What Went Wrong With Perestroika

by Marshall I. Goldman

Release Date: August, 1992

Edition: Paperback

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Platitudes, received ideas and factual inaccuracies

I understand that Marshall Goldman is/was an esteemed economist at Harvard. To be fair, it is easy to look back on his book (last updated soon after the August 1991 coup) with critical hindsight. However, it has been claimed in the main review that this book was "prescient". So it seems reasonable to point out that Goldman got a lot wrong. His repeated emphasis on the need for early and rapid privatisation (by which I mean selling off state enterprises) as a key part of successful economic reform, for starters. Goldman's economic diagnosis and prescribed cure are merely a mapping of received ideas about economics onto a country without paying much attention to how those prescriptions would actually take effect in this particular situation. "Privatisation is good, it says so in this textbook, so Gorbachev needs to privatise everything now. Inflation is bad, so Gorbachev needs to stop printing money." etc. etc. We now know what effect this kind of thinking has had on the people of the former Soviet Union. But what really bothers me about this book is that it contains factual inaccuracies, which I'm sure were just typos but should have been weeded out. The transliteration of Russian words is erratic to say the least, which leads me to suspect that Goldman's knowledge of Russian was close to non-existent at the time (but hey, who needs to know the language of a country before you start drawing up recipes for its reform?). And finally, it's just plain badly written.