There is almost a consensus that we in the West have lost the opportunity to turn the Russian state, and with it the other former Soviet republics, away from late totalitarianism towards early democracy and the market system. On the radical edge of this consensus live a group of mainly American scholars who believe that what has happened in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union is a wholly corrupt transfer of what had been Soviet state property into private hands through a collusion between the reformers, the Russian power structure, the new capitalists, the financial institutions, and the US (and other G7) governments.

Those who believe this, or close variants of it, include the Washington University anthropologist Jeanine R. Wedel (who wrote a kind of bible of this group, Collision or Collusion), the UK political scientist Simon Clarke, whose studies of the fate of labour since the Soviet collapse have been unparalleled in their scope, and the distinguished US Russian experts (and former Sovietologists) Peter Reddaway, Jerry Hough and Stephen Cohen. All of these latter scholars are preparing to bring out books denouncing the practices of the Yeltsin governments since 1991. In a synopsis he sent me of his book, Professor Reddaway said that the ‘ideology and ethic’ of the Yeltsin-era reforms were the same as those of the Stalinist collectivisation period.

There are milder forms of this view, which concede the difficulties faced by the Yeltsin administrations and the sheer intractability of the post-Soviet system to reform. Many who studied the Soviet Union and who saw in Mikhail Gorbachev’s six years in power the possibility for a peaceful transformation of a totalitarian state into something approaching a pluralist one felt angered by Yeltsin’s rude grasping after power once the last General Secretary of the CPSU had been mortally weakened by the August 1991 coup attempt. Professor Archie Brown, whose biography of Gorbachev published in 1998 sets the standard, leads those who see in the figure of this (to Westerners) attractive and apparently miraculous transformer of a closed system one who had a clear vision of where he was going and how he would achieve his end. On such a view, the lurching, opportunistic career of Yeltsin, dependent as he increasingly was on Western financial support and showing nothing of the intellectual and personal openness of Gorbachev, was bound to appear a hideous successor to, even a deliberate destroyer of, the Soviet Union’s social-democrat-cum-lately leader.

I share a few of the milder critiques some of the members of this camp made. I think the IMF was the wrong instrument for the job of assisting Russian reform—not because it knew too little (who knew anything?) but because it was too constrained by its rules and allowed itself to come too much under the thumb of the US administration. It delayed in delivering aid to the reformers until they were themselves politically weakened: had it intervened early with the massive assistance requested by Yegor Gaidar, the first of the economic radicals, it might have jolted the process on to rails of reform which would have been more robust than they subsequently proved to be.

That domination by the US administration—acquiesced in by all of the major G7 states, though with grumbling reservations on the part of the Japanese—was complemented by a US–Russia relationship which was over-personalised and, in strategic terms, over-blown. Far too quickly Yeltsin became a ‘friend’ to Clinton, and Clinton a ‘friend’ to Yeltsin, and Russia was said to have a strategic importance which it rapidly lost. Money was pumped in to save the political careers of the reformers—especially Yeltsin, who broadly protected them—not to bolster reforms. As Gill and Marwick write in their generally clear account of the transition from Soviet to Russian polities, ‘already by mid-1992, Yeltsin’s government had lost control over the economy. Strong external support from Western governments and the unexpected forbearance of the population ...were saving graces for the government.’ The West, and especially the US, became identified with a government widely seen as corrupt. The IMF, in particular, had its own criteria and judgements debauched by political pressure—a fact which contributed to its present difficulties.

Finally, the large privatisations which began in 1996—especially of the oil companies—were explicitly tied to large donations to Yeltsin’s campaign, and were very largely corrupt. The IMF and the US administration did not endorse these moves, but their disquiet was private; by that time they were seen as wholly supportive of the chaotic and criminalised market, and of the new ‘oligarchs’ who had made fortunes in half a decade and who acted ruthlessly to extend and protect them.

This list can be extended, but only at the risk of leaving the real world. In this sense I agree with the arguments of the works by Mau and Shleifer/Treisman—that the constraints under which Russian reform laboured are generally ignored by Western critical comment, but were decisive in producing the situation the Russians now face. Mau, in his characteristically clear and witty pamphlet, establishes (not for the first time) the key issues which must be remembered (but generally aren’t) in any critique of the last decade.

(1) Gorbachev bequeathed a chaotic economy. Shortages were critical, working-class expectations were aroused without hope of satisfaction, and legislation had destroyed the socialist system but had not created a capitalist one. Already, managers were in de facto control of ‘their’ enterprises and were liquidising the assets.

(2) Price liberalisation was the only possible response to shortages—short of a revival of war communism—and privatisation was the only feasible way of trying to create a class of independent economic agents. In the latter case, the compromises with a hostile parliament made by the reformers (especially Anatoly Chubais, the Minister for Privatisation) were decisive in producing a privatisation framework which encouraged insider dealing; it was the best they could get.

(3) Above all else, the state was weak to the point of disappearance. Mau writes that ‘the state’s weakness is reflected in the volatility of economic policy and trends, in the multiple centres of power competing with each other and in the lack of sustainable, stable political institutions and of any acceptable, consistent “rules of play”.’ The concrete results of this weakness were and still are an inability to collect tax revenues; a privatisation process used for political ends rather than economic ones; the dollarisation of the financial system; an inability, even given the will, to combat corruption.

Shleifer and Treisman stress the same theme, though in greater detail. They show that when Chubais was moulding the initial privatisation package, he was simply unable to get what he and the other reformers believed to be right and had to settle for something which was feasible. The alternative was to leave the property in ‘state’ hands—which meant it was being eaten away from within by managers on whose greed there were no curbs.

Both Mau and Shleifer were participants in the drama they describe; their acid comments about Western critics derive from their own sense of being inside a chaotic and at times dangerous process which they struggled with vast effort to master, while, in comfortable universities in the West, professors wrote elegant essays condemning their toil as misguided, ideologically driven or even corrupt (indeed, Shleifer was under investigation by a US agency for his role, as a member of the Harvard Institute of International Development, in the Russian privatisation project). ‘Conducting reform’, Shleifer and Treisman conclude, ‘is much like embarking on a journey through mountains without a map ...to understand their [the reformers’] chances of success, it is not enough to consider their will power, their integrity and the climbing kits or cash international friends have supplied. One also has to consider the shape of the mountains.’

I observed this mountainous journey at close quarters for the first half of the 1990s, as Moscow Correspondent of the FT. It pre-disposed me to sympathy for the Mau/Shleifer view. But there is one large reservation, which I do not think belongs to the ivory tower school of critical commentary on Russia. The reformers as a whole were and remain fixated on economic relations: they thought too little of the social and political support in their own country which they would need to create—at least until too late, and then only half-heartedly. It left them utterly dependent on the Presidency; and it does so still. Of the democratic politicians, only Grigory Yavlinsky’s Yabloko party has developed and retains an independent liberal position, one which allowed it to take principled and unpopular opposition to the conduct of the second Chechen war—though at the cost of political marginalisation. Russian reform was indeed a map-less trip through the mountains; but to survive such a trip, the help of the local population is usually a sine qua non. The reformers did not try hard enough to garner that support, and remain today outside of their own society’s blood-stream.