![]() ![]() Western businessmen swarmed the country to make a killing but also brought with them their new, seemingly superior ways of doing business: boards of directors, corporate governance, stocks and bonds. Those same Harvard wonks - young men like Jeffrey Sachs - helped push the painful transformation of the Soviet command economy into a market one. There was suddenly a freewheeling and adversarial press in the Western mold. The era of Soviet one-party rule gave way to a raucous parliamentary system that, at one point, had more than 100 political parties, including one for beer lovers. The first constitution written in Russia after the 1991 collapse of the USSR was drafted in the Western mold with the help of young Harvard University wonks. Just get rid of communism, they thought, and they’d start living like their American and European counterparts.Īnd Westernization came. And it was decided that the Western way of government, 25 years ago, would govern the new Russia, too.Īs the USSR crumbled, many in the urban intelligentsia longed for a Westernization they believed would turn their country and their lives around. Twenty-five years ago, the Western conception of government - democracy, free markets, human rights - seemed to be proved to be the best, most stable, most moral way to govern. ![]() I’m not one for historical anniversary stories, but this one seems to me to be truly significant, though mostly in its breach. Twenty-five years ago this week, the Soviet Union ceased to exist and the Cold War ended. ![]()
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