Evolution and transformation of the Soviet elite* Valery Lazarev Department of Economics, University of Houston, and the Hoover Institution E-mail:
[email protected] Draft: April, 10, 2001 Introduction Radical social transformations are often represented as sets of policies that are consciously designed and implemented by selfless, benevolent - although probably ideologically biased - “experimenters.” Hence, titles of numerous books and papers referring to either “Soviet socialist experiment” or “Russia’s capitalist experiment.”1 The main problem of transition is, therefore, to design an optimal path from one sets of institutional arrangements to another, given the structural gap between the two. Under this approach, institutional elements are a passive material of social construction - or destruction - and the studies in institutional inheritance have no relevance. This is arguably not true even in the context of the most abrupt revolutionary change. Institutions do not exist per se, they are borne by people, economic - or in a broader setting, political-economic - agents who are selfish and rational. Whatever changes they opt to go for, they do it not for the love of abstract enlightened policies but to maximize their own objective functions. In addition, these agents are boundedly rational: their ability to collect and process information, i.e. to solve problems, is limited, and so is their possible speed of adaptation to new conditions. They acquire social and human capital – skills, beliefs, and patterns of behavior, as well as identity and reputation – through a lengthy process of socialization under “ancienne regime.” They bring this luggage into the brave new world, even if they arrive into it in a revolutionary-romantic manner, on a top of tank.