Conflicting patterns of thought in the Russian debate on transition: 1992 – 2002

Abstract

After a paradigm shift in Russian economics around 1990, in the period 1992 – 2002 Russian economists increasingly returned to the path-dependent shared mental models that had prevailed earlier in their country. In particular, after the liberal reform concept seemed to have failed to solve the socio-economic problems of transition, the old debate between ‘Westernisers’ and Slavophiles was forcefully revived. The conflict between these camps has not yet been settled. This makes it difficult to predict the further development of Russia's economic and political order.

Notes

¹As I cannot take for granted that the reader is familiar with this work, I shall provide a short summary of it here.

²This article is based on an analysis of the Russian major economic journals between 1992 and 2002. The journals examined here are (in alphabetical order): Ekonomicheskaya nauka sovremennoi Rossii, Ekonomika i matematicheskie metody, Ekonomist, Mirovaya ekonomika i mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, Obshchestvo i ekonomika, Rossiiskii ekonomicheskii zhurnal, Vestnik moskovskogo universiteta (seriya 6), and Voprosy ekonomiki. A number of books have also been taken into account, but I cannot claim to provide a systematic analysis of the Russian economic monographs of the period. Mostly, I have used books as secondary sources and partly also to provide further evidence on issues that have been debated in journals.

³In my monograph on the history of Russian economic thought in the nineteenth century (Zweynert 2002) I have developed this idea in more detail. This paragraph follows the introductory chapter of my book. For short summaries in English see Zweynert (2004, pp. 263 – 274), and Balabkins (2005, pp. 207 – 214).

⁴Very aptly Andrei G. Fonotov (1993) describes the task of transition as shifting from a ‘mobilised’ to an ‘innovative’ society.

⁵‘Acceleration’ of social development was proclaimed the official ideology at the twenty-seventh congress of the CPSU, held in February 1986.

⁶The key works are by Kantorovich (1959), Birman (1963) and Liberman (1970).

⁷The most important works of this second generation are by Rakitskii (1968), Abalkin (1973) and Aganbegyan (1979).

⁸For a more detailed elaboration of Leonid Abalkin's ideas and their evolution, see Sutela (1991, pp. 98 – 108). Abalkin was not only the most acknowledged but also the most politically influential member of this school: from 1989 to 1991 he was appointed deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union and head of the commission of economic reforms. As the director of the institute of economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a position he holds to the present day, he has been one of the leading figures in the Russian economic debate on transition. Therefore, his 1973 manifesto provides especially valuable insights into the connection between the economic thought of the last decades of the Soviet Union and of post-Soviet Russia.

⁹A clear indication of this is that in 1983 Abalkin published an article on ‘Theoretical questions of the economic mechanism’ in the official organ of the CPSU (Abalkin 1983), and other key figures of this school also published on the issue again (see e.g. Petrakov 1988; Aganbegyan 1989, pp. 7 – 58).

¹⁰Again, the journal Kommunist gives the clearest evidence of this: in the September 1986 issue it published an article on ‘The human factor in the development of the economy and social justice’ by Tatyana Zaslavskaya, the outstanding Soviet sociologist (Zaslavskaya 1986).

¹¹For more details on these authors and the economic reforms of the 1960s see Chapters 2 and 3 of Sutela (1991).

¹²Nureev and Latov (2001, p. 104). According to Pekka Sutela and Vladimir Mau, Kenneth Galbraith's New Industrial State‘almost succeeded in convincing a generation of Soviet economists that the market economy belongs to the past’ (Sutela & Mau 1998, p. 72).

¹³On the reception of Friedman and Hayek during the last years of the Soviet Union see Zweynert (2006). In 1993 an article on Ludwig von Mises was published in Russia (Levita 1993, pp. 396 – 404), and in 1994 a Russian edition of von Mises' work, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis was published.

¹⁴See for example, Maiminas (1992, p. 520) and Kuz'minov (1992, pp. 50 – 51). Oleg I. Anan'in spoke for many when he demanded the banning of the hitherto ubiquitous phrase in Soviet dissertations ‘this study is mainly based on national literature’, a phrase which had expressed nothing but complete isolation from international discourse (Anan'in 1992, p. 98).

¹⁵The first foreign textbooks to be translated into Russian were: Heynes (first edition 1973), translated in 1991; Dolan and Lindsey (1974), translated in 1991; Pindyck and Rubinfeld (1989), translated in 1992; Fisher et al. (1988), translated in 1993; Samuelson (1948), translated in 1994; and, last but not least, McConnell and Brue (1990), translated in 1992—which for a couple of years was the leading textbook of economics at Russian universities (see Nureev & Latov 2001, p. 97).

¹⁷Another clear expression of shestidesyatniki anthropocentrism reads as follows: ‘… in the centre of the new civilisation, man stands not only as a creator, but also as the aim of all activity. Therefore the transition to the new civilisation must be regarded above all as a process taking place on the basis of the whole intellectual and social progress of mankind …’ (Medved'ev 1993, pp. 24 – 25).

¹⁶See for example, Radaev (1992b, pp. 113 – 120), Superfin (1993, pp. 53 – 65), Yakovets (1994, pp. 75 – 84), Kashin (1996, pp. 31 – 37), Inozemtsev (1997, pp. 3 – 22) and Vasil'chuk (1997, pp. 74 – 86).

¹⁸This idea had first been developed by Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Chernishevskii and also played a decisive role in Lenin's thought.

¹⁹Besides being a perfect substitute for ‘socialism with a human face’, the idea of the post-industrial society also provided a comforting perspective, for it meant that not only the post-socialist countries, but also the whole world was about to begin a painful fundamental reorientation of all aspects of social life, including science (see e.g. Yakovets 1994, p. 77). And ‘if not only the Marxist current, but the social sciences throughout the world experience a crisis’, this calls ‘for a critical analysis of the whole potential of the social sciences, for a search for fundamentally new answers to the problems of humanistic knowledge …’ (Medved'ev 1993, p. 22). See also Abalkin (1993, p. 4) and Buzgalin (1993, p. 44).

²⁰As Leonid Y. Kosal argues, both the euphoria at the beginning of the reform process and the early and bitter disappointment must be seen in the context that in official Soviet propaganda only one comparison was permitted: that with the United States of America (Kosal 2000a, pp. 14 – 20, 2000b, p. 38).

²¹As the historian V. Sorgin puts it: ‘an important reason for the failure of liberal-democratic ideology in Russia lies in the obvious intellectual unwillingness of Russian society as a whole and the intelligentsia in particular to absorb and to adopt the new ideals . … There is still not a single important Russian philosopher, sociologist, political scientist or economist, not to speak of theoretical currents, with a liberal-democratic orientation’ (Sorgin 1993, p. 16).

²²Additionally, collectivism was often mentioned as a stubborn Russian tradition, contradicting the application of Western reform concepts to Russian reality (see Moiseev 1998, p. 78).

²³See also Khubiev (1993, p. 65).

²⁴The titles of the articles in this special issue, such as ‘Elements of a concept of economic security’ (Samsonov 1994, pp. 14 – 24), ‘Economic security: evaluations, problems, methods of maintenance’ (Arkhipov 1994, pp. 36 – 44), or ‘The object of Russia's economic security’ (Tambovtsev 1994, pp. 45 – 53) indicate that the main task was seen in outlining the problem methodologically. The concept was then further developed in countless articles and in the monographs of Sergei Yu. Glaz'ev (1996) and Vyacheslav K. Senchagov (1998).

²⁵For an overview see Sergei A. Afontsev (2002, pp. 30 – 39). Despite these differences, however, most authors would probably have agreed with the following definition suggested by Bogdanov et al.: ‘economic security, if considered at the level of a single country, may be defined as a condition of the national economy, which is characterised by resistance to external and internal destabilising influences and which can be maintained by means of the country's own resources and mechanisms alone’ (1999, p. 253).

²⁶In this regard it is especially telling that he refers to the German historical school and namely to Gustav Schmoller, whose economic nationalism never went as far as that of Ol'sevich and others.

²⁷This was the case, he clarified, especially for ‘a certain part of the “new Russians”’, whom he characterised as ‘international vagabonds’ (Ol'sevich 1996).

²⁸Ol'sevich dedicated a book chapter to ‘the formation of a Russian school of economic thought’ (Ol'sevich 1997). This chapter can be seen as the first contribution to the discussion about a Russian economic school in the 1990s; yet as Leonid D. Shirokorad shows, the thesis could already be found in Soviet literature (Shirokorad 2003, p. 52).

²⁹For a more detailed critique see Avtonomov (2003, pp. 116 – 122) and Shirokorad (2003).

³⁰The applicability of Western standard theory to Russia had also been questioned previously, not because of ideological reservations, but because it was an ‘extrapolation of Western stereotypes of behaviour’ which hardly accorded to those prevailing in the former Soviet Union (Anan'in 1992, p. 92).

³¹See the list provided by Nureev and Latov (2001, p. 99, notes 10 and 11).

³²The Western works that were translated included Coase (1988), translated in 1991; Olson (1965, 1982), translated in 1995 and 1998, respectively; Williamson (1985), translated in 1996; Ménard (1990), translated in 1996; Buchanan (1962, 1975), both translated in 1997; North (1990), translated in 1997 (see Nureev & Latov 2001, pp. 104 – 105).

³³Where such attempts can lead is most clearly shown by Abalkin's contribution to a conference volume in which the author states in earnest that the ‘corner stone of evolutionary economics’ was the assumption about ‘the unity of blood and belief, culture and customs of the population, the system of norms and institutions’ and that therefore the ‘renaissance of Russian economy … is inseparably connected with the reconstruction of the historical memory of the people …’ (Abalkin 2000a, p. 12). A far more conservative representative of this current is Volkonskii, who glorifies the Chinese economic reforms and the Soviet workers collective (see e.g. Volkonskii 1998, pp. 7 – 16, 1999, pp. 11 – 27, 2000, pp. 119 – 134). Besides Leonid Abalkin, Volkonskii is perhaps the best example of an author who in Soviet times belonged to the most ‘progressive’ economists (Sutela & Mau 1998, p. 49), but whose views in the second half of the 1990s looked anything but progressive.

³⁴It must be stressed, however, that there were also liberal authors, who had earlier pointed to the problem of cultural adaptation to the new formal institutions. In my opinion, the most impressive example was an article by Kuzminov in which he warned against thinking that a change in behavioural patterns could be achieved quickly, and therefore called for long-term ‘investments into economic culture’ (Kuzminov 1992, p. 52).

³⁵Yasin (2003, p. 7). It is a point in favour of Yevgenii Yasin's great scientific honesty that he explicitly stressed, in his opening talk on the ‘Modernisation of Economy and Nurturing of Institutions’ at the 2005 annual conference of the Moscow Higher School of Economics, that he had renounced his previous views. He had, said Yasin, underestimated the inertia of informal institutions in the early 1990s.

³⁶See also Nesterenko (2000, p. 6) and Volkonskii (2000, p. 124).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joachim Zweynert

This article originates from a research project on the historical and cultural path-dependence of the transition processes in Central and Eastern Europe, which is carried through jointly by the Hamburg Institute of International Economics and the University of Hamburg; the project is funded by the VolkswagenStiftung. This article was presented at the research seminar ‘Order and Organisation’ at the Economics Department of the University of Freiburg/Breisgau on 17 February 2005. I am indebted to the discussants of my paper at this occasion as well as the anonymous referees for helpful comments. Also I should like to thank Lena Nievers for language assistance.