№ 6 - 2001
Bychkova O.V.
Post-Soviet Market-Oriented Reformation: Political Economy Conceptions

In the treatment of the theme of her article, the author, a post-graduate student of the European University (St. Petersburg), to begin with, presents a general view of the modern political economy of postcommunist transition, whereupon she specially dwells on the existing approaches to the analysis of the politics of market-oriented reforms; in fact, the article, for its most part, is an analytical review of literature discussing post-Soviet economic transformation. In their assessments of its course and results and in their interpretations of those results, economists, as is demonstrated in the review, proceed from their own, sometimes essentially differing visions of the aims of market reforms in Russia, as well as of the role of the state in them. The author's attention is concentrated on the most widely spread interpretations of the causes which, in the respective economists' opinions, determine the failures of many of the Russian reforms. Such interpretations specified by the author, depending on what factor is seen as the main factor of the failures, are, basically, three: the «actorial», the «stuctural», and the «state-referential» ones. An attempt is made in the article to formulate a general scheme that could help explain failures of Russian reforms.