The Russian Economy

Since Tsarist times, Russia’s leaders, rather than pursue economic growth for its own sake, have sought control over economic activity as a means to manage their own support base, respond to perceived security threats and to facilitate their wider geopolitical ambitions. Balancing the needs of an authoritarian state with the tentative and inconsistent use of the market has defined Russia’s modern economic history from the nineteenth-century Stolypin reforms to Lenin’s New Economic Policy th...