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While the attempt to integrate the Russian economy into global capitalism has produced several market‐oriented economic institutions that formally appear to converge with those in the advanced industrial West, ‘globalization’ has had far less of an impact on the prevalent norms and attitudes of key economic factors at the local and regional level where many of the most successful enterprises are focusing their energies. This chapter may be summarized in terms of three tentative claims designed primarily to raise some questions concerning the prevailing assumptions concerning the nature and direction of the post‐Soviet transformation. First, the privatization program and other market‐oriented reforms under Yeltsin, while certainly ushering in a new set of institutions in the post‐Soviet era, do not represent a steady, unidirectional process of change leading towards the integration of Russia into the global economy and society. Second, the framework of ‘globalization’ works even less to capture the transformation of industrial relations in the post‐Soviet period, as evident in the failed attempt to develop a tripartite corporatist framework for bargaining on key issues, and in the increasing evidence of bilateral dealings and alliances between pro‐ and anti‐reform segments that cut across the business/labour divide and contact between government officials and the most influential trade unions and business associations across different regions. And finally, while the old system of industrial relations may not be much in evidence today, a substantial number of industrialists and Russian workers appear to be responding to the transformation of the post‐Soviet economy by focusing on regionally based, enterprise‐level survival strategies nested in informal ‘moral’ understandings that emerged in the context of enterprise paternalism in the Soviet era and that continue to survive within the context of new economic institutions.

This chapter analyzes alternative strategies—multilateral and regional—pursued by the Central Asian countries to integrate into a wider economic circle, emphasizing the shift from being part of the highly integrated Soviet economy to regional disintegration in the 1990s and early 2000s and then, after 2006, steps towards greater cooperation and integration. In the 1990s and 2000s, despite the actual multilateralism, only the Kyrgyz Republic joined the World Trade Organization. At the same time, a number of regional agreements were signed, both among the Central Asian countries and between Central Asian countries and their neighbors, although none had much influence, until the Eurasian Economic Union was constructed after 2009. Meanwhile, high costs of international trade in Central Asia are a symptom and a cause of regional disintegration.

This chapter surveys books and articles on the Soviet economy published in 1948-1991 and finds that Sovietologists afforded the military sector little attention, both relative to its importance and relative to the attention lavished on the other, lower-priority sectors. Literature on Soviet economy contains few chapters, articles, and books on the military sector, compared to other sectors. Thus, textbooks on the Soviet economy have 136 chapters on civilian sectors, and only eight on the military sector. Disproportionately many of those appeared in the final years of the USSR, and few of the military economy publications have been produced by American Sovietologists. Post mortem writings on Sovietology have not detected this gap in the scholarship. A survey of comparative systems and introductory economics textbooks shows that Sovietologists failed to persuade other economists that the military sector was merited a mention in popular treatments of the Soviet economy.

The Allies were worried whether the economy of the Soviet Union could survive the war, and in Washington the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) directed a young Russian émigré economist to study the problem: Wassily Leontief’s reports predicted the Soviet economy was stronger than thought, and ultimately he was proved right. Leontief’s big contribution was to invent the input-output methodology, and this was used in economic planning for the US economy. In the war the Americans went further, adapting this technique to map the Axis economy, and identify weak points for targeting their bombing raids in Europe. Ultimately this helped destroy the German economy.

American academic study of the Soviet economy was created to help parry the strategic challenge of the USSR and received lifetime government support for reasons of national security. The military sector of the economy was one of the most important topics that the sponsors of Sovietology expected it to address. To understand how the field dealt with this task, I describe its organization. The minuscule size of Sovietology meant that there were not enough specialists to cover the range of problems arising in the analysis of a modern economy. Some sub-fields were the sole preserve of a single researcher, resulting in lack of debate. Most of the debates that did occur were between American Sovietologists and outsiders of various kinds. These characteristics of the field reduced the reliability of findings and resulted in fragmentation, when mutually exclusive propositions were held at the same time.

This chapter discusses the author's experience covering Russia's new tsar after the first handover of power in the Soviet Union since 1964. As the sole correspondent for the Washington Post in Moscow, the author felt under even more pressure. Yuri Andropov admitted that the Soviet economy had failed to meet its targets for the past two years, blamed “inertia” and “adherence to old ways,” and characterized many Communist Party objectives as containing “elements of separation from reality.” Andropov also oversaw a limited debate on economic reforms and talked about greater discipline and material incentives for better performance. The author's stories detailed how Andropov set about replacing Leonid Brezhnev's bloated secretariat with aides from the KGB, moved KGB personnel into political jobs, and sent many of the old guard into retirement. The main obstacle was that although Andropov appeared to have consolidated his personal authority with the support of the military and the KGB, he had yet to gain control over the party bureaucracy and the approximately eighteen million Communist Party members accustomed to privileges that they did not want to lose.

In this chapter, transformation of the economic system is analysed with the example of post-socialist transition. This is obviously not confined to the imperative trinity of ‘liberalization, privatization, and stabilization’, however important it may have been. The transformation of the economic order, i.e., of the framework of formal institutions, is a deliberate political process that may be intended from below, but has to be initiated from above in the form of legal acts and administrative measures. The transformation of the economic system is described much less precisely and encompasses, in addition to the constitutive order, the individual structures in all their specificities as well as the attitudes and behaviours of the economic agents. The final outcome differs markedly between individual countries due to historical legacies and actual policies.

This chapter continues the themes of gifts and exchange, looking at the changing discourses about money, religion, and morality in the new Russia. It demonstrates how Buryat Buddhists grapple with what they see as contradictions between the perceived Buddhist notions of wealth and private property, values of monastic asceticism, and the Republic of Buryatia’s marginal position in the newly monetized post-Soviet economy. By sharing ethnographic observations on diverse discourses and practices— from Buryat Buddhist intellectuals suggesting to revive an ancient Indian cult of Anathapindada, Buddha’s favorite “socially responsible businessman,” to suggesting (using Max Weber) that with the modernization of Buddhism in accordance with capitalism, Buryatia would become a “Calvinist Switzerland,” to legitimating the possibility to engage in multi-level marketing as a specifically spiritual vocation— this chapter aims to show how Buryats rely on particular interpretations of the Buddhist doctrine, combined with enduring socialist and newer postsocialist values as they enter broader economic realms.

Forced industrialization, which was launched under the First Five-Year Plan, was a formative event that set the course of the Soviet economy. Stalin and other Soviet rulers have repeatedly stated, with uncharacteristic candor, that the objective of industrialization was the creation of defense capability, as well as building socialism. The main feature of industrialization, primacy of heavy industry, was said to serve the same twin goals. The standard Sovietological account civilianizes industrialization by downgrading or omitting the objectives proclaimed by Stalin, and substituting growth for its own sake as the sole motive. It derives the priority of heavy industry from the writings of Marx and the obscure Soviet economists. This account disregards or glosses over contradictory Soviet sources, violates the basics of the economic approach, and fails to draw connections to similar policies in other countries and periods.

To provide a backdrop for our stories and to study effects of duress on order, this chapter explores political authority and the field of power (the state and Communist Party). The dearth of food deprived the state of a tool for control, and skills and routines of average officials were not initially aligned with wartime needs. Further, intense material deprivation and hunger shifted civilians’ incentives: survival compelled breaking rules, even for civilians not otherwise so inclined. Finally, some officials and cadres were tempted to steal and resell food in shadow markets for speculative profit, creating a competitor to the state: the collective farmers’ market (rynok). Elites and the police/NKVD knew of food theft and rynok speculation but could not stop it. Paradoxically, shadow opportunists and civilians simultaneously challenged institutional coherence and reproduced it: shadow practices bled the state of control, but also required the state to provide food.

This chapter reviews how regional leaders had to find solutions to the problems of authoritarian control and authoritarian power sharing in the late 1940s. It recounts the original strategies of the classic substate dictator that had become harder to activate. It also points out how politically engaged rank-and-file members of the party or “regional aktivs” threw their weight behind a package of authority-enhancing norms that included public shows of deference, the hiding of policy differences, and a carefully calibrated system of seniority based on step-by-step promotions. The chapter traces Leonid Brezhnev's regime that made do with higher levels of economic and political freedom at the micro-level. It also analyzes how the Soviet economy had tacitly made use of the idea of trust (doverie) for over a generation in order to make the bloated and overcentralized economic system to work more effectively during the Brezhnev era.