2025/08/09 by Fritz Bartel · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Artificial intelligence #Computer science #Law #Leverage (statistics) #Political science #Politics #Russia and Soviet political economy #Superpower
paper · doi:10.1093/dh/dhaf057
published in Diplomatic History 49(5), 690-713 (Oxford University Press)
openalex publication_date 2025/08/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
In February 1992, Thomas Wolf arrived in Moscow intent on transforming Russia. As a leader of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) mission to the newly independent Russian Federation, Wolf was no stranger to the economic foibles of the collapsing Soviet system, but his visit that February maintained the urgency of heightened expectations. He had arrived in the Russian capital to negotiate a so-called “shadow agreement” between the fund and the reformist government of Yegor Gaidar, the liberal economist who Russian President Boris Yeltsin had selected as the point man to lead Russia’s march out of its Soviet past. Over the course of Wolf’s two-week visit, he and his team would be hammering out a list of economic commandments—a “Memorandum of Economic Policies” (MEP)—with Gaidar’s team that the Kremlin would need to follow in order to receive international support for its push to transform Russia into a capitalist economy. Both within and outside Russia, the expectations for this memorandum could not have been higher. Abroad, all manner of foreign investors—including Western governments, multinational corporations, and international banks—were looking to the memorandum as a signal that Russia could be quickly set on a capitalist course. At home, Russians looked upon the memorandum as the source of their future economic pain or gain—their jobs, life savings, cost of living, and families’ futures depended heavily on what economic policies the government chose to pursue. In the bygone Soviet era, ordinary Russians would have maintained no expectation of influencing policy discussions within the Kremlin—that was the purview of party bureaucrats. But in the new era of Russian democracy, citizens expected to have a voice in their own fate.