ILLUSIONS OF MARKET PARADISE: STATE, BUSINESS, AND ECONOMIC REFORM IN POST-SOCIALIST RUSSIA AND POST-1980s CRISIS ARGENTINA
ILLUSIONS OF MARKET PARADISE: STATE, BUSINESS, AND ECONOMIC REFORM IN POST-SOCIALIST RUSSIA AND POST-1980s CRISIS ARGENTINA

Summary/Abstract: The 1980s and early 1990s were characterized by sweeping, radical neoliberal, monetarist-inspired economic reforms designed to correct financial or structural crises. Latin American countries initiated the wave, followed by Eastern Europe and the former USSR, although the timing, scope, and policies varied. Often one reads accounts of friends and foes of reform lined up to do battle in domestic and international alliances. However, reform processes and outcomes do not always follow the formula of reformers versus conservatives; there is more to the balance of power than these all-too-common accounts would suggest. Industrial managers in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia and business elites in Argentina initially accepted reforms that would soon harm them. Soviet industrial managers, with their hands on levers of Soviet and early post-Soviet production, did not wholeheartedly embrace increasingly radical economic reforms, but neither did they reject them, or prepare for the uncertainty and systemic shocks that marketization would bring. Unlike younger entrepreneurs, they did not play games of speculation to accumulate capital; rather, they played on the margins of the law to improve gains and positions somewhat. However the extent of these practices didn’t come close to guarding them against what would come.

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