The Rocky Road from Plan to Market

Abstract

Six years after Mikhail Gorbachev took office in 1985, his programme of economic reform was overtaken by political and economic disintegration. The new leadership which took over in the wake of the attempted coup in August 1991 decided they had no alternative but to break with the old model and introduce a market economy in Russia. In October 1991 President Yeltsin appointed Yegor Gaidar as First Deputy Prime Minister in charge of economic policy. The political vacuum created by the collapse of the USSR and of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which had previously steered the planned economy, gave Yeltsin and Gaidar a window of opportunity to introduce radical economic reform.