister. Even Gaidar's faithful supporters, while eager to acknowledge his unusual intellect and personal civic courage, realize the unconvincing nature, to put it mildly, of his attempts to communicate his views beyond the all-understanding and almost all-forgiving community of liberals. To this day, he is remembered for a pre-election video clip of the party leader, alone and purposeful, walking along the railway tracks. The need to justify himself for 1992 to those who do not need this justification, and to advance arguments for his position to those who do not want to engage him in any kind of discussion, is obviously weighing on Gaidar. His new book, published in a run of 8,000 copies by the well-known humanities publisher Rosspen, is no doubt aimed at a wide range of members of Russia's "political class" and falls somewhere between a political manifesto and a research study.

This attempt at dialogue is, however, no more persuasive than was the video of yore. His book, Collapse of an Empire, is poorly written, shows little regard for the reader, and will be difficult even for a specialist who is well-disposed toward the author. It is difficult to imagine that it will be read, let alone accepted, by a politically partisan audience without specialized training in economics.

Gaidar's book is dedicated to a search for logical reasons that led to the collapse of the Soviet empire.

"This book is not a memoir but an attempt to analyze what leads to the disintegration of empires and the problems that empires engender" (14), the author writes in the preface. He then states something like a postulate that he means to refute: "In Russian public opinion today the following picture of the world is dominant: (1) 20 years ago, there existed a stable, growing,mighty country—the Soviet Union; (2) strange people (possibly agents of foreign intelligence) attempted political and economic reforms; (3) the results of these reforms were catastrophic; (4) in 1999–2000, people came to power who were concerned with the state interests of the country; (5) after this, life started to get better… . [T]he aim … of this book is to show that this picture of the world does not correspond to reality" (19). Actually, points 4 and 5 are not discussed in the book at all. The problems indicated in point 3, which are characterized in the book as "catastrophic," form the subject of a good half of the work.

Mostly, what the book calls to mind is not a memoir—there are no reminiscences anywhere—but rather the notebook of an earnest student who writes down whatever he sees that relates to his topic. According to Gaidar himself, "When one tries to dispute common sense, one should not skimp on finding supporting evidence" (194). This is what permits him not only to spend entire pages quoting from the minutes of meetings, thereby reducing his own text to only 15 percent or so of some chapters (as occurs in chapters 5–8), but also to counter the postulates of his imaginary...