Abstract
This chapter covers the episodes leading up to the dissolution of the USSR. In particular, it analyses the impact of political, economic, and social policies such as Perestroika and Glasnost. This is followed by analysis of events surrounding the unconstitutional dissolution of the USSR and the rise of Boris Yeltsin as the new leader. The chapter analyses foreign policy of the Yeltsin government in the 1990s along with domestic economic policies of privatization and liberalisation led by Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais. Special focus is given to the economic events leading up to the Russian Bond crisis and default in 1998.
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Notes
- 1.
In February, Secretary of State James Baker offered the Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, ‘iron-clad guarantees that NATO’s jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward’. On the same day in Moscow, he famously told Gorbachev that the alliance would not move ‘one inch to the east’. He argued that in a post-Cold War Europe NATO would be ‘less of a military organization, much more of a political one, would have no need for independent capability’. See Savranskaya and Blanton (2017) for details on the archival records of these conversations.
- 2.
Klein (2007) reviews application of the ‘shock doctrine’ in countries around the world including in Latin America.
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Bhattacharyya, S. (2020). Dissolution of the USSR and Russian Decline in the 1990s. In: A History of Global Capitalism. Frontiers in Economic History. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58736-9_9
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