Stability and disorder: An evolutionary analysis of Russia’s virtual economy

The much-heralded “transition to the market” in Russia is now widely recognized to be a far more complex and open-ended process than many at first expected. Boris Yeltsin’s last state-of-the-federation speech to the Duma reflected this realization: “We are stuck halfway between a planned, command economy and a normal, market one. And now we have an ugly model-a crossbreed of the two systems.” Yeltsin’s mixing of metaphors-the spatial with the biological-reflected the fundamental confusion in logic that has plagued economic policymaking in post-Soviet Russia. A hybrid-the biological mixture of two genotypes-is not a halfway point. If it were, the current dilemma would be simpler to resolve.