The political constraints on Russia’s economic development: The visionary zeal of technological modernization and its critics

Abstract:

To understand the political constraints on Russia’s economic development, three dimensions should be explored simultaneously. The relations between Russia and the outside world, Russia’s relations with its own past and the relations between ideas and political action.

In this paper I will briefly discuss the first two aspects
and then focus more closely on the third. The purpose of this working paper is to look at how certain ideas, perhaps as yet rather vague ones, as to preferable futures for Russia are interlinked with the specific policies for advancing their implementation. In other words, I am
interested in explicating political meaning of modernization and hence, emphasis on the relation between ideas and political action.