The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold FROM THE PUBLISHER
Can Russia ever become a normal, free-market, democratic society? Why
have so many reforms failed since the Soviet Unionﾽs collapse? In
this highly-original work, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy argue that
Russiaﾽs geography, history, and monumental mistakes perpetrated by
Soviet planners have locked it into a dead-end path to economic ruin.
Shattering a number of myths that have long persisted in the West and
in Russia, The Siberian Curse explains why Russiaﾽs greatest
assets - its gigantic size and Siberiaﾽs natural
resources - are now the source of one its greatest weaknesses.
For seventy years, driven by ideological zeal and the imperative to
colonize and industrialize its vast frontiers, communist planners forced
people to live in Siberia. They did this in true totalitarian fashion
by using the GULAG prison system and slave labor to build huge factories
and million-person cities to support them.
Today, tens of millions of people and thousands of large-scale
industrial enterprises languish in the cold and distant places communist
planners put themﾽﾽnot where market forces or free choice would have
placed them. Russian leaders still believe that an industrialized
Siberia is the key to Russiaﾽs prosperity. As a result, the country
is burdened by the ever-increasing costs of subsidizing economic
activity in some of the most forbidding places on the planet. Russia
pays a steep price for continuing this follyﾽﾽit wastes the very
resources it needs to recover from the ravages of communism.
Hill and Gaddy contend that Russiaﾽs future prosperity requires that
it finally throw off the shackles of its Soviet past, by shrinking
Siberiaﾽs cities. Only by facilitating the relocation of population to
western Russia, closer to Europe and its markets, can Russia achieve
sustainable economic growth.
Unfortunately for Russia, there is no historical precedent for
shrinking cities on the scale that will be required. Downsizing Siberia
will be a costly and wrenching process. But there is no alternative.
Russia cannot afford to keep the cities communist planners left for it
out in the cold.
About the Authors:
Fiona Hill is a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at
the Brookings Institution. Trained as an historian at St. Andrews and
Harvard, she has published extensively on a wide range of issues related
to Russian and Soviet history, Russiaﾽs economic and political
transition, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and energy and security issues.
Clifford G. Gaddy is a senior fellow in the Economic Studies and
Foreign Policy Studies programs at the Brookings Institution and a
visiting professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University. His
previous books include Russiaﾽs Virtual Economy (Brookings 2002) and
The Price of the Past: Russiaﾽs Struggle with the Legacy of a
Militarized Economy (Brookings 1996).
SYNOPSIS
Characterizing the 70 years of Communist rule in Russia as an especially long time frame, Hill and Gaddy, both foreign studies fellows at the Institute, use economic statistic, economic geography, and history to describe how Russians live and work in cold, distant, and wrong places; and to examine the implications of this for the modern economy they see dawning there. They say Siberian cities should be abandoned and torn down. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
The New Yorker
Solzhenitsyn once noted that Siberia offers “plenty of room in which to correct all our idiocies.” For centuries, the vast expanse east of the Urals has been a place of mythic promise and peril, its frigid terrain and unending horizons essential to Russia’s sense of itself. This incisive polemic, however, argues that if Russians hope to attain prosperity they should abandon their eastern territories, where not a single settlement is economically viable. Of all the political pathologies to emerge from the Soviet experiment, none were so grandiose and manifestly disastrous as the attempt to fashion an industrial utopia in the Siberian wasteland. The policy left nearly a third of Russia’s hundred and forty-five million inhabitants stranded in places where even basic survival requires a constant and costly stream of supplies. The authors make their case vigorously, but they recognize that the bureaucratic barriers to leaving remain severe, and that national myths are potent.
Foreign Affairs
Everyone knows that Russia is big and cold. Hill and Gaddy argue that Russians, during the Soviet era especially, have treated the first condition as an advantage and the second as surmountable — and that in both respects, they are deeply mistaken. Distance and temperature, they argue well with ample data to back them up, have been critical drags on Russia's economic development. Efforts to populate and industrialize the frozen reaches of Siberia have always been economic folly. If Russia is to escape the past, it must, as Canada, Sweden, Finland, and Norway have, concentrate people and activity in large urban areas in the country's warmer regions: Europe should be its target market, fifteenth-century Muscovy its heartland, and Siberia a commodity-producing hinterland (as is northern Canada). How is this to be accomplished? Make other cities livable, not just Moscow and St. Petersburg; rethink internal migration policy; reverse the development strategy for Siberia; and economically link the Russian Far East with Northeast Asia.
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