Conversations on Russia: Reform from Yeltsin to Putin
Padma Desai
Abstract
Much of the discussion of Russia's recent post-Communist history has amounted, both in Russia and the West, to a series of monologues by strong-minded people with starkly divergent views. In contrast, the author of this book's conversations with influential, intelligent participants and observers provide the reader with a broad, nuanced view of what has and has not happened in the last 14 years, and why. Conversations from Russia thus serve as a reference volume, both for academics who study Russia and for laypeople who only have vague perceptions of what has occurred in Russia since the colla ... More
Much of the discussion of Russia's recent post-Communist history has amounted, both in Russia and the West, to a series of monologues by strong-minded people with starkly divergent views. In contrast, the author of this book's conversations with influential, intelligent participants and observers provide the reader with a broad, nuanced view of what has and has not happened in the last 14 years, and why. Conversations from Russia thus serve as a reference volume, both for academics who study Russia and for laypeople who only have vague perceptions of what has occurred in Russia since the collapse of Communism. In conversations with important figures like Boris Yeltsin, George Soros, Anatoly Chubais, and Yegar Gaidar, the author considers questions like why the Soviet Union fell apart under Gorbachev, what went wrong with economic reforms after Gorbachev, whether the privatization of Russian assets could have been managed differently, and what the prospects are for the Russian economy in the near future. She ties the interviews together with an introduction, ultimately reaching her own judgment on each issue considered in the conversations.
Keywords:
Russia,
Communism,
Boris Yeltsin,
George Soros,
Anatoly Chubais,
Yegar Gaidar,
Soviet Union,
Gorbachev,
economic reforms,
privatization
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2006 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780195300611 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195300611.001.0001 |
