Praise Hayek and pass the ammunition

John Lloyd

  • The Fate of Marxism in Russia by Alexander Yakovlev, translated by Catherine Fitzpatrick
    Yale, 250 pp, £19.95, October 1993, ISBN 0 300 05365 7
  • Politics and Society in Russia by Richard Sakwa
    Routledge, 518 pp, £40.00, September 1993, ISBN 0 415 09540 9

Pessimism over Russia was not always as fashionable as it is now. Western commentators still refer automatically to the upheaval in the former Soviet Union as a ‘transition’, as though Russia and the former Soviet Republics were following a well defined and orderly course leading from one form of state to another. But in recent conversations with British, German and, above all, American policy planners, officials and scholars, I have found only a dogged determination to go on hoping for the best, while very much fearing the worst.

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