The Conundrum of Russian Capitalism ─ The Post-Soviet Economy in the World System

In this book Ruslan Dzarasov reveals the nature of Russian capitalism following the fall of the Soviet Union, showing how the system originated in both the degenerated Soviet bureaucracy and the pressures of global capital. He provides an unprecedented analysis of Russian firms' corporate governance and labor practices, and makes sense of their peculiar investment strategies.

By comparing the practices of Russian companies to the typical models of corporate governance and investment behavior of big firms in the West, Dzarasov sheds light on the relationship between the core and periphery of the capitalist world-system.

This groundbreaking study proves that Russia's new capitalism is not a break with the country's Stalinist past, but is in fact the continuation of that tradition. At the same time, the brutal and deficient character of the current system also reflects the realities of the modern globalized and financialized world capitalist system.

Ruslan Dzarasov is a Senior Research Fellow at the Central Institute of Economics and Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has written for the academic journals Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Cambridge Journal of Economics.