The Economic Crisis in Russia: Reasons and Ways Out

Editorial Note . The report below substantiates the directions of structural restructuring of the Russian economy proposed in the studies of the Institute of Economic Forecasting of the Russian Academy of Sciences for government during the period of transformation in the 1990s. The proposed measures were based on taking into account the structural and technological imbalance in the Russian economy, which require targeted actions by the state. Reforms in the country were carried out according to the most common monetarist recipes, which have little in common with the real reality of our nonequilibrium economy. The wrong choice of course is largely due to an erroneous interpretation of the experience of other countries. The liberalization of prices violated the measure of advancement towards world prices that could be assimilated by our economy. The new pricing policy should create opportunities to restore investment demand and begin the technological modernization of backward industries, making up for lost time. The article is not only of historical interest. Today, the urgent need for structural and technological transformations not only persists, but is also exacerbated, since the commodity economy is persistently preserved with a small add-on in the form of the military-industrial complex. “The very task of conducting a new industrialization of the country is not posed … In 12 national projects of the President of the Russian Federation, industrialization does not appear, as well as the protectionism necessary for it” [1, p. 5]. The discussion of these tasks remains relevant today.