Long before Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet planners and economists engaged in wide-ranging debates about economic reform. But they never seriously considered the option of a genuinely participatory, democratic model of socialism that would empower workers.

Review of Building a Ruin. The Cold War Politics of Soviet Economic Reform by Yakov Feygin (Harvard University Press, 2024).

It is now some three and a half decades since the Soviet Union collapsed. But its past continues to haunt the Left, and its experience helps to define the “short twentieth century” from 1917 to 1989–91.

Between 1917 to 1953, the territory that we think of as the Soviet Union experienced a succession of crises. Revolution and civil war gave way to a period of stability under the New Economic Policy, before the experie

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