Russia under Western Eyes

...Her prognosis for the coming years, which she admits is rooted in sympathy for the reformers, may be unduly roseate...

...As Brady aptly notes, although Russia's reformers modeled their shock therapy on Poland's similar and triumphant effort, their task was inherently more troublesome...

...In fact, faced with this lack of unanimity, Yeltsin's men couldn't even implement their proposals...

...Though Nizhni has had a comparatively successful experience with local privatization, and its officials speak knowledgeably of market systems, the local children attended a camp where signs still exhorted "Young Pioneers" to join the proletarian cause, and shrines to Lenin dotted the local factories...

...Hence, Kapitalizm...

...it needs the promise of rest...

...Vladimir's workers-turned-shareholders objected to placing competition over "deep personal contacts," electing to keep a Communist boss and resisting capitalist realities...

...Former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, the one Russian politico who seemed likely to subdue the crisis, got his walking papers last summer and has formed an opposition party...

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...Russia cannot continue to survive daily shocks...

...Inevitably, this kind of simplistic view, focused on the doings in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, withers when confronted with the sheer size, diversity, and entrenched beliefs of the Russian people...

...Brady's limitation, however, comes from the very same love of Russians and Russianness that allows her to chronicle the country so well...

...In the first half of the eighteenth century, Russia came into favor with European philosophes, who idealized Peter the Great, Catherine, and their efforts to convert Russia into a "civilized" Western model...

...Rose Brady, Moscow bureau chief for Business Week magazine from 1989 to 1993, explains the immediate roots of this turmoil in Kapitalizm...

...In a way that is eerily similar to recent celebrations, Westerners vaunted Russia's transformations on a fundamentally superficial level, ignoring the serfs, the corruption, the complexities...

...STILL IN THE RED Kapitalizm Russia's Struggle to Free Its Economy Rose Brady Yale LlnixKisity Pras, $V), 2S'1pp Russia under Western Eyes From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum Martin Malta Harvard Univfniti/ PieWOrlknap...

...A few years ago, Russian reformers promised that their privatization push would soon bestow the gifts of market capitalism on citizens and investors alike...

...Soon, after a stint of continued production without corresponding demand, the factory's resources disappeared, and a Harvard-educated director came in...

...That hope obscures, at times, the distinct possibility that Russia may turn back the clock...

...opponents persuaded them to forgo plans—among them, a value-added tax and a liberalization of energy prices—that would have preserved the government's budget...

...In fact, as Malia's book illustrates, the West's current disillusionment with Russian reforms is not unfamiliar...

...Not only was Russia's economy larger and more heavily dominated by the state, but Russia also lacked the strong political consensus for change that Poland enjoyed...

...Most valuable, perhaps, is her in-depth coverage of the Vladimir Tractor Factory, which in its turbulent privatization serves as a microcosm for the whole nation...

...And it can only lead to disappointment...

...Brady has a talent for personalizing the plot, for bringing large issues down to their day-to-day operations, and she makes the crucial point that Russian capitalism, with its roots unavoidably set in Soviet soil, is a unique proposition—not at all identical to Western economic systems...

...With no market supports in place (such as worker protections, the promise of government bailout, or even an established banking system), Vladimir's director had to fire or give "extended vacations" to the majority of employees, impoverishing the factory-dependent community...

...What has been created in Russia today is an oddly Marxist-tinged form of capitalism, which emphasizes economics as primary...

...Russia's condition, then and now, speaks to the ludicrous belief in the capacity of doctrine, bolstered by shock and terror, to transform a place...

...D Susan McWilliams, a recent graduate of Amherst College, works as a consultant in New York City...

...The "reforms" begun eight years ago have failed to bring stability, far from prosperity, and Russian citizens are fighting to survive amid vastly devalued currency, employers who don't pay wages, a nonexistent social net, money-laundering schemes abroad, and terrorist acts at home...

...Despite all its high-level problems, Russia is showing signs of change at the most important level of the (for lack of a better word) proletariat...

...When I lived in Nizhni Novgorod in 1994, the difficulties of such ideological "reforms" were apparent...

...Today, as Russia lies again on the verge of economic and political collapse, Bill Clinton and other Western leaders would do well to offer support...

...President Boris Yeltsin, still in questionable health and coming to the end of his term, is butting heads with a hostile parliament...

...As Malia, professor emeritus of history at Berkeley, points out, Russia's place in the Western mind is inherently subjective...

...Brady's story can be filled out, to a certain extent, by the themes in Russia under Western Eyes, Martin Malia's attempt to make sense of the relationship between Russia and the West...

...Russia and the West were wrong in some initial assumptions, but that does not mean failure...

...Unfortunately, that rest will not come easily, and even the hardiest reformers cannot promise it on their own...

...But, as Brady and Malia both conclude, the scenario is not impossible...

...It would be a painful transition, they warned, but swift...

...It has been Russia's fate to suffer when people try to apply, more or less directly, ideologies or political institutions that are not appropriate to the nation...

...Through interviews with both winners and losers in Russia's new capitalism, Brady constructs an absorbing story of Russia's reform attempts from 1991 to 1998...

...half-finished tractors rusted on the assembly line while unneeded parts clogged warehouses...

...Susan McWilliams R ussia today is floundering...

...It neglects the fact that capitalism has succeeded only in countries which have very elaborate political systems that support, and contend with, market forces...

...Now, as Russia's stores and factories empty once again, we must wonder what went wrong...

...But despite his ambition, Vladimir's new director struggled: Shoddy bookkeeping and poor planning had left the company $4 million in debt...

...From the Western perspective, Russia's disarray is disheartening...

...Commonweal 2 6 October 8,1999...

...economists who helped engineer the reforms and the Clinton administration's resolute support— accepted this scenario...

...Although the atmosphere was undoubtedly more liberal than when I visited the Soviet Union three years earlier, it was apparent that changes in Russia would be slow and tedious, especially while citizens were losing their retirement savings along with their sense of order...

...For better or for worse, the West helped Russia plunge toward a free-market democracy, and now is not the time to abandon our best hopes...

...and Russia's massive interest rates prevented refinancing...

...Hers is a sweeping saga, describing the political and personal travails of a country in transition...

...When Yeltsin announced that "shock therapy" would reconstruct Russia in a matter of months, he was doing what Peter and the Bolsheviks had done before: insisting that a philosophy can be imposed through formal means, that ways of thinking can change quickly and unilaterally...

...The West—led by U.S...

...Time and again, Western thinkers have dramatized the turns of top-level Russian ideology and neglected empirical ambiguities...

...Citizens speak more comfortably in free-market terminology, and, although most think Yeltsin is done for, many have come to support Primakov or other reformers...

...We tend to view Commonweal 2 5 October 8,1999 Russia with romantic eyes, as either emerging hero or despotic villain...

...Even after describing the difficult tensions that plague Russia's political life, Brady, in her words, "still hoped for the liberal alternative...

...The only group that didn't seem ambivalent about capitalism was organized crime, whose members paraded through the streets, unchecked, in Reebok jogging suits...

...Just as it was inadvisable to apply Marxism, a Western European industrial theory, to a fundamentally agricultural society, it was inadvisable to apply capitalism to a country with a seventy-year Communist history...

...It is hard to believe that Russia will ever approximate Western society without overhauling its judicial and social forms...