The 1950s—the triumph of the Soviet economy

The frequent assertions in both Russian and Western economic literature and the broader press that the command economy is not viable are based on data showing the inefficient use of material and labour resources in the pre-war period and the continuous decline in the rate of economic growth and the efficiency of resource use in the 1960s–1980s. Yet it is a long way from observing these facts to confirming the failure of the command economy. Before the political system of the USSR began to collapse in 1990–91 there had been no prolonged absolute fall in GDP nor, in the post-war period, in the standard of living of the population, nor had technical progress come to a halt as it did, for example, in the 1990s after the rejection of the command economy. Compared with the latter period it is justifiable to talk of the indisputable advantages of the command over the market economy in Russian conditions, if of course we do not consider (for which there are some grounds) the enormous difficulties of the Russian economy in the 1990s to be consequences of a protracted transformation crisis. I would like to draw attention to the fact that these advantages are evident even in comparison with the degenerate mid-1980s version of the command economy, which was very different from the classical model.     

The Russian virtual economy turning real: Institutional change in the Arkhangel'sk forest sector

The article reports on an attempt to assess recent developments of the Russian ‘virtual economy’, a system that, some have argued, represents an alternative form of economic interaction to the modern market economy. In the virtual economy enterprises are engaged in informal non-market transactions with other enterprises and the public sector in accordance with rules that are alien to a market economy. Structural and behavioural changes that have taken place in the Russian economy after 1998 are studied with the help of official data and two surveys (from 1998 and 2005) of 15 forest sector enterprises in Arkhangel'sk Oblast’, a region in Russia's north-west with a largely forest-based economy. The outcome of the assessment indicates that the virtual economy is contracting in the Arkhangel'sk forest sector as well as in Russia at large, and that it will eventually disappear altogether, even if it is likely to exert a profound influence on the behaviour of Russian enterprises for some time yet.     

Russia's post-crisis growth: its sources and prospects for continuation

This article provides an in-depth analysis of Russia's post-crisis growth, with a view to understanding the prospects for its continuation. It examines in detail the chief drivers of growth, as well as the main developments and policies that have been underlying it. A key finding is that the role of the oil sector, and particularly privately owned oil companies, has been vastly more important in driving economic growth from 2001 to 2004 than thus far recognised. The oil sector's contribution to growth has hitherto been severely underestimated because official data do not account for transfer pricing and thus fail to fully reflect the importance of the hydrocarbon sector in the Russian economy. In the light of this finding, this article also assesses the economic impact of the ‘Yukos affair’. Looking forward, it is reasoned that—given its economic structure—Russia is bound to remain a heavily resource-dependent economy for some time to come. The article further argues that, given good macroeconomic management and the avoidance of gross policy errors, Russia could realistically hope to sustain high growth rates over the medium term. However, given current tendencies for greater state involvement in key sectors of the economy, such an outcome is not by any means guaranteed.     

State Capitalism in Time: Russian Natural Gas at the Service of Foreign Policy

This article explores the phenomenon of the enduring state control over the Russian natural gas sector. We suggest that explanations of the underlying motives can be classified under two broad theoretical categories: idealism and utilitarianism. Thus, we argue that state capitalism in the Russian natural gas industry can be understood through the idealistic claims of state power and of serving the national interest, which underpin the dominant perception of natural gas resources as a foreign policy tool. Moreover, we contend that although this perception is often considered as a product of the last decade, in fact it is rooted in history, as a legacy of the Soviet era.     

Rethinking the Economic Relationship between Kazakhstan and Russia

According to their governments, economic relations between Kazakhstan and Russia—the two largest post-Soviet countries—have been exceptionally solid and robust. However, statistical data demonstrate that Russian investments in Kazakhstan's economy have been weak, and that Kazakhstan has only recently increased investment in the Russian economy. This raises the question of whether relations between the two countries have been more uneven than has been claimed officially. The article also explores the influence of off-shore investments via third countries and other aspects of the bilateral relationship between Kazakhstan and Russia and the involvement of each country in the other's economy.     

Ethnofederalism and ethnonationalism in the separatist politics of chechnya and tatarstan: sources or resources?

Common explanations of the recent war in Chechnya add up to an astonishingly overdetermined picture. The conflict between Russia's central government and its separatist ethnic autonomy was blamed on several grand factors: oil interests, resurgent Islam, imperial collapse, international terrorism, organized crime. Superficially, Chechnya shares most of these features with Tatarstan — another defiant republic of the Russian Federation which has oil, notorious gangsters, and a native population of Islamic heritage. A more detailed account shows, however, that the two state entities have little in common except the Soviet-made institutional framework. Tatarstan is a rare example of an ethnically non-Russian republic within the very urban industrial core of the former USSR, while Chechnya was patently peripheral. Differences in historical legacies and present-day social compositions conditioned very different outcomes of multifaceted political struggles that accompanied the demise of Soviet empire. In Tatarstan, local ethnically-colored nomenklatura exploited the chaotic transition to claim property rights over the local economy. The new rhetoric of national revival which the nationally-minded wing of Tatar intelligentsia advanced during Gorbachev's relaxation of censorship, was used by the Tatar nomenklatura to justify its struggle for economic property rights and exclusive political jurisdiction in its territory. By contrast, the Communist patronage network which ruled Chechnya until 1991 was too dependent on the central government for subsidies and coercive resources to follow the Tatarstan example. In the aftermath of August 1991 hardliner coup, when the Chechen apparatchiks misplaced their bets in Moscow's politics and momentarily lost support of the central government, they were swept away by the social movement of rural masses and urban marginal intellectuals. In its turn revolution, the only such outcome among the republics of the Russian Federation (but not the USSR), created an inherently unstable regime in Chechnya which could legitimate itself only with the idea of national independence and, once Moscow attempted to destabilize it, through the patriotic war.     

Russia and the Caucasus

Russia began moving toward the Caucasus at the end of the 16th Century. In the early 19th Century, the Tsars consolidated control over Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, but had to fight a 35‐year war against the North Caucasian mountaineers to secure control of the entire area The three Transcaucasian republics declared their independence before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but have been hard pressed to consolidate it because of Russian interference. In the North Caucasus, the Chechens declared their independence as well. Erratic Russian policies and freebooting by elements of the Russian military have resulted in disruptive intervention in all three of the Transcaucasian countries. In December 1994, Russia launched a military offensive to subdue the Chechens. The Chechens have fought back furiously, and Russia's war against them has become a domestic Afghanistan. Russia has yet to define its national interests in the Caucasus and adopt coherent policies toward the region. Until it does the area will continue to be unstable.     

Russia's Response to Crisis: The Paradox of Success

Russia's recovery from the deep economic crisis it experienced in 2008–2009 did not deliver clear political dividends for the Russian leadership. This is because of the context in which the crisis occurred and the way that the leadership, particularly President Medvedev, and many of its critics described the crisis. The oil-fuelled boom that preceded the crisis had the effect of deepening it. Economic recovery based on rising energy prices looks like a failure, rather than a success, and highlights the underlying structural problems of the Russian economy. Arguments about the need for modernisation from within government exacerbated this perception. This seems to have weakened the connection between approval for the leadership and economic growth, a staple of pre-crisis politics.     

Budgetary politics in the Russian federation:(1) the case: of sakha (yakutia)

This article traces the evolution of center-periphery relations between the Russian federal government and the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) using an institutional framework. During each of three stages the author identifies a distinct set of institutional parameters that, to varying degrees, determined the powers of federal and regional institutions. Each stage is also identified with a unique central institutional conflict that helped shape the rules of the political games played during that period. From this perspective, institutional change is seen as a major determinant of Russian center-periphery relations. The article concludes that Sakha has had remarkable success in extracting budgetary concessions from the federal government. However, Sakha has been unable to force the federal government to implement all the promises it has made.

Nonetheless, the concessions that Sakha and others have received are significant, and prompt the conclusion that Russia has become a federal state. However, Russia is far from an equal federation.     

Prince Adam Czartoryski as a liminal figure in the development of modern nationalism in Eastern Europe at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

In Polish history, Prince Adam Czartoryski is almost universally regarded as one of the most important Polish statesmen and patriots of the first half of the nineteenth century. In Russian history, on the other hand, he is remembered chiefly as the Foreign Minister of the Russian Empire, and a close personal friend of Tsar Alexander I. How did Czartoryski reconcile his commitment to the Polish nation with his service to the Russian Empire (a state which occupied most of Poland)? This paper will attempt to place Prince Adam's friendship with Alexander, and his service to Imperial Russia, in the broader context of national identity formation in early nineteenth-century eastern Europe. It will be argued that the idea of finding a workable relationship between Poland and Russia, even within the framework of a single state for a “Slavic nation,” was an important and forgotten feature of Polish political thought at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By answering the question of precisely how Czartoryski was able to negotiate between the identities of a “Polish patriot” and “Russian statesman,” the paper will shed light on the broader development of national identity in early nineteenth-century Poland and Russia.     

Gorbachev, ideology, and the fate of Soviet communism

The collapse of the Soviet Union has spurred much scholarly debate about the reasons for the rapid disintegration of this apparently entrenched system. In this article, it is argued that the basic source of ultimate weakness was the obverse of the system's strengths, especially its form of organization and its relation to Marxist–Leninist ideology. Democratic centralism provided cohesion for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) but also gave inordinate control over ideology to the party leader. Mikhail Gorbachev carried out an ideological revision that undercut the legitimacy of party elites and his restructuring of the system left the party with no clear functional role in the society. The successor party, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), has made a surprising comeback for communism, utilizing the Leninist model of party organization, which has proved to be highly effective in the Russian political culture. Furthermore, the CPRF, under party leaders like Gennadi Zyuganov, has avoided Gorbachev's ideological deviations while attempting to broaden the party's base through the cultivation of Russian nationalism.     

Property rights in context: Privatization’s legacy for corporate legality in Poland and Russia

In the first decade after the collapse of Communism, Russia became notorious for conflicts around corporate property and corporate governance. In Poland, such conflicts were far less frequent. This distinction I argue, reflects the form of privatization in each country. In Poland, negotiation among potential shareholders and current enterprise stakeholders preceded privatization, whereas in Russia privatization procedures pitted these same groups against one another. The legacy of privatization in Russia expressed itself in long-running legal conflicts over the security of property rights. These developments highlight the importance of situational incentives to challenge or respect property rights, undermining various new-institutionalist arguments that link security of property rights primarily to the commitment and capacity of state bodies to enforce them, to the normative legitimacy of the law, or to coordination equilibria in a game-theoretic framework. The argument also enables a clarification of the political trajectory now leading to stronger corporate property rights in Russia. David M. Woodruff is associate professor of political science at MIT. His main interest is the politics of economic state-building in the post-socialist countries, especially Russia. His present research focuses on how Russia’s insertion in the international economy affects its ability to build legal institutions appropriate for a market economy. Professor Woodruff is the author ofMoney Unmade: Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism (Cornell University Press 1999) and articles inPolitics & Society, Post-Soviet Affairs, andEast European Constitutional Review.     

Making Baikal Russian: Imperial Politics at the Russian–Qing Border

The article discusses power asymmetries and transcultural entanglements in the Baikal region on the border between the Russian and Qing empires. The Russian imperial authorities used transculturality, the diversity of the regional population and its transboundary connections, as a resource in their attempts to control parts of the former Qing Empire, but at the same time they tried to reduce it through Russification, Christianisation, and the homogenisation of social groups, which led to protest and instability instead of the anticipated results. Consolidation of Russian rule in some spheres undermined its control over others and led to an unexpected increase in cultural and political diversity.     

Farewell to the Caucasus: Regional ethnic clan politics and the growing instability of the ruling elite after the 2012 presidential elections in Russia

One of the most lingering questions about Russian politics that dominates public discourse and media coverage is the future of political regime after the 2012 presidential elections. The answer to this question is inextricably linked to the extent of differences between President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, how long their “tandemocracy” will last and what can bring about regime change as scarce critics of the Kremlin, from ultra-liberals to communists, have been haphazardly co-opted into the power system, leaving no political ambitions that they would not, in principle, be ready to abandon in return for proper compensation.In sharp contrast to the views of many regional experts and commentators, the present-day Russian Federation is the world's most anti-Soviet state. It is based upon a very different set of values: private ownership, dire individualism, the cult of money, a clan-based political system, and pervasive corruption at all levels of government. The North Caucasus ethnocratic elites, however, do not have access to abundant resources for sale, and are forced to look around for alternative sustenance, as rigid centralism and unification limit their rent-seeking capabilities. Alexander Khloponin, the incumbent presidential envoy in charge of the North Caucasus Federal District, seems to continue the policy of buying the loyalty of regional archaic clan-based elites that aggravates rather than improves the situation.The paper addresses this puzzle: why, against rigorous rhetoric and demonstration of tight grip over the region, neither Putin nor Medvedev has real power to bring change to the North Caucasus? In an attempt to solve this puzzle, the paper examines the triadic relationship among central political elite, who benefited from the massive privatisation of lucrative segments of Soviet industry in the early 1990s, regional clan-based ethnocracy, and non-systemic religious opposition. Drawing on the works of Russian scholars and experts in Russian politics, the paper explores the hypothesis that on-going instability in the North Caucasus can no longer be explained by a well-known set of theories of ethnic violence, because it is carefully negotiated by regional and central political elite, who do not see the North Caucasus as an indispensable part of the Russian Federation and whose clan-based rent-seeking agendas have gradually driven Russian statehood into a complete dead-end. Instead of facing the real challenges that are addressed in this paper, it is only able to make a public show of action on the eve of crucial political campaigns: the 2012 presidential elections and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The paper concludes that the deep freeze in the Russian political system has exhausted its debatable potential for change through the existing tandem model of government with its obscure division of roles between two leaders. What we actually see is an imitation of political reform and the resulting degradation of the entire system of governance. Over the past century, Russian polity has never been as weak as today, because the only legitimate source of power in Russia is corruption.     

The Representation of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Twenty-first Century Russian Media

The aim of this study is to investigate the representation of Mikhail Gorbachev in contemporary Russian media discourse. Attention is paid to Gorbachev's social roles and activities as well as his personality, as presented in Russian news texts. The empirical data were collected over the period from 2000 to 2009 from seven major Russian newspapers. According to these data, a dual relationship to Gorbachev exists: in the West he is an honoured politician with a high profile, whereas in Russia the attitude towards him is ambivalent. In most texts he is represented as a once important political actor.     

Higher Education in Transition to a Market Economy: Two Case Studies

THE IDEA FOR THIS ARTICLE came from a visit to Tomsk that took place in May 1997. The authors visited the State University of Tomsk, one of Russia's leading universities, with an enviable research record and very good library and computing facilities, and were fortunate enough to be able to interview senior staff of the university concerning their budgets and financial situation. Apparently the situation in Tomsk is not especially bad; indeed it may well be rather better than elsewhere in Russia. In order to have a little basis for comparison and to provide a second case study, we also investigated some aspects of the financial arrangements at the Economics Faculty of Moscow State University. What we learned from these two cases-admittedly far from a representative sample-not only revealed a great deal about the current state of higher education reforms in Russia but also provided a snapshot of the state of Russian economic reforms in general. Hence although this article is partly about Tomsk and Moscow, it is also about these wider issues. In significant respects, Russia remains quite distant from a well-functioning market-type economy, and some of these respects are important for the higher education sector. In a very fundamental sense, one could identify the main source of Russian shortcomings in reforms as a general problem of the state.1 However, this is not the place for a general review of such a major topic. Instead, in this article we focus on a few aspects of Russia's reforms in so far as they affect higher education, namely (1) ownership, property rights and governance issues; (2) funding issues and the state budget; (3) the tax regime and (4) non-functioning of the market economy. In what follows, therefore, we proceed as follows. First we outline some general issues relevant for the reform of a system of higher education moving away from former, Soviet-type structures, focusing on the Russian situation; then we present the case studies of Tomsk and Moscow. The following section examines issues concerning higher education in particular and the reform process more generally, as highlighted in the two case studies and in the light of the above four issues. We end with a short concluding section.     

A comparative study of the production structure of the cotton textile industry in India and the USA

This paper attempts a comparison of production structures of the cotton textile industries in India and the USA, using the input‐output framework. There are studies of comparative production structures in an economy but a disaggregated study has not been attempted for a particular industry. Almost all studies of the international comparisons of production structure have revealed that there are structural similarities between developed and less developed countries in spite of wide differences in per capita income and in levels of development. These similarities may not persist at an industry level and it could be that the chosen product‐mix and techniques conceal the basic differences in production structure of a developing and a developed economy in the economy‐wide study.     

东盟跨境数据流动治理的机制构建

跨境数据流动是全球数字经济的重要基础,也是全球治理的新兴议题。在数字经济发展和东盟区域一体化的趋势下,东盟从统筹数字经济发展与数据保护入手,着眼于提升东盟国际竞争力和话语权,制定并完善跨境数据流动治理机制。这一机制的构建始于新加坡对数据保护规制的探索,基于东盟个人数据保护框架,在东盟数字一体化总体框架下制定数字管理框架,并以“东盟示范合同条款”和“东盟跨境数据流动认证”两大关键手段促进机制落实。该机制具有灵活性、包容性和指导性的特征,有利于促进东盟地区数字经济发展,降低谈判成本与合规成本,获得更多全球竞争优势。对于中国而言,在与东盟跨境数据流动治理机制合作对接方面具备可能性和可行性,需要充分认识和评估东盟机制对世界数字治理的影响、对地区数字经济秩序的挑战,推动中国与东盟之间的数字经济合作。     

Deindustrialisation and the social and economic sustainability nexus in developing countries: Cross‐country evidence on productivity and employment

In an empirical investigation of the interactions between industrial structure and macro outcomes, an accounting framework was applied to relate changes in sectoral employment and output compositions to changes in overall productivity growth over time. The numerical results were interpreted using a taxonomy describing industrialisation and deindustrialisation in developing countries. The findings suggest that, in particular, industrial performance correlates with the overall performance of an economy, and therefore is the key sector in explaining the sustainability of different regional patterns in overall productivity and employment growth. That is, negative rates of productivity growth in the industrial sector are strongly associated with negative productivity growth for the economy as a whole, and vice versa. Further, slow industrial growth may lead to low road development, in which productivity growth trades off with employment growth, while high road development is defined as simultaneously expanding employment and overall productivity growth.     

Post-Soviet Developmentalism and the Political Economy of Russia’s Electricity Sector Liberalization

Observers of Russian state market relations typically consider the state as an entity engaged in creating rent-seeking opportunities for bureaucrats or powerful economic interests. The trajectory and outcomes of electricity sector reforms demonstrate the limits of this perspective and serve to highlight a developmental strand in Russian economic policy, which I call post-Soviet developmentalism. I found that post-Soviet developmentalism is key to understanding the patterns of market institutions that have emerged in the newly liberalized electricity sector and that they cannot be adequately explained if the state is largely seen as a predator or as captured by oligarchic interests. A close analysis of the institutional underpinnings of new electricity markets suggests that they were shaped in political bargains, in which the government sought to enlist Russia’s oligarchic conglomerates for its modernization agenda and developmental priorities. The paper links this discussion to three sets of theoretical literatures: It speaks to the debates on the post-Soviet transition, more broadly to the political economy of market reform, and finally, it addresses the developmental state literature.