SUMMARY:

Egor Gaidar, a leading Russian economist and an architect of the post-1991 economic reforms, has recently published two books dedicated to the Russian past: “Long Time. Russia in the World: Sketches of Economic History” and “The Fall of Empire: Lessons for Contemporary Russia.” Ilya Gerasimov attempts to answer the question, what brought the renown economist to historical studies, and what is a contribution of these studies to the field of economic history of Russia and the world? With regard to the latter question, the answer is pessimistic: not only does Egor Gaidar largely ignore the rich and multifaceted tradition of writing economic history, but he seems to be completely unaware of the modern state of the discipline, methods, and problems that are being employed by historians. It is the leitmotif of both books that betrays the true motivation and genre of Gaidar’s writings: using historical examples as self-evident teaching aids, Gaidar advocates a certain political agenda for modern Russia and defends his own role in the Russian transition of the early 1990s. This utilitarian use of history is hardly unique in the writings of politicians and public activists. What is interesting in Gaidar’s case is that his historical treatises tell more about his political and economic thinking than anything else. The way Gaidar applies his expertise to the episodes of the past reveals his fundamental methodological blindness to the problems of social transition and mixed economies – something one would not expect from the Director of the Institute for the Economy in Transition. It is his treatment of history that allows one to understand Gaidar’s peculiar sense of temporality. For Gaidar, the modern economies of the most advanced capitalist societies present the ideal norm, the future already institutionalized, up and running. The entire history of mankind is seen as a prologue to this normative reality. Hence “transition” is understood by Gaidar as a leap from the irrational, inefficient, and unjust past to the rational and righteous future-present. This makes him indifferent to everything not fitting into the idealized capitalist model, and to everything that constitutes the object of economic history. By the same token, this idealized image of advanced capitalism reveals methodological shortcomings of Gaidar as economist; for example, he is unaware of the tradition originating in gender studies of conceptualizing the enormous potential of “informal” and “non-capitalist” sectors of economy in the most advanced capitalist countries. This idealism coupled with a fundamental lacunae in modern economic theory made Gaidar indifferent if not hostile to entire sectors of economy and social groups that did not fit his ideal picture of the brave new capitalist world: non-monetary spheres of social services, welfare subsidised categories of population (e.g. senior citizens), and others. The “methodological blindness” of Gaidar compelled him to castigate as reactionary such phenomena as complex multiethnic polities, mixed economies, and everything else that did not fit into his oversimplified ideal model.
Gerasimov concludes that these shortcomings have had grave consequences for contemporary Russia, going well beyond the sphere of academic debates. Gaidar and the cohort of his fellow economists with similar theoretical backgrounds have become firmly identified with “Western” and “liberal” socioeconomic and political agendas, and are responsible for compromising these values in the Russian public opinion due simply to their theoretical crudeness and dogmatism.