Becoming ‘Masters of Their Own House’: Economic Nationalism in the Late USSR

• In Event: Varieties of Economic Nationalism in Cold War Europe: Small State Responses to Economic Changes, 1960s-1980s

Abstract

The presentation focuses on the role of economic nationalism in the nationalizing debates of the perestroika-era USSR. By the late 1980s, many of the ethno-national federal republics of the Soviet Union developed what can be labeled as small state-like behavior, feeding on the opportunities brought by glasnost’ and the willingness of the central government to allow for far-reaching economic experiments in order to reinvigorate the ailing Soviet economy.
The paper discusses the case of the Estonian SSR, often labeled the economic laboratory of the USSR, where economic reform debates took a clearly nationalizing tone, reinforcing economic state-building processes and the formulation of an ultra-liberal, Western-oriented foreign economic policy.

Author

• Lars Fredrik Stöcker, U of Vienna (Austria)