The economy of Russia has gradually transformed from a planned economy into a mixed market-oriented economy. It has enormous natural resources, particularly oil and natural gas. It is the world's 11th-largest economy by nominal GDP, and 6th-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). Due to a volatile currency exchange rate, Russia's GDP as measured in dollars fluctuates sharply. Russia's membership to the WTO was accepted in 2011.
Russian oligarchs are business oligarchs of the former Soviet republics who rapidly accumulated wealth in the 1990s via the Russian privatisation that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The failing Soviet state left the ownership of state assets contested, which allowed for informal deals with former USSR officials as a means to acquire state property.
Daniel Howard Yergin is an American author, speaker, energy expert, and economic historian. Yergin is vice chairman of S&P Global. He was formerly vice chairman of IHS Markit, which merged with S&P in 2022. He founded Cambridge Energy Research Associates, which IHS Markit acquired in 2004. He has authored or co-authored several books on energy and world economics, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, (1991) The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (2011), and The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations (2020).
Nancy Fraser is an American philosopher, critical theorist, feminist, and the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and professor of philosophy at The New School in New York City. Widely known for her critique of identity politics and her philosophical work on the concept of justice, Fraser is also a staunch critic of contemporary liberal feminism and its abandonment of social justice issues. Fraser holds honorary doctoral degrees from four universities in three countries, and won the 2010 Alfred Schutz Prize in Social Philosophy from the American Philosophical Association. She was President of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division for the 2017–2018 term.
Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) is a consulting company in the United States that specializes in advising governments and private companies on energy markets, geopolitics, industry trends, and strategy. CERA has research and consulting staff across the globe and covers the oil, gas, power, and coal markets worldwide.
Per Anders Åslund is a Swedish economist and former Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He is also a chairman of the International Advisory Council at the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE).
Brenda Shaffer is an American scholar who holds positions as Fellow with the Atlantic Council and professor at University of Haifa. Shaffer was the former research director of the Caspian Studies Program at Harvard Kennedy School and past president of the Foreign Policy Section of the American Political Science Association. She specializes on energy in international relations and energy policy in the Caspian region and has written or edited several books of these topics, including "Energy Politics" and "Beyond the Resource Curse." Shaffer has also written a number of books on the topic of identity and culture in the Caucasus including explorations of Azeri literature and culture. She has been accused of lobbying for Azerbaijan and failing to disclose conflicts of interest. According to the 2019 book Lobbying in the European Union: Strategies, Dynamics and Trends, published by Springer: "research shows that her [Shaffer's] entire career has benefitted from financial support from sources tied to Azerbaijan's leadership".
Mark R. Beissinger is an American political scientist. He is the Henry W. Putnam Professor of Politics at Princeton University.
For the majority of its history, the formal ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was Marxism–Leninism, a form of socialism consisting of a centralised command economy with a vanguardist one-party state that aimed to realize the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Soviet Union's ideological commitment to achieving communism included the national communist development of socialism in one country and peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries while engaging in anti-imperialism to defend the international proletariat, combat the predominant prevailing global system of capitalism and promote the goals of Russian Communism. The state ideology of the Soviet Union—and thus Marxism–Leninism—derived and developed from the theories, policies and political praxis of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.
Steve LeVine is a journalist. He writes The Electric, a new publication on batteries, electric vehicles, and their impact on society, cities and geopolitics. He is a senior fellow on the Foresight, Strategy and Risk Initiative at the Atlantic Council and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, where he teaches energy security in the graduate-level Security Studies Program. Previously, he was a foreign correspondent for eighteen years in the former Soviet Union, Pakistan and the Philippines, for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Financial Times and Newsweek. He formerly wrote Future, a newsletter at Axios, and The Oil and the Glory, a blog on energy and geopolitics at Foreign Policy magazine. LeVine is married to Nurilda Nurlybayeva and has two daughters. He has published three books: The Oil and the Glory (2007) which tells the story of the struggle for fortune, glory and power on the Caspian Sea; Putin's Labyrinth (2008), a profile of Russia through the life and death of a half-dozen Russians; and The Powerhouse, on the geopolitics of advanced batteries, which was long-listed for the Financial Times-McKinsey 2015 Business Book of the Year.
Stefan Peter Hedlund is a Swedish academic, an expert on Soviet and Communist studies/Russian studies, and Professor of East European Studies at Uppsala University. Currently he is also Research Director at UCRS Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He has published extensively on the Soviet economic system, Russian economic reform and the attempted transition to democracy and market economy.
The energy policy of the Soviet Union was an important feature of the country's planned economy from the time of Lenin onward. The Soviet Union was virtually self-sufficient in energy; major development of the energy sector started with Stalin's autarky policy of the 1920s. During the country's 70 years of existence (1922-1991), it primarily secured economic growth based on large inputs of natural resources. But by the 1960s this method had become less efficient. In contrast to other nations who shared the same experience, technological innovation was not strong enough to replace the energy sector in importance.
Robert William Davies, better known as R. W. Davies or Bob Davies, was a British historian, writer and professor of Soviet Economic Studies at the University of Birmingham.
The New Economic Policy (NEP) was an economic policy of the Soviet Union proposed by Vladimir Lenin in 1921 as a temporary expedient. Lenin characterized the NEP in 1922 as an economic system that would include "a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control", while socialized state enterprises would operate on "a profit basis".
Angela E. Stent is a British born American foreign policy expert specializing in US and European relations with Russia and Russian foreign policy. She is Professor Emerita of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University and senior advisor and director emerita of its Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She has served in the Office of Policy Planning in the US State Department and as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia.
CERAWeek is an annual energy conference organized by the information and insights company S&P Global in Houston, Texas. The conference provides a platform for discussion on a range of energy-related topics; CERAWeek 2019 featured sessions on the world economic outlook, geopolitics, energy policy and regulation, climate change and technological innovation, among other topics. The conference features prominent speakers from energy, policy, technology, and financial industries, and is chaired by Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Yergin, vice-chairman, IHS Markit and Jamey Rosenfield, vice chair, CERAWeek, senior vice president, IHS Markit. Both are co-founders of Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
The social phenomenon of nostalgia for the era of the Soviet Union, can include its politics, its society, its culture and cultural artifacts, its superpower status, or simply its aesthetics.
Robert J. Lieber is an American academic and Professor of Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Lieber is the author or editor of a total of seventeen books and has served as the Chair of the Government Department and as Interim Chair of Psychology.
This is a select bibliography of English language books and journal articles about the post-Stalinist era of Soviet history. A brief selection of English translations of primary sources is included. The sections "General Surveys" and "Biographies" contain books; other sections contain both books and journal articles. Book entries have references to journal articles and reviews about them when helpful. Additional bibliographies can be found in many of the book-length works listed below; see Further Reading for several book and chapter-length bibliographies. The External Links section contains entries for publicly available select bibliographies from universities.
