The Siberian Curse How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold

by Hill, Fiona; Gaddy, Clifford G.

• ISBN13: 9780815736448
• ISBN10: 0815736444
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-11-04
• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Summary

Can Russia ever become a normal, free-market, democratic society? Why have so many reforms failed since the Soviet Union's collapse? In this highly-original work, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy argue that Russia's geography, history, and monumental mistakes perpetrated by Soviet planners have locked it into a dead-end path to economic ruin. Shattering a number of myths that have long persisted in the West and in Russia, The Siberian Curse explains why Russia's greatest assetsits gigantic size and Siberia's natural resourcesare now the source of one its greatest weaknesses. For seventy years, driven by ideological zeal and the imperative to colonize and industrialize its vast frontiers, communist planners forced people to live in Siberia. They did this in true totalitarian fashion by using the GULAG prison system and slave labor to build huge factories and million-person cities to support them. Today, tens of millions of people and thousands of large-scale industrial enterprises languish in the cold and distant places communist planners put themnot where market forces or free choice would have placed them. Russian leaders still believe that an industrialized Siberia is the key to Russia's prosperity. As a result, the country is burdened by the ever-increasing costs of subsidizing economic activity in some of the most forbidding places on the planet. Russia pays a steep price for continuing this follyit wastes the very resources it needs to recover from the ravages of communism. Hill and Gaddy contend that Russia's future prosperity requires that it finally throw off the shackles of its Soviet past, by shrinking Siberia's cities. Only by facilitating the relocation of population to westernRussia, closer to Europe and its markets, can Russia achieve sustainable economic growth. Unfortunately for Russia, there is no historical precedent for shrinking cities on the scale that will be required. Downsizing Siberi

Author Biography

Clifford G. Gaddy is a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies and Governance Studies programs at the Brookings Institution and a visiting professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
Acknowledgments	xiii
Note on Transliteration	xix
The Great Errors	1	(6)
Size Matters	7	(19)
The Cost of the Cold	26	(31)
Geography Is Not Destiny	57	(15)
Siberia---Plenty of Room for Error	72	(29)
Disconnected Russia	101	(17)
Taking Stock: How Much Has Changed?	118	(22)
Can Russia Shrink?	140	(29)
Russia of the Mind	169	(27)
Tearing Down Potemkin Russia	196	(35)
APPENDIXES
A Celsius-Fahrenheit Conversions	215	(2)
B Definition of the TPC Concept and Sources of Data	217	(4)
C The Russian North	221	(3)
D An Outline for Further Research	224	(3)
E Cities in the Cold	227	(4)
Notes	231	(40)
Bibliography	271	(22)
Index	293