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a_kleberWhy did the Soviet Union collapse? (откровенные размышления британских коммунистов)
Kotz and Weir: The party elite, not the masses, wanted capitalism (тезис британских социалистов)
Why did the USSR fall? (критика предыдущего)
Kotz and Weir: Revolution from Above, 1997
Preface
One of the authors of this work, David Kotz, is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the other, Fred Weir, is a journalist based in Moscow. In the late 1980s, from our separate vintage points, we both observed with interest the economic and political reforms taking place in the Soviet Union. At the same time it appeared that Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of perestroika might be giving birth to the world's first democratic socialist system. Perhaps, buried beneath the Soviet Union's repressive state and rigidly centralized economy, some genuine socialist remnants might have survived from the ideas that had originally inspired the Russian Revolution. It seemed possible that Gorbachev's reforms would succeed in liberating what was good in the Soviet past while expunging the unsavory aspects of the Soviet system.
Events in the former Soviet Union did not follow such a course. Gorbachev's attempt to reform the Soviet system instead led to its disintegration. By the end of 1991, some six years after Gorbachev's rise to power, the Soviet state was dissolved, replaced by fifteen newly sovereign nation-states, and an effort to build capitalism superseded Gorbachev's project of reforming and democratizing Soviet socialism. This was a remarkable turn of events, which almost no one had predicted.
The authors of this book first met in Moscow in the summer of 1991. We discussed the Soviet demise unfolding around us. The Western media were filled with stories of a popular assault from below toppling the Soviet system, as its inevitable economic collapse suddenly left the Soviet elite unable any longer to protect and save the system. However, this did not accord with what we saw. We looked at the process of the Soviet demise from the perspective of our particular intellectual training and experience, and we found the received explanations to be implausible and inconsistent with the evidence.
David Kotz is an economist who specializes in the process of institutional change in economic history, in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere. This speciality requires knowledge of the factors that promote economic growth and those that retard it, of the interplay of technological development and class interest, of the roles of economics and politics in social change. He had spent years studying the factors that make for continuity in socioeconomic systems and those that produce either incremental or radical change. As Kotz observed the Soviet demise in 1991, the difficulties of the economy of the USSR, serious though they were, did not seem to provide satisfactory explanation for the rapid unraveliing of the Soviet system. Other forces were at work besides economic decline.
Fred Weir is the Moscow correspondent for the Hindustan Times of India and a regular contributor to Canadian Press, Canada's national news service. He had studied Russian and Soviet history up to the graduate level at the University of Toronto, taking a special interest in ideas for modernizing and democratizing the state socialist system. He travelled widely in the USSR and Eastern Europe in the 1970s and early 1980s, before coming to live in the Soviet Union to work as a journalist in 1986. He married Mariam Shaumian, a Russian-Armenian woman, in 1987. Weir travelled throughout the country and reported weekly on the progress, disappointments, and disasters of perestroika. He came to know personally, as well as in the line of work, many members of the Soviet Union's intellectual and political elite. He found a widespread cynicism among them. Contrary to the claim that the Soviet elite sought to defend the system to the end, it appeared to Weir that by 1991 many of them not only failed to support the effort to reform socialism but were ready to embrace capitalism.
The two of us discussed these puzzling events and how they could be understood. We came to the view that the Soviet system had been dispatched, not by economic collapse combined with a popular uprising, but by its own ruling elite in pursuit of its own perceived interests. In 1992 we decided to write a book exploring, and explaining, this unconventional interpretation of the Soviet demise.
-----
В 2007 эти авторы выпустили пересмотренную версию своей книги, теперь она называется так:
Russia's Path from Gorbachev to Putin: The Demise of the Soviet System and the New Russia
(пост написан 17 окт.2008)
Kotz and Weir: The party elite, not the masses, wanted capitalism (тезис британских социалистов)
Why did the USSR fall? (критика предыдущего)
Kotz and Weir: Revolution from Above, 1997
Preface
One of the authors of this work, David Kotz, is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the other, Fred Weir, is a journalist based in Moscow. In the late 1980s, from our separate vintage points, we both observed with interest the economic and political reforms taking place in the Soviet Union. At the same time it appeared that Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of perestroika might be giving birth to the world's first democratic socialist system. Perhaps, buried beneath the Soviet Union's repressive state and rigidly centralized economy, some genuine socialist remnants might have survived from the ideas that had originally inspired the Russian Revolution. It seemed possible that Gorbachev's reforms would succeed in liberating what was good in the Soviet past while expunging the unsavory aspects of the Soviet system.
Events in the former Soviet Union did not follow such a course. Gorbachev's attempt to reform the Soviet system instead led to its disintegration. By the end of 1991, some six years after Gorbachev's rise to power, the Soviet state was dissolved, replaced by fifteen newly sovereign nation-states, and an effort to build capitalism superseded Gorbachev's project of reforming and democratizing Soviet socialism. This was a remarkable turn of events, which almost no one had predicted.
The authors of this book first met in Moscow in the summer of 1991. We discussed the Soviet demise unfolding around us. The Western media were filled with stories of a popular assault from below toppling the Soviet system, as its inevitable economic collapse suddenly left the Soviet elite unable any longer to protect and save the system. However, this did not accord with what we saw. We looked at the process of the Soviet demise from the perspective of our particular intellectual training and experience, and we found the received explanations to be implausible and inconsistent with the evidence.
David Kotz is an economist who specializes in the process of institutional change in economic history, in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere. This speciality requires knowledge of the factors that promote economic growth and those that retard it, of the interplay of technological development and class interest, of the roles of economics and politics in social change. He had spent years studying the factors that make for continuity in socioeconomic systems and those that produce either incremental or radical change. As Kotz observed the Soviet demise in 1991, the difficulties of the economy of the USSR, serious though they were, did not seem to provide satisfactory explanation for the rapid unraveliing of the Soviet system. Other forces were at work besides economic decline.
Fred Weir is the Moscow correspondent for the Hindustan Times of India and a regular contributor to Canadian Press, Canada's national news service. He had studied Russian and Soviet history up to the graduate level at the University of Toronto, taking a special interest in ideas for modernizing and democratizing the state socialist system. He travelled widely in the USSR and Eastern Europe in the 1970s and early 1980s, before coming to live in the Soviet Union to work as a journalist in 1986. He married Mariam Shaumian, a Russian-Armenian woman, in 1987. Weir travelled throughout the country and reported weekly on the progress, disappointments, and disasters of perestroika. He came to know personally, as well as in the line of work, many members of the Soviet Union's intellectual and political elite. He found a widespread cynicism among them. Contrary to the claim that the Soviet elite sought to defend the system to the end, it appeared to Weir that by 1991 many of them not only failed to support the effort to reform socialism but were ready to embrace capitalism.
The two of us discussed these puzzling events and how they could be understood. We came to the view that the Soviet system had been dispatched, not by economic collapse combined with a popular uprising, but by its own ruling elite in pursuit of its own perceived interests. In 1992 we decided to write a book exploring, and explaining, this unconventional interpretation of the Soviet demise.
-----
В 2007 эти авторы выпустили пересмотренную версию своей книги, теперь она называется так:
Russia's Path from Gorbachev to Putin: The Demise of the Soviet System and the New Russia
(пост написан 17 окт.2008)
