Perspectives on Entrepreneurship and Privatization in Russia: Policy and Public Opinion

Abstract

In 1991, the Supreme Soviets of both the Soviet Union and the RSFSR approved legislation that was a decisive departure from the tentativeness about individual initiative that had characterized the Gorbachev era until then. Between January and July, a series of laws was enacted which pointedly endorsed entrepreneurship and outlined aspects of a program to remove a broad spectrum of enterprises from state control. Scholarly analysis, however, highlighted a potential obstacle to the incipient transition toward a market economy: public opinion. During the period that the 1991 laws were being enacted, most Soviet and foreign scholars studying the subject were maintaining that the Soviet people generally opposed private enterprise and that historical suspicion about capitalism would probably make the transition away from state ownership particularly difficult.