The Hoover Institution invites you to attend a Book Talk with Yakov Feygin: Building a Ruin: The Cold War Politics of Soviet Economic Reform on Friday, January 10, 2025 from 4:00 – 7:00 PM PT.
What brought down the Soviet Union? From some perspectives the answers seem obvious, even teleological—communism was simply destined to fail. When Yakov Feygin studied the question, he came to another conclusion: at least one crucial factor was a deep contradiction within the Soviet political economy brought about by the country’s attempt to transition from Stalinist mass mobilization to a consumer society.
Feygin argues that Soviet policymakers never resolved these tensions, leading to stagnation, instability, and eventually collapse. Yet the legacy of reform lingers, its factional dynamics haunting contemporary Russian politics.
Building a Ruin explores what happened in the Soviet Union as institutions designed for warfighting capacity and maximum heavy industrial output were reimagined by a new breed of reformers focused on “peaceful socioeconomic competition.” From Khrushchev on, influential schools of Soviet planning measured Cold War success in the same terms as their Western rivals: productivity, growth, and the availability of abundant and varied consumer goods. The shift was both material and intellectual, with reformers taking a novel approach to economics. Instead of trumpeting their ideological bona fides and leveraging their connections with party leaders, the new economists stressed technical expertise. The result was a long and taxing struggle for the meaning of communism itself, as old-guard management cadres clashed with reformers over the future of central planning and the state’s relationship to the global economic order.
This is an in person event only.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Yakov Feygin is an economic and financial historian currently working as the director of public sector finance at the Center for Public Enterprise, a think tank and non-profit consulting organization dedicated to improving administrative capacity in state and municipal government. Prior to his move into the public and non-profit sectors, he was a historian of Russia and the former-USSR and the broader history of 20th century economic policy and thought. He is the author of Building a Ruin: The Cold War Politics of Soviet Economic Reform (Harvard University Press, 2024). Yakov Feygin holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania and has held fellowships at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the Jain Family Institute, and the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government.
Joseph Torigian is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution; an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC; a global fellow in the History and Public Policy Program at the Wilson Center; and a Center Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan.
