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Collapse of an Empire
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Collapse of an Empire

Lessons for Modern Russia

Yegor Gaidar
Brookings Institution Press, 2007

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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Innovative

Recommendation

This remarkably accessible, lucid survey of recent Russian history is a must-read for anyone interested in global affairs. Yegor Gaidar, an acting prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, provides a concise yet comprehensive summary of the course of empires during the 20th century, and draws some pointed lessons. His goal is to counter nostalgia for the glory days of the Soviet Union. getAbstract admires how effectively he executes his objective, with a step-by-step recapitulation of the economic blunders that led inevitably to the Soviet Union’s dissolution. However, he also shows why those who expected democracy to grow must face the fact that it is on the retreat – and he leaves no doubt about Russia’s dangerous crossroads.

Take-Aways

  • When territorially integrated empires – like the USSR at the end of the 20th century – collapse, a serious threat of ethnic conflict and bloodshed arises.
  • The USSR’s dependence on oil exports created severe problems when oil prices fell.
  • Agriculturally inefficient, the Soviet Union could not feed itself and depended increasingly on imports of grain, financed with foreign loans.

About the Author

Yegor Gaidar, Boris Yeltsin’s acting prime minister in 1992, was the architect of “shock therapy” reforms during Russia’s transition to capitalism in the 1990s. He is director of the Institute for the Economy in Transition, a Moscow-based research organization.

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