The Death of an Empire. Lessons for Modern Russia

The book is devoted to the problems faced by authoritarian regimes in multi-ethnic states whose economy largely depends on unpredictable fluctuations in fuel and energy resource prices. This issue is relevant for modern Russia, and the author explains which mistakes... made by the Soviet Union should not be repeated. The uniqueness of the book lies in the fact that Yegor Gaidar demonstrates for the first time how the policy of collectivization, which ruined our agriculture, predetermined, just over sixty years later, the accelerated collapse of the Soviet regime, which had de facto become bankrupt by that time. What was the real economic condition of an outwardly powerful superpower, was the collapse of the USSR absolutely inevitable, could the dismantling of the Soviet system have been carried out differently, and why was a Chinese or Latin American path of transformation impossible in Russia - the answers to these questions can be found in "The Death of an Empire".