Restructuring the Soviet Economy examines the Soviet leadership's most urgent question - how to revitalize the soviet economy. David Dyker argues that the current impasse can can only be understood in the context of the failure of 60 years of central planning. He analyses both the problems besetting the centrally planned system and those that have paralysed perestroika and assesses whether the most ambitious attempt ever to reform the Soviet economy will succeed.

Richly represented in the Russian folktale tradition, the legends in this work are religious tales in a peasant village setting. Among the standard themes is the return of Christ, who wanders through rural Russia with his disciples. Satan appears too, as do a cast of spirits and lesser devils.

In Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy, Paul R. Gregory takes an inside look at how the system worked and why it has traditionally been so resistant to change. Gregory's findings shed light on a bureaucracy that was widely considered the greatest threat to Gorbachev's efforts at perestroika, or restructuring.

Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika is a historic effort at restructuring the troubled Soviet economy. Wide-ranging in scope, harnessed with cultural and political reforms, it raises intriguing and important questions: Are Gorbachev's ideas different from the Kosygin-Brezhnev reform of 1965 that came to naught? What kinds of problems do the Russians have in understanding the market system? Who opposes perestroika? Do Gorbachev's proposals threaten his own future as Soviet leader? How does perestroika relate to a more general environment of openness, of glasnost? What happened at the June 1988 Party Conference? And, above all, is the old order really giving way to a new one? Or does Gorbachev aim at "capitalist icing on a socialist cake"?. To answer these questions and others, Padma Desai, a distinguished pioneer in the modern econometric analysis of the Soviet economy, has distilled from Gorbachev's myriad decrees the outlines of his strategy for doing away with the Soviet Union's long-term economic malaise. Focusing on the key areas of industry, agriculture, services, and foreign trade, she discusses specific blueprints for change and evaluates the possibilities for their success. Skillfully combining charts, photographs, cartoons, and quotes, this book offers a unique and coherent view of the strategy underlying Gorbachev's reform efforts to date--and does so gracefully and with sparkle, in terms completely understandable to the layperson. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In 1991, a small group of Russians emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union and enjoyed one of the greatest transfers of wealth ever seen, claiming ownership of some of the most valuable petroleum, natural gas and metal deposits in the world. By 1997, five of those individuals were on Forbes Magazine's list of the world's richest billionaires.