This book rejects the claim that the Soviet Union transitioned as it did because elites converted to “neoliberalism,” a narrative that was ex post facto, but became widely accepted during the 2000s. Kirtchik criticizes it as the “appropriation thesis,” an “etiological illusion,” and a “heroic explanation.” Instead, she emphasizes the domestic coevolution of knowledge and politics. She traces how political possibilities, institutions, identities, and ideas shifted over more than twenty years to explain how Yegor Gaidar's team of economists could enter Yeltsin's government in 1991 with a plan for rapid transition to capitalism. The first two chapters introduce the regime of economic knowledge production formed under Stalin and analyze its “structural dependence,” or “heteronomy”—the old question of ideology/politics' impact on Soviet science. Kirtchik calls the institutional result the “academic-bureaucratic nexus”: an intertwining of academics generating knowledge and bureaucrats soliciting and (sometimes) applying it, within (or as) which a reformist impulse took shape by the 1960s. Chapters 3 to 5 address how introducing markets, then the transition to capitalism (distinct for late Soviet reformers), became imaginable and then imagined to be necessary, and—obversely—how economists became able to shape policy. Chapter 3 focuses on the Brezhnev era to mid-perestroika, during which the hypothesis of a “scientific technical revolution” in the “forces of production” requiring new “relations of production” framed the nexus' discourse. Reformers' proposals were constrained to planning and management technique and often expressed in the language of upravlenie (cybernetics, management). Kirtchik sidelines mathematical theorists who monopolized Cold War–era Western observers' attention in favor of political economists, management specialists, and long-ignored but important agricultural economists, who expressed two convergent lines of critique: first, the Soviet system created contradictory or perverse incentives for enterprises and planners and, second, stubbornly low labor productivity met Marxist critiques of alienated labor, raising the dangerous question of workplace democracy. Thus, well before Gorbachev's secretariat a reformist consensus had already consolidated within Soviet power structures. As he prepared in earnest for reform, economists were elevated up the rungs of power. In chapters 4 (1986–89) and 5 (1989–91), a government committed to reform and facing intensifying crises demanded more from its experts; commissions and committees mushroomed and economists entered politics' highest sanctums. Simultaneously, economists' field of action expanded: they entered the newly opened public sphere with previously unpublishable ideas, and participated in clubs, social movements, and parliamentary politics. This facilitated their advocacy but shattered their consensus. During glasnost, revelations of the government's past crimes and the country's present ailments snowballed. As after the 1956 Twentieth Party Congress, reformers called for returning to true Leninism. In economic policy, this now meant an (erroneous) reassessment of the New Economic Policy as Lenin's socialism, which replaced the scientific technical revolution discursive frame. This enabled far more radical proposals to claim socialist bona fides, even private entrepreneurship. But glasnost began to delegitimize the socialist project as a whole. From 1989, as the new Congress of People's Deputies debated property law, intellectuals, activists, and politicians increasingly abandoned socialism, even with a human face, and embraced capitalism as the “universal” or “normal” path of development. But this path was bumpy: growing parliamentary opposition forced radical reformers to confront that democratization and economic transformation were not automatically conjoined, evoking for the first time an anti-“populist” stance. Chapter 5, on the “battle of programs” (1989–91), is the book's narrative peak. Kirtchik writes that these years, perceived as “crisis,” were a “critical juncture” during which “actors' perceptions of political risks and possibilities,” “positions,” “identities,” and “social fields” transformed. The government's central reform effort, a commission led by Leonid Abalkin, represented the old consensus. It did not matter much in 1988 that members' goals ranged from socialism with markets, to dual track systems, to capitalist social democracy, but by 1991 it would. Its 1989 plan already seemed inadequate to many, and that perception spread as the economic situation worsened, the government remained paralyzed, and independence movements threatened the Union. In 1990, Grigory Yavlinsky left the commission with several colleagues and one-upped his mentor with a “500 Days” plan to rapidly transition to capitalism. But by mid-1991, the competition between the Union and Russia, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, restructured the field. Several overlapping teams worked on reform programs, but economists who had already achieved leading roles remained committed to the Union. This left Yegor Gaidar's team as one of Yeltsin's few options. Kirtchik examines and dismisses claims that they were ever outsiders to the reformist nexus, radicalized by foreign connections, or became uniquely radical (“neoliberal,” “market fundamentalists”). They owed their “success” to others' commitment to the Union and their own well-timed and decisive bet on Yeltsin, their academic and social capital, and their accrued centrality to reformist networks. In turn, their program enabled Yeltsin to differentiate himself from Gorbachev, and to dynamite the foundations of collapsing Union structures. Yeltsin and Gaidar's determination to see it through despite “populist” backlash cemented the impression of their government as “liberal,” and, eventually, “neoliberal.” The last chapter is a denouement. On one side, Kirtchik analyzes the dynamics of the post-Soviet economics profession; on the other, she traces the persistence of the young reformer network through Yeltsin's and Putin's governments, anchoring economic policy despite political discontinuities until the near exhaustion of their political capital after the invasion of Ukraine. Their post-Soviet careers, she concludes, demonstrate the stability of their Soviet technocratic habitus, reproducing roles auxiliary to power despite how radically Russia has changed around them.
Adam E. Leeds (Thu,) studied this question.