Importing 'Shock Therapy' to Russia: Jeffrey Sachs, Economics, and the Rise of the Globalist-Academic after the Collapse of the Soviet Union

• In Event: Studying, Writing, and Building the "End of History": Sovietologists after the Collapse of the Soviet Union

Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in one of the most dramatic periods of economic tumult in modern history. In post-Soviet Russia, newly rebranded as the Russian Federation, “shock therapy,” as the series of reforms that included the elimination of the country's public sector in favor of privatization, large-scale deregulation, and trade liberalization, led the national GDP to decline by roughly 50% between 1990 and 1997. This paper examines the role that the American economist Jeffrey Sachs played in authoring shock therapy and working closely with Boris Yeltsin's government to implement its central tenets in the early 1990s. Scholars of Russian shock therapy and in shock therapy experiments pursued elsewhere in the former communist world have emphasized the roles played by western actors (foreign governments, supranational organizations, NGOs) and economic philosophies (neoliberalism of the Mont Pelerin Society variety) in “building capitalism” in post-Soviet Russia. In contrast, western—and especially American—academia’s and academics’ influence has attracted far less scrutiny. By examining Jeffrey Sachs's input as one of shock therapy's architects, this paper seeks to do two things: first, to frame western academics as “globalists”—to use Quinn Slobodian's influential terminology—deeply invested in steering post-Soviet Russia on a course towards the free market; and second, to trace how economics became a major academic discipline to emerge out of the rubble of the Soviet Union’s and Sovietology’s twin collapse, and how economists themselves came to enjoy the funding, professional opportunities, and proximity to the region and the power structures within it that their regional expert peers in history and political science did during the Cold War.

Author

• Yana Skorobogatov, Columbia U