30 YEARS WITHOUT THE USSR. PART 1. POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DISINTEGRATION
Differentiation of the concepts of «revolution» and «reform» for the purposes of analyzing the economic development of the republics of the former USSR in the period after 1991. Substantiation of the concept according to which the revolutionary collapse of the USSR was not objectively conditioned, and it was he who entailed extremely negative economic and demographic consequences. On the contrary, reforms were necessary for further socio-economic development. There were no economic reasons for the revolution, since the policy of equalizing the socio-economic conditions of farming and living standards in the republics of the USSR was carried out. There were prerequisites for the reforms, they are divided into theoretical and practical. The theoretical justification of the reforms in the USSR was the critical studies of the socialist economy by both Western scientists, starting with the «Austrian school» of the early XX century, and «reformers» from the COMECON countries and the USSR in the 1980s and 1990s. The practical need for reforms was determined by the stagnation of the economy in the second half of the 1980s, the problems of a general shortage of goods, the low international competitiveness of Russian exports, the dependence of the economic system on energy production and other objective reasons.