Volume 50, Number 19 · December 4, 2003
Putin's Trap
By Robert Cottrell
Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism
by Vadim Volkov
Cornell University Press, 201 pp., $42.95; $17.95 (paper)
Across the Moscow River: The World Turned Upside Down
by Rodric Braithwaite
Yale University Press, 372 pp., $35.00
State and Evolution: Russia's Search for a Free Market
by Yegor Gaidar, translated from the Russian by Jane Ann Miller
University of Washington Press, 139 pp., $30.00
When I began working as a foreign correspondent in Moscow in 1995, the chaos of the place was, from a narrow professional point of view, one of its more attractive features. Nobody was absolutely sure of anything, which meant that your guesses about what was happening were as good as anybody else's. Of the many theories hatched about the way the Russian state functioned (I use the verb loosely) in those days I can think of only one, by Thomas Graham and Lilia Shev-tsova, which proved to have any predictive value. It held that the members of Russia's political and business elites had formed themselves into four or five warring 'clans,' and that whenever one clan got too strong the others would unite to bring it down. This analysis both explained and predicted constant turmoil, and for that we commentators were grateful.[1]
Review, 5218 words
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