Monograph on the role of the communist political party in the application of the 1965 economic reform in the USSR, with particular reference to the reform of the industrial planning and industrial management systems - assesses political aspects and economic implications, analyses present and potential trends from centrally planned economy toward decentralization, and covers the extent of political leadership support and managerial support of the reform, implications for industrial growth, etc. Bibliography pp. 205 to 230 and references.

This work examines the political and organizational factors that have shaped Russian economic reforms since the demise of the Soviet Union. The author draws on a variety of sources - including interviews conducted in Ekaterinburg, Voronezh and Smolensk - to present a multilayered portrait of the successes, failures and umintended consequences of the reforms. The book covers: the consequence of dissolving the USSR and Russia's role in the CIS; political transition; economic reform; assessment of the political and social implications of neo-liberal moneterism and of the voucher privatisation programme; and both regional and federal structures and processes.

A balanced look at Russia's attempts to build capitalism on the ruins of Soviet central planning. Recent commentators on Russia's economic reforms have almost uniformly declared them a disappointing and avoidable--failure. In this book, two American scholars take a new and more balanced look at the country's attempts to build capitalism on the ruins of Soviet central planning. They show how and why the Russian reforms achieved remarkable breakthroughs in some areas but came undone in others. Unlike Eastern European countries such as Poland or the Czech Republic, to which it is often compared, Russia is a federal, ethnically diverse, industrial giant with an economy heavily oriented toward raw materials extraction. The political obstacles it faced in designing reforms were incomparably greater. Shleifer and Treisman tell how Russia's leaders, navigating in uncharted economic terrain, managed to find a path around some of these obstacles. In successful episodes, central reformers devised a strategy to win over some key opponents, while dividing and marginalizing others. Such political tactics made possible the rapid privatization of 14,000 state enterprises in 1992-1994 and the defeat of inflation in 1995. But failure to outmaneuver the new oligarchs and regional governors after 1996 undermined reformers' attempts to collect taxes and clean up the bureaucracy that has stifled business growth.Renewing a strain of analysis that runs from Machiavelli to Hirschman, the authors reach conclusions about political strategies that have important implications for other reformers. They draw on their extensive knowledge of the country and recent experience as advisors to Russian policymakers. Written in an accessible style, the book should appeal to economists, political scientists, policymakers, businesspeople, and all those interested in Russian politics or economics.

This argues that Perestroika failed as the result of the lack of understanding of market and political processes with reform processes representing

Although the history of centrally planned economies has been widely studied, the development of socialist thinking on the subject has remained largely uncharted. In this 1991 work, Pekka Sutela presents a detailed analysis of Soviet economic thought and theory. Dr Sutela traces the competing currents in the Marxist tradition of socialist economies from the Revolution to the present day. In particular he shows how the Gorbachev economic reform programme of 1987 rose from the work of Nobel Prize economist L. V. Kantorovich and his followers. However, this programme failed and the author explains in some detail why this happened. Since then, Soviet economists have tried to abandon their traditional theory of central planning and move along the path and long established contacts with leading Soviet economists, Pekka Sutela is able to show how Soviet economic thinking has moved from dogmatism through reformism to pragmatism.