Who Lost Russia? The 1990s revisited

There is a view now widespread in much of the Western academic debate on Russia that the 1990s was a decade of missed opportunities in which the West “lost” Russia either by failing to take account of its security needs or by not being generous enough as Russia made the painful transition away from a command economy toward capitalism. This chapter does not refute this argument in its entirety. What it does suggest is that even though more might have been done, the West very soon discovered that the scale of the challenge facing it was beyond its capacity to manage the transition there with any degree of certainty about the outcome. Indeed, if Russia was “lost” as claimed, then this probably owed less to poor policy choices made in Western capitals—though there were plenty of these—and more to the nearly impossible task of building a functioning market democracy on the foundation of a disintegrating empire in economic free fall following nearly seventy years of authoritarian communist rule.