The new Russians ebook

I read it in the mid-seventies when Smith wrote it. I was just back from the USSR for the first time. I later went another four times. I ordered the book to read again recently. Smith's observations of the USSR in the Brezhnev years matches mine perfectly. He is a master observer of that place at that time.

Hedrick Smith's books on the Russians (and Soviets) gives a great overview of the Russian powers at work. His original book, The Russians, is almost a college course on the former Sovie

If you want to know, in all its details, what went wrong with Gorbachov's plans
to modify the economic structure of the USSR this is an interesting book.
It is well researched and written after exploring Russia and some of the Soviet
republics almost a quarter of a century ago.

This book was written by a person who has spent a lot of time in the country and has grown to know it well. It describes the break up of the Soviet Union and its aftermath. I also heartily recommend his first book - The Russians.

Beautifully written. Gets into the hearts and minds of the Russian people. A must read for anyone interested in how Russian culture has evolved.

nice smooth, no marks it is excellent, well written can't wait to finally engulf and read it looks great like his power game book

at Russia during its modern transition era. Hedrick Smith bequeathed two impressionist journals of his Russian/Soviet experience. His first, "The Russians," was a `70s eye-opener for Americans used to silly cold war stereotypes. Though better information had long been out there, only top correspondents like Smith or Harrison Salisbury could ever get their works funded before a wide audience. Along came Gorby, glasnost and perestroika, and Mr. Smith followed up with "The New Russians". As with so much of the optimistic reportage of the period, Smith could not know the phrase would become a sneer both at home and abroad.

Smith was (and remains) a cheerleader for this era of "democratic free market reform." Time has not done well by the hopes of the era nor the reformers he lauds therein. Not to become simplistic, but one example will suffice for the book's theme and tone. In Chapter 23, "City Hall: The New Political Entrepreneurs," he portrays Vadim Tumanov, a construction contractor, whose performance repairing a section of Moscow's Ring Road was touted as "a classic lesson in free-market productivity" (p. 547). Mr. Tumanov had been running an off-the-books "firm" for 35 years with the state looking the other way. This was, of course, not a start-up "entrepreneur," but an artel, a traditional contract-labor collective. Such arrangements were a functioning part of the unofficial gray economy throughout the USSR's economic history. Tumanov could not have survived so long without the highest government connections, so it was no wonder that he was recommended and awarded the Ring Road contract by Moscow's City Council.

Only, the city subsidized his trucks (with gasoline) and supplied his asphalt. Rather than a textbook Horatio Alger capitalist success story, we see a well-connected contractor receiving government subsidy. When "accused" of "making a profit," his shrugging reply was that "there is no secret" - and he was right: get some level of government to pay for your operating costs and reap the profits. This is not a failure of the capitalist model, of course, but how it really works in practice. There was indeed no ideological catchup with the West required. The reformers of Moscow and Leningrad City Hall were, however, much more candid than their Western counterparts in how they began their free-market kickback ventures. Said Deputy Mayor Sergei Stankevich: "We help create them [new independent enterprises] and give them a legal basis, and they give us part of the profits" (p. 549). It took the West a full decade to begin catching up to this pioneering contractor-outsourcing model, like a cold war space race.

Russia of the period was a Chicago School vanguard experiment, trying out its nostrums upon a crumbling Soviet economy that couldn't dare be pulled off at home without the direst political consequences. But this was the Communist USSR - so, in Strobe Talbott's memorable term, bring out the "wrecking ball." Of course, the consequences could not be avoided, even in Russia. The young midlevel government free market reformers allied with the ambitious Boris Yeltsin, to seize control of the Russian Republic out from under an increasingly entrapped Gorbachev. "You see the same kinds of things going on in other cities where democrats are in power," Stankevich is quoted further, trying to "control administrative buildings, local newspapers and establish radio stations." Once in power, they and Yeltsin were as single-minded as their Bolshevik predecessors, and so Russia embarked on one of the wildest eras of corruption in its history, ending in the Great Crash of '98 and the financial and political disgrace of the entire cadre of perestroika reformers whose "energy, new ideas, and noble objectives" Smith lauded in this book - up to and including Tzar Boris himself.

Smith and many others have bemoaned the rise of Putin as bringing these good times to an end. But those who didn't stuff dollars into foreign bank accounts had quite different experiences. Smith writes in conclusion that many rank-and-file workers regarded market reforms "as simply a means to line the pockets of a new Soviet bourgeoisie" (p. 551) which "saw openings to exploit" as it hammered away at the Soviet state and economy. Thus the reformers' popular support was not as pervasive as Smith wrote elsewhere, even in 1990. Hindsight demonstrated that those simplistic, Stalinoid Soviet workers had clearer insight into reality than - shock! - a veteran NYT foreign correspondent. It was exactly this kind of free-wheeling looting during the early NEP period of the 1920s that brought on the Stalinist backlash of Five Year Plan statism - and explains Putin's nagging hold on post-reform Russia.

I recently re-read both Smith's original "The Russians" and "The New Russians." The first book was a landmark, a riveting inside look at the USSR during the Brezhnev years, though Smith's conclusion (that the Soviet system would endure indefinitely) was dead wrong. (No shame in that. Predictions by NYT writers about the future of Russia are generally wrong.)
The second book, though written by the same man, using the same reporting techniques, is completely different. It is less about Russia (or the rest of the former USSR) than it is about Mikhail Gorbachev and the wonders he had performed and would surpass in the future. Gorbachev comes from Lincolnesque beginnings. Gorbachev does no wrong. Gorbachev has no antidemocratic side -- unless circumstances force him to act in such a way. Gorbachev is the driving force and visionary architect of the restructuring and opening of Russian society. It's as if one of Stalin's old apologists had been resurrected and put back to work -- with "Stalin" inked out and "Gorbachev" inked in.
"The New Russians" came ten years after "The Russians," and the Russian world had changed utterly in that decade. Ten years after "The New Russians" was published, the outlook for and course of the New Russia has altered radically from what Smith foresaw in 1991, and -- sadly -- not for the better.
An adolescent mash note to the last Soviet dictator when it was published, "The New Russians" is now a period piece. Read it for Smith's anecdotes and style, but look elsewhere for insight on the real New Russia.