In this path-breaking history, Tobias Rupprecht offers a revisionist account of Russia's post-Soviet marketisation from the perspective of the advisors and ministers who oversaw this transformation. Based on extensive interviews with economists and research in state and private archives, he uncovers a significant minority of economic liberals from late Soviet academic and dissident circles who sought to chart a new path, believing free prices and private property were the foundations of a 'civilised country'. This provides a vital challenge to the dominant narrative that neoliberal advisors and organisations imposed harmful reforms on Russia after the collapse of Communism. Liberal reformers faced a profound dilemma - one for which Western advisors had no solution either: should they commit to democratic political activism and risk irrelevance, or align themselves with those in power and be co-opted by an authoritarian state determined to reassert its imperial strength?
Victor Sokirko figures prominently in the book as the most committed liberal of the informal opposition of the late Soviet Union. Early than anyone else, he predicted the collapse of the Soviet planned economy. And unapologetically, he called for free markets, private property, rule of law, and democracy while most other dissidents still harboured ideas about reformed socialism and convergence with the West. But 'Burzhuademov', as he called himself in his Samizdat publications, faced the same obstacle as everyone else choosing a democratic, grassroots approach to reform: his ideas fell on deaf ears not only in the political leadership but also among large parts of the Soviet and Russian population.
Viktor Sokirko and Yevgeny Yasin, the protagonists of Chapter 1, passed away while I researched and wrote this book. Their adult lives and deaths encompassed the development and demise of Russian liberalism as it re-emerged in the waning days of the Soviet Union. Together, they exemplify how both informal and systemic liberalism failed in their mission to civilise Russia. Sokirko, an ethnic Ukrainian, railed all his life against the Kremlin's imperial policies. Yasin's Liberal Mission continuously opposed Russian aggressive foreign policy, rejected all intellectual trends that saw Russia as a separate civilisation from Western Europe, and was eventually branded a 'foreign agent'.
Both Sokirko and Yasin spent the last years of their lives in frail health and were spared from seeing the descent into the worst. Hardly able to walk by 2014, Sokirko could only follow the news about Russia's imperial grab of Crimea, Lugansk, and Donetsk on the radio, as his mind slowly deteriorated until his eventual passing in 2018. Yasin, too, was no longer aware of the outside world in the final years of his life. Luckily unbeknown to him, Russian rockets were raining down on his beloved native Odessa when he passed away in 2023. This book is dedicated to both of them, and to the prospect of a civilised Russia that they, each in their own way, represented and worked toward their entire lives.
