|
Product Description
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 assets––its gigantic size and Siberia's natural resources––are 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 them––not 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 folly––it 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 western Russia, 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 Siberia will be a costly and wrenching process. But there is no alternative. Russia cannot afford to keep the cities communist planners left for it out in the cold.
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Geopolitics in the 21st Century)
- Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump
- Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump
- A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America
- The Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report: Report of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Pursuant to H. Res. 660 in Consultation ... and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs
- To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment
- Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth
- The Plot to Betray America: How Team Trump Embraced Our Enemies, Compromised Our Security, and How We Can Fix It
- Deep State: Trump, the FBI, and the Rule of Law
- Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos
*If this is not the "The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Dec 25, 2024 10:29 +08.