tid242
Mordant God
Joined: 27 Feb 2002
Posts: 1964
Location: Minneapolis
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 Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2008 6:14 pm Post subject: Book: 'Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia.' |
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Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia.
by Yegor Gaidar (Author), Antonina W. Bouis (Translator)
# Hardcover: 332 pages
# Publisher: Brookings Institution Press (October 17, 2007)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0815731140
# ISBN-13: 978-0815731146
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Product Description
In today's Russia, nostalgia for the Soviet era is growing. Many Russians reflect wistfully on the passing of an era when the Soviet Union was a superpower, commanding international respect, and they blame its demise on external enemies and foolish changes in policy. In an address to the Russian Federal Assembly, President Vladimir Putin called the breakup of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. In Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, however, economic reformer and former prime minister Yegor Gaidar clearly illustrates why such notions are misguided, ill informed, and dangerous. As he explains in the introduction: "My goal is to show the reader that the Soviet political and economic system was unstable by its very nature. It was just a question of when and how it would collapse."
Although the Soviet Union never referred to itself as an empire, it fit Gaidar's definition: "a powerful multiethnic state formation in which the power (or at least the right to vote) is concentrated in the metropolis and its democratic institutions (if they exist), though the power and those institutions do not extend to the entire territory under its control." The U.S.S.R. sat on a shaky foundation of far-flung lands, conquered peoples, centralized authoritarian government, and a command economy overly reliant on natural resources. Gaidar explains why this once-powerful state was doomed to fail eventually, and why Russians should be looking forward rather than backward in building their nation. He worries that Russia is repeating some of its tragic mistakes, including uneven economic development that leaves the nation vulnerable to fluctuations in the energy market.
Gaidar uses the Soviet case as a device for understanding the life cycle of empires, which found themselves at the wrong end of history in the twentieth century. World War I spelled the end for the Hapsburgs, Ottomans, and Romanoffs, for example, and Europe's overseas empires began breaking apart after World War II. In the 1990s, the final remaining territorially integrated empire-the Soviet Union-fell. This is no mere coincidence: "The dissolution of empires in the twentieth century is a component of the process of global change that is called modern economic growth." To reproduce such a flawed model of governance would be a tragic mistake, yet many Russians still look backward through rose-colored glasses as their government centralizes power again. Such misplaced nostalgia defies reality while it imperils the future of Russia and its people.
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I think the following write-up sums it up well...
| Leonard J. Wilson (VA United States) ((Amazon.com Review)) wrote: |
Yegor Gaidar's Collapse of an Empire is an insider's view of the causes and events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The author is has a fascinating and improbable background. He served as acting Prime Minister, First Deputy Prime Minister, and Economics Minister of Russia under Boris Yeltsin in the early 1990s but is an academic economist rather than a politician or bureaucrat. He received his PhD in economics under the Soviet educational system but, somehow, developed a solid understanding of economics of free markets. In Collapse of an Empire, Gaidar offers his historical and economic perspective on the Soviet collapse as a lesson and caution for today's Russia. It is as close to a definitive work on the Soviet collapse as I have yet read.
Gaidar starts with two general observations, one on empires and one on oil, and then proceeds to describe the Soviet Collapse.
Empires
Empires come in two flavors: Overseas empires (British, French, Dutch) and territorially contiguous empires (Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia, Ottoman Turkey, Soviet Union, and, on a smaller scale, Yugoslavia). Of these two types, the overseas empires are the easier to dismantle: The imperial power can simply declare the former colonies free and, possibly, repatriate a limited number of colonists with a claim to citizenship in the mother country. In territorial empires, diverse ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious groups usually reside in close proximity to each other and often have longstanding conflicts over rights to land and under the law. Abolishing a territorial empire leaves all these conflicts in place, ready to boil over as soon as imperial control has been lifted. Members of the formerly dominant ethnic group may even find themselves a minority in one of the successor states and subject to the rule of one of their formerly subject people. Many of the troubled areas of the world today (Balkans, Middle East) are parts of former territorial empires where population segments have not succeeded in making peace with their neighbors.
Oil
Countries with significant natural resources, especially oil, have generally not been on the forefront of democracy or economic liberalism. Gaidar attributes this phenomenon to the steady stream of revenues the sale of oil provides the ruling party. Secured by this source of income, the government has no need to reach an accommodation with its people that gives them a voice in how they are governed. In exchange, the tax burden on the population often remains very light. The western democracies grew out of accommodations that essentially gave the people a voice in how their countries were governed in exchange for their acceptance of the government's imposition of taxes.
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As you may or may not have known, I've been thinking about this work for a while now, since before it was translated to English, in fact. I finished this book a couple of months ago & always meant to do a formal writeup, however I've found myself too lazy to do it. I may yet do a real write-up, however for now I'll just re-post what's jumped out as interesting to me that I've already posted. With respect to the empire bit: it's interesting to see a modern text on empires without mentioning the US in this capacity - in fact the entire book largely skips most mentions of the United States, which makes for an interesting read. Gaidar is a lot more optimistic about democracies & functioning governments than I traditionally have been, thus perhaps he did not feel much needed to be said of the US (he also makes very little mention of any of the oftmentioned secular globally recognized democracies.).
| tid242 wrote: | | Grigory Yavlinsky, 1991 wrote: |
Grigory Yavlinsky, in an interview in April 1991:
Mikhail Leontyev: Now Gerashchenko and Orlov, minister of finance, “have realized” that a fiscal catastrophe is looming.
Yavlinsky: Dear comrades, beloved friends! You were informed of this at the beginning of August! And you responded that this was not so. Why are you so upset now? You took the huge budget deficit, about a fourth of a trillion, and spread it out over the republics, you put on all kinds of fig leaves to hide the shame of the real deficit. Did you seriously think that trick would work? . . .
Leontyev: We could end up in a situation when the fiscal system will completely fall apart.
Yavlinsky: We already have, actually.
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Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia. by Yegor Gaidar p195-6. |
| tid242 wrote: | | Quote: |
The development model the socialist system was trying to achieve was the creation of major new enterprises. But such enterprises cannot be efficient if there is no one to work in them. In the 1960s the supply of labor to industry dried up. In a socialist system, it is not easy to replace labor with additional investments.
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Attempts to improve the efficiency of the Soviet economy through administrative methods failed. Planning discipline eroded. It was impossible to compensate for inadequate labor resources with increased capital investments. The deputy chairman of Gosplan, Lev Voronin, wrote to the Council of Ministers on February 23, 1984, that the labor shortage caused by a steady overcreation of jobs was reducing labor efficiency. Economists Stanley Fisher and William Easterly believed that a system that did not allow for capital investments to compensate for reductions in the work force was the main factor in the crash of the Soviet economy. These problems were real, but they extended over time, and the difficulties accumulated over decades. Extrapolating from these trends would allow us to predict economic decline and stagnation, but not a crash.
Economic growth was slowing down, but the slowdown did not threaten the economic and political structures.
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Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia. by Yegor Gaidar p74-8.
Just replace "Soviet/Socialist" with "American."
Actually, the parallels between the US and USSR seem largely striking in this book (although this book has NOTHING to do about parallels between the two systems), I will write up a fuller account when I finish the book in the book review section.
Just reminds me of that Hoppe quote:
| Hans Herman-Hoppe wrote: |
[T]he collapse of the Soviet Empire represented no so much a triumph of democracy as the bankruptcy of the idea of socialism, and it therefore also contained an indictment against the American (Western) system of democratic - rather than a dictatorial - socialism.
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-tid242 |
| tid242 wrote: | I may or may not respond to tizmo's reply, but if so it will be on another thread...
Here's a snipped from a short I read today written by none other than Yegor Gaidar.
| Yegar Gaidar wrote: |
In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Soviet leadership, however, was not intellectually prepared to heed lessons from the School of Salamanca. The shortest quotation about the intellectual capacity of the Soviet leadership came from the Politburo minutes: "Mr. Zasiadko has stopped binge drinking. Resolution: nominate Mr. Zasiadko as a minister to Ukraine."
While intellectual capacity was not the strongest quality of the Soviet leadership, they still understood the need to manipulate the oil market.
(snip)
Yet one of the Soviet leadership's biggest blunders was to spend a significant amount of additional oil revenues to start the war in Afghanistan. The war radically changed the geopolitical situation in the Middle East. In 1974, Saudi Arabia decided to impose an embargo on oil supplies to the United States. But in 1979 the Saudis became interested in American protection because they understood that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a first step toward--or at least an attempt to gain--control over the Middle Eastern oil fields.
The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.
As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive. The Soviet leadership was confronted with a difficult decision on how to adjust. There were three options--or a combination of three options--available to the Soviet leadership.
((lists 3 solutions))
Unable to realize any of the above solutions, the Soviet leadership decided to adopt a policy of effectively disregarding the problem in hopes that it would somehow wither away. Instead of implementing actual reforms, the Soviet Union started to borrow money from abroad while its international credit rating was still strong. It borrowed heavily from 1985 to 1988, but in 1989 the Soviet economy stalled completely.
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.25991,filter.all/pub_detail.asp
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I am finding it increasingly interesting, the more I read today, about how totally incompetent the west was during the entire cold war, and immediate aftermath.
Most of what will be intuitively obvious in 10 years to the average Joe are obvious truths that couldn't be realized by any "expert" in the 80's....
makes you wonder.
-tid242 |
-tid242
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