There is no dispute that the Soviet state-driven economy was totally inadequate in providing for the needs of its people and that led to its collapse.
I think there is also no dispute that the wave of privatizations that followed the end of USSR led to an even economically worse situation for the Russian state. The fact that said privatizations were merely a transfer of State assets to a small group of private individuals for pennies on the dollar is a signifiant factor of that.
What's less clear to me is why privatization was the chosen direction instead of a more dirigist approach, and I posit that the reason is the prevailing dogma back then (as promoted by such institutions as the IMF or the World Bank) was that democracy equals free market economy equals prosperity, so the Soviet people naturally believed democracy would be the solution to their economic problems. Had they been aware of an alternative way to prosperity (aka the Chinese way), I don't know if they would have adopted democracy (or what passed for democracy in Eltsine and Putin's Russia) or free market economy.
> I think there is also no dispute that the wave of privatizations that followed the end of USSR led to an even economically worse situation for the Russian state. The fact that said privatizations were merely a transfer of State assets to a small group of private individuals for pennies on the dollar is a signifiant factor of that.
I'm not sure how to parse this. Certainly I can agree that there is something morally wrong about the process of expropriating assets, mismanaging them, and then transferring them to politically connected people. However the economy now meets the needs of the people better than it did when it was state-owned, and the Russian state is made of people, it has no interests apart from the people who constitute it. If you're presenting a command economy that can't feed its people and a crony economy that does a better job feeding people, I think most people would choose the option where they get fed.
> What's less clear to me is why privatization was the chosen direction instead of a more dirigist approach, and I posit that the reason is the prevailing dogma back then (as promoted by such institutions as the IMF or the World Bank) was that democracy equals free market economy equals prosperity, so the Soviet people naturally believed democracy would be the solution to their economic problems.
I doubt the people had much say in the matter either way.
I think there is also no dispute that the wave of privatizations that followed the end of USSR led to an even economically worse situation for the Russian state. The fact that said privatizations were merely a transfer of State assets to a small group of private individuals for pennies on the dollar is a signifiant factor of that.
What's less clear to me is why privatization was the chosen direction instead of a more dirigist approach, and I posit that the reason is the prevailing dogma back then (as promoted by such institutions as the IMF or the World Bank) was that democracy equals free market economy equals prosperity, so the Soviet people naturally believed democracy would be the solution to their economic problems. Had they been aware of an alternative way to prosperity (aka the Chinese way), I don't know if they would have adopted democracy (or what passed for democracy in Eltsine and Putin's Russia) or free market economy.