Kapitalizm

Fen Montaigne

...[A]dmirably chronicles, step by step, how Yeltsin's young reformers fought to...construct a free-market society....Kapitalizm is at its best when Brady takes readers behind the scenes of machinations....one of the most coherent accounts to date of the disassembly of the economy of the Evil Empire.
—New York Times Book Review

Finance & Development

Providing a mosaic of views is the author's objective and a chief virtue of the book....For the professional economist, the book highlights the importance of initial conditions for economic reform...

Scott Shane

A compelling, close-up account of the Russian economic struggle by BusinessWeek correspondent Rose Brady.
— Baltimore Sun

Publishers Weekly

Brady's vibrant account of the first six years of Russia's post-Communist economic reform explains how a once closed economy became so precariously dependent on the global markets. As Business Week's Moscow bureau chief from 1989 to 1993, Brady collected interviews from government officials Yegor Gaidar, Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov. She leaves chronology and statistics for the appendixes (which include charts listing wages, inflation, poverty level, household income) and allows anecdotes, photos and quotes to paint a picture of the socioeconomic metamorphosis of the country. Bankers and tycoons such as Oleg Boiko, Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, the so-called oligarchs who have asserted their power since Yeltsin's reelection (for which they were arguably responsible), figure prominently, and Brady delicately probes the role of Western financial advisers and their reincarnation into overly bullish investors. Pensioners and the poor, too, speak out: one widowed pensioner laments, "We were just beginning to live when it was Brezhnev's time." The book ends in early 1997, when Russia's future still looked relatively rosy--before the August 1998 financial crisis catapulted the country back into economic chaos. But Brady addresses these recent changes in a postscript. For the most part, she believes that Russia has no choice but to stumble on toward economic liberalization. However, in speculating about Russia's future, Brady offers the cautious "Pozhivyom uvidem. We will live and see." (Feb.)

Kirkus Reviews

Under no five-year plan, Russia's journey to capitalism is a unique occurrence. Brady, Business Week bureau chief in Moscow when the Soviet Union disintegrated, was a witness to the ongoing struggle. The Russian economy has been in severe recession for most of the 1990s (and, according to the Finance Ministry's latest report, will continue to shrink a lot more). Funds for education, health care, and science have evaporated. The path to the free market has been rough, indeed. Vouchers, issued to all Russians, were to be used to buy shares in state-owned businesses at privatization auctions. They could be sold for cash, too. Not worth much, the vouchers were traded, arbitraged, or placed in dubious investment funds. But the idea of private ownership hasn't been generally understood. Many barely subsist, trading on street corners and waiting for the state to help while some "new Russians"-often former apparatchiks or insider nomenklatura-have become instant plutocrats. Indigenous mafias and gangsters have joined the party, seizing power by force or fanciful schemes and scams. The most promising cases are dogged by adversity. Brady describes the Vladimir Tractor Factory and interviews its management as an example. She interviews citizens in the street (literally) who cope with hyperinflation and she talks with the privatization czar. The rough politics of the last presidential election and the current economic policy are parsed impartially. Through much of the time since the fall of the Soviet regime the author seemed to think that it might all come together somehow. Yet the national fisc is still no healthier than Boris Yeltsin. In a postscript, she acknowledges the default in Russian debt,the bare spots on store shelves, and the exhaustion of policy. The aspect is Chekhovian, indeed. The sorrowful story could cause a seismic perturbation in the neighborhood of London's Highgate Cemetery (where Karl Marx lies buried). But in Russia a story is never ended. "Pozhivyom uvidem," says the author. "We will live and see." (30 photos) .