The Origins of Russian Reformers and their Program (Some Facts about Informal Economic Discourse in the 1980s)

Abstract

Oleg Ananyin — Chairman, Educational and Methodical Council, National Research University “Higher School of Economics”. Address: 20, Myasnitskaya St., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation. E-mail: ananyin@hse.ru

This paper reconstructs the circumstances under which a team of Russian reformers of the 1990s was recruited. It particularly looks into the story of how the discourse community emerged in Moscow and Leningrad in the 1980s, as well as the origins of the fractions of ‘loyal reformers’ and ‘latent dissidents’. It is recognized that the general worldview shaped within the community was not radical. The first blueprints of future reformers were quite ‘gradualist’ and accounted for a distinction between a market-based mechanism of functioning and a plan-based mechanism of developing of an economic system. Critical reform thinking was centered on the so called ‘bargaining’, or ‘administrative market paradigm’, which challenged the textbook picture of the socialist economic system as planned and centralized. It is argued, however, that although useful for critical purposes, this paradigm could be accused of creating a misleading expectation that market reforms (especially, privatization) could use the existing ‘administrative market’ as its foundation.

This idea missed the famous Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft distinction and failed to grasp the scale of the process involved. Finally, the question is raised: how could once gradualist ‘young researchers’ be converted into ‘shock therapists’ in such a short period of time? The answer suggested in this article rests on the combination of two factors: 1) the growing external and internal disequilibrium of the Soviet economy from 1988-1991, which linked the discussions around market reforms with the imperative of economic stabilization, 2) and newly established contacts with Western experts. The stabilization discourse within mainstream economics of that period was based on the principles of Washington consensus. Due to the high reputation of mainstream economists among the reformers, but despite its inadequacy to deal with the transformation process, this stabilization package was reassessed to become a tool of launching the systemic reforms.