Publisher's Synopsis
This study shows how radical privatization produced economic misery and political chaos in Russia. It argues that the crucial problem lies in the development of criminal and survivalist business networks that prey on Russia's wealth. It was the reversed sequence of Russian reform, which opened markets before establishing institutions to regulate and support those markets, that allowed predatory networks to take hold.;The volume grew out of an earlier essay written by Stephen S. Cohen and Andrew Schwartz, predicting Russia's current troubles: "The collapse of the former Soviet Empire created an opportunity for the victims of one failed utopian ideology to find another. In its wake, especially in Russia, legions of Western and neo-liberal advisers sped to the cause of translating "democracy" into elections and a "market economy" into privatization. But the task was institution building."
