The Rivalry Between the Monetary and Dirigiste Traditions in the Historiography of the Radical Economic Reform (1991–1993)

The subject of the study is the development of two scholarly currents devoted to the study of market transformations in Russia in 1991–1993: the monetary and the dirigiste. The criterion for their distinction is their attitude toward government policy on the implementation of radical economic reform, specifically in terms of assessing the necessary scale of state regulation. In the monetary approach, the level of regulation is assessed as adequate or excessive; in the dirigiste approach, as insufficient. The study includes not only scholars’ views on the content of the transformations themselves but also on the conditions and factors of their implementation. In the development of both currents, two periods are identified – an early and a late one – with the early 2000s serving as the chronological dividing line. Each period is characterized by both common features and specific approaches to problem formulation, methodology, and logic of argumentation. The review is based on the method of periodization and a chronological–problematic approach. These allowed the body of scholarly works to be divided into two periods, with the main trends in the development of scholarly thought identified in each. Comparative analysis was used to juxtapose scholarly concepts in three aspects: problem formulation, principal methods, and modes of their application. The conducted research has enabled a number of conclusions that constitute the author’s contribution to the study of the historiography of Russian reforms. The main trend of the early period was the formation of two principal currents of scholarly thought – the monetarist and the dirigiste. Their chief methodological differences lay in the use of different economic theories and different ways of constructing models of reality. Common methods of argumentation were identified: comparing the consequences of government policy with potential alternatives and comparative analysis of international experience. It is shown how the use of identical methods could yield diametrically opposite conclusions. New trends in the late period included the convergence of problem areas, the dominance of critical assessments of reform outcomes in Western historiography, and an increase in the diversity of disciplinary approaches. A connection is traced between the core tenets of the currents under study and higher-order abstractions – uniqueness and universality. Promising directions for further research are outlined: separating the role of government policy from the conditions of its implementation in assessing the consequences of transformations; separating the scholarly basis of economic policy from the economic expression of various group interests; and turning to the methodological toolkit of non-economic disciplines.