Ukraine's Controversial Transition: How It Became a Market Democracy

Åslund’s book represents the only Western volume that seeks to chronicle the last two decades of Ukraine’s transition from a Soviet republic in a totalitarian empire with a command administrative economy to an independent democratic state with a market economy. The book is exhaustive in what it surveys but is nevertheless also controversial in the largely positive analysis it gives of the transition process. The volume is also, as I will show, replete with mistakes that devalue its potential contribution to political science, but these could be overcome in future editions. The book is most excellent when Åslund discusses areas that he was involved in as an adviser to Ukrainian governments. In the early 1990s he describes the ‘total confusion in economic policy’ and the lack of ‘qualified economists’; meanwhile, ‘The ignorance of economics as astounding and international interaction was minimal’ (pp.30, 44). The lack of understanding of what constituted a market economy during Leonid Kravchuk’s presidency during 1991–94 was seen in his economic adviser, Oleksandr Yemelianov, who was, in Åslund’s view, the ‘most dogmatic communist economist I have ever met’ (p.30). In the 1990s Ukraine became an ‘oligarchic economy’ with insider privatization, state intervention to maximize rents, and corrupt tax and state subsidies (p.128). ‘This model of self-reinforcing rent seeking was close to equilibrium and thus stable’ (p.128) until the late