The Road from Snake Hill. The Genesis of Russian Neoliberalism (original) (raw)

in: Quinn Slobodian, Dieter Plehwe (ed.): Market Civilizations: Neoliberals East and South. Verso 2022, p. 109-138

Cluster of Excellence 'Contestations of the Liberal Script' 1 'Neoliberalizm' has become a popular slur for free-markets and for the dominance of economics over politics in contemporary Russia. Commentators from both sides of the political spectrum have used it to criticise what they see as Western-inspired reforms under President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s. The left has also attached the label to the ensuing governments, claiming that 'neoliberalism has been and remains an organic part of the Putin regime.' 2 Anti-Western nationalists by contrast have triumphantly declared it a thing of the past: 'The neo-liberal paradigm was exhausted by the 2008 crisis and never recovered.', proclaimed Vladimir Yakunin, a long-term associate of President Vladimir Putin. 3 Again influential dirigiste economists have been praising the success of gradual state-led reforms in Deng Xiaoping's China as opposed to the neoliberalism allegedly imposed on Russia by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). 4 This anti-neoliberal rhetoric is in line with notions around the world that reject what is seen as Anglo-American imposed anti-statism and laissez-faire capitalism. 'When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989,' goes a fairly representative view of contemporary observers and early academic assessments, 'there was an army of committed, international economic liberals reared in the Hayekian tradition, armed with clipboards and portable phones, waiting to move into Eastern Europe and the disintegrating Soviet Union to convert their ailing economies.' 5 Such notions of 'neoliberalism' as an anti-state dogma have over the last years been questioned by intellectual historians and economic sociologists. Neoliberal ideas, they claim, are better explained by emphasising their notions of a strong state, and sometimes international governance as well as legal and monetary arrangements, to create and defend free markets and liberal institutions from potentially anti-liberal national democratic majorities. 6 But, as the editors of this volume state: even in the most innovative work, the history of neoliberalism is still told as one emanating from the West. 1 I want to thank two colleagues for their very thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter: Adam Leeds, who has put forward a similar argument about the Gaidar group in his unpublished dissertation (Adam Leeds, Spectral Liberalism: On the Subjects of Political Economy in Moscow (2016), PhD Dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania), and Chris Miller, who did ground breaking work on the generation of their academic teachers (Chris Miller,