История одного национального дефолта

Abstract

This is a contribution to the discussion forum "Conceptualizing Society after the Modern Territorial State and Nation." Ilya Gerasimov uses the case of the 1998 Russian financial crisis to introduce the modern sociological model of the nation-state's systemic demise. Known in Russian primarily as "the default" – a shorthand for "sovereign debt default" – the 1998 financial crisis was first and foremost a crisis of trust in the government and its economic policy. Economics experts have traced the roots of the default all the way to 1991 and the origins of the sovereign Russian Federation. Gerasimov suggests that the 1998 crisis was the first stage in the Russian national project's fundamental default on its promise to build a "normal" democratic state, so that Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was only the culmination of that systemic failure. From the very beginning, the problem was not the project's Russianness but its normative "normalness."