State and Evolution: Russia's Search for a Free Market by Yegor s> Gaidar Jane Ann Miller (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 989 enterprisesstuckto non-members, with 66 per cent of exports in 2002 sent to Russia, Belarusand Ukraine (note that on p. I I8 the shareof the lattershould be 23.2 per cent, not 37.2 per cent, as shown). In particular,exportersfailed to capitalize on the one product in which Moldova had comparative advantage.In the I980s one in five of everybottle of wine and bunch of grapes consumed in the USSR came from the Moldavian SSR: on independence Australasiantransnationalsmoved in to modernize viticulture and marketed the product in the UK and elsewhere. But government corruption, a disintegratinginfrastructureand delayuntil theyear 2000 in breakingup state and collective farms stymied hopes of bringing another type of 'New World' vintage to Europe's supermarkets.Merchandise exports currentlylag below the peak of the mid-I990S and are now supplemented by heavy traffickingin women. As Ala Mlndlcanu (Chief Editor of the Moldovan newspaper Democratia) records, more than Ioo,ooo females were enticed abroad for prostitutionin the ten yearsto 2002; shenotes thata similarnumberofwomen have emigrated for other employment, mostly in the caring services where they are paid at rates even lower than the modest local levels. In all, Moldovans abroad annually remit over $400 million to their families, a sum almost equal to total government revenue. Hensel and Gudim estimate that, Transdniestria excepted, the quarter of the labour force who work abroad remit home the equivalent of nearly one-third of its GDP. William Crowther (Universityof North Carolina)points up one political consequence (an index would have helped towardsfocus on this and other diverseperspectives).'By 200I well over 500,000 Moldovans had left the country in search of employment. Disproportionately young, educated and disaffectedwith economic conditions, the migrantscould have been expected to vote in favourof reformistpartieshad they remained in Moldova' (p. 43). StAntony's College, Oxford MICHAEL KASER Gaidar,Yegor. StateandEvolution: Russia's Searchfor aFree Market. Translatedby Jane Ann Miller. University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA, and London, 2003. xv + 140 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. $30.00: C23.OO. YEGOR GAIDAR headed the 'kamikaze' government that got free-market reformstartedin Russia in I992. He is one of the leadersof the liberal Union of Right Forces (SPS) party and was until recently a member of parliament. His record as a brave and clear-sightedreformpolitician is admirable. Even among Russian economic reformers,however, he is notable for his reflective, scholarlybent. He heads the Institutefor the Economy in Transition,known in Moscow as the 'Gaidar Institute', and a think-tankis perhaps his natural habitat. This book is a meditation on the choices facing Russiansociety in the light (shadow?)of Russian history. It surveys developments in broad terms, and is not a blow-by-blow account of economic-policy-making. State and Evolutionwas published in I994. This is the first English translation and it is an excellent one that reads well. In an eight-page preface to this edition, Gaidar adds some new thoughts, to which I shall return. 990 SEER, 82, 4, 2004 The theme of StateandEvolution is couched in terms that well-schooled Marxist-Leninistswould recognize, just as they would catch the echo in the title of Lenin's StateandRevolution. Gaidar'skey question is:will Russia remain an example of the 'Asiaticmode of production' or will it modernize itself by adoptingWesterninstitutions? The firstchapter, 'Two Civilizations',sets out Gaidar'sdistinctionbetween a Western free-market society with entrenched property rights and the 'Eastern' state in which 'Property is the natural prey, and the state is the natural predator' (p. 5). The second chapter looks at Russia's history as a 'catch-up civilization', where attempts at modernization have mostly ended up relying on the power of the state, and thereforefailing. Stolypin is singled out as a rareexample of a Russian statesmanwho triedto limit the role of the state (p. 39). Chapter three presents Gaidar'sinterpretationof Bolshevismas the 'child of war', whose ideas about running the economy were based on military mobilization. 'The October Revolution washed away Russia's thin layerof Westernculturewith blood' (p. 55). In the last three chapters, Gaidar argues that Soviet officialdom became alienated from the 'nomenklatura state',caused its downfalland unintentionally opened up the way to more radicalchange. The Soviet systemwas 'devoured from within by its...