What do you think?
Rate this book
The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold
"
Can Russia ever become a normal, free-market, democratic society? Why have so many reforms failed since the Soviet Union's collapse? In this highly-original work, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy argue that Russia's geography, history, and monumental mistakes perpetrated by Soviet planners have locked it into a dead-end path to economic ruin. Shattering a number of myths that have long persisted in the West and in Russia, The Siberian Curse explains why Russia's greatest assets––its gigantic size and Siberia's natural resources––are now the source of one its greatest weaknesses. For seventy years, driven by ideological zeal and the imperative to colonize and industrialize its vast frontiers, communist planners forced people to live in Siberia. They did this in true totalitarian fashion by using the GULAG prison system and slave labor to build huge factories and million-person cities to support them. Today, tens of millions of people and thousands of large-scale industrial enterprises languish in the cold and distant places communist planners put them––not where market forces or free choice would have placed them. Russian leaders still believe that an industrialized Siberia is the key to Russia's prosperity. As a result, the country is burdened by the ever-increasing costs of subsidizing economic activity in some of the most forbidding places on the planet. Russia pays a steep price for continuing this folly––it wastes the very resources it needs to recover from the ravages of communism. Hill and Gaddy contend that Russia's future prosperity requires that it finally throw off the shackles of its Soviet past, by shrinking Siberia's cities. Only by facilitating the relocation of population to western Russia, closer to Europe and its markets, can Russia achieve sustainable economic growth. Unfortunately for Russia, there is no historical precedent for shrinking cities on the scale that will be required. Downsizing Siberia will be a costly and wrenching process. But there is no alternative. Russia cannot afford to keep the cities communist planners left for it out in the cold.
"
Can Russia ever become a normal, free-market, democratic society? Why have so many reforms failed since the Soviet Union's collapse? In this highly-original work, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy argue that Russia's geography, history, and monumental mistakes perpetrated by Soviet planners have locked it into a dead-end path to economic ruin. Shattering a number of myths that have long persisted in the West and in Russia, The Siberian Curse explains why Russia's greatest assets––its gigantic size and Siberia's natural resources––are now the source of one its greatest weaknesses. For seventy years, driven by ideological zeal and the imperative to colonize and industrialize its vast frontiers, communist planners forced people to live in Siberia. They did this in true totalitarian fashion by using the GULAG prison system and slave labor to build huge factories and million-person cities to support them. Today, tens of millions of people and thousands of large-scale industrial enterprises languish in the cold and distant places communist planners put them––not where market forces or free choice would have placed them. Russian leaders still believe that an industrialized Siberia is the key to Russia's prosperity. As a result, the country is burdened by the ever-increasing costs of subsidizing economic activity in some of the most forbidding places on the planet. Russia pays a steep price for continuing this folly––it wastes the very resources it needs to recover from the ravages of communism. Hill and Gaddy contend that Russia's future prosperity requires that it finally throw off the shackles of its Soviet past, by shrinking Siberia's cities. Only by facilitating the relocation of population to western Russia, closer to Europe and its markets, can Russia achieve sustainable economic growth. Unfortunately for Russia, there is no historical precedent for shrinking cities on the scale that will be required. Downsizing Siberia will be a costly and wrenching process. But there is no alternative. Russia cannot afford to keep the cities communist planners left for it out in the cold.
"
331 pages, Paperback
First published November 4, 2003
28 people are currently reading
396 people want to read
About the author
Fiona Hill
9 books319 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Fiona Hill is director of the Center on the United States and Europe, and senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution.
Fiona Hill is director of the Center on the United States and Europe, and senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 17, 2019
This book brings to mind the putative Mark Twain quote about everyone complaining about the weather but no one doing anything about it. Everyone knows Russia is cold, but few have the temerity to ask why. Yes, Russia is in the North, but on its own that wouldn't be so terrible. Moscow is on about the same 55 degrees North latitude as Vilinius, and just a little North of Berlin and London. Moscow is also about the about the same latitude as Siberian towns like Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, and Krasnoyarsk. The problem, however, is that the great Russian land mass is isolated from warm ocean airs, and exposed to the Arctic, which means that temperature drops faster growing East than going North (St. Petersburg is warmer than Moscow, even though it is Northwest). Moscow's average January temperature is about -10 degrees Celsius, while Novosibirsk is -20, and further East cities like Yakutsk are -35. The greater mystery, however, is why Russia has such big cities so far East and North in Siberia, and over 30 million people living in them?
The reason for Russia's peculiar coldness is bad Soviet planning combined with Russian nationalist ideology. The authors construct a national "temperature per capita," and show that while Russia started out about -11.6 degrees TPC around the Russian Revolution, they dropped more than a full degree on average over the next seventy years (a semi-equivalent country like Canada got a degree warmer over the same time period). Frozen Siberian cities like Novosibirsk, Omsk, Yekaterinburg and Perm were built up to over a million people, due partially to "Engel's dictum" that industry should be spread equally throughout a country, and also partially to the need to keep voyenno-promyshlennyy kompleks (VPK) or defense cities, away from European aggressors. Even today, nationalist ideologues from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Alexander Dugin celebrate the peculiar Russian benefits of Siberia and the frozen taiga. They should instead celebrate people moving away from them.
The Soviet build-up of isolated archipelagos of frozen towns had numerous negative consequences. For one, it inhibited a natural urban network. Outside of the two big cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia has a complete absence of any "medium-sized" cities in the 4 to 1.5 million range that are typical in almost all large nations. Also, the great number of million-plus Siberian cities also are much less efficient and comfortable than warmer cities would be. At -20 degrees manual construction workers are about 50% less efficient than at 0, and equipment is about 25% less efficient. At that temperature, compressors in internal combustion engines stop operating, tower cranes start to collapse. A little lower and unalloyed steel breaks, and fuel tanks must be insulated. During the Soviet period, cost was rarely calculated, however, so these Siberian areas were subsidized at about 25% of all expenses from the European "mater
ik" or mainland. Now, the government still subsidizes, at around 2-3% of GDP, but at a lower level, so many people are trapped in freezing and impoverished cities.
The authors offer no obvious solutions to Russia's dilemma, except to gradually move people away from Siberia and the North around the Arctic Circle (where which 7% of Russia's population lives, while in countries like Sweden its less than 1%), towards natural urban networks around Europe, with the help of gradually diminishing subsidies. Although the book often repeats itself and reiterates the same issues, this is about as original a look as one will get at Russia, one which takes into account demography, geography, and, above all, that greatest Russian curse, purblind ideology.
The reason for Russia's peculiar coldness is bad Soviet planning combined with Russian nationalist ideology. The authors construct a national "temperature per capita," and show that while Russia started out about -11.6 degrees TPC around the Russian Revolution, they dropped more than a full degree on average over the next seventy years (a semi-equivalent country like Canada got a degree warmer over the same time period). Frozen Siberian cities like Novosibirsk, Omsk, Yekaterinburg and Perm were built up to over a million people, due partially to "Engel's dictum" that industry should be spread equally throughout a country, and also partially to the need to keep voyenno-promyshlennyy kompleks (VPK) or defense cities, away from European aggressors. Even today, nationalist ideologues from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Alexander Dugin celebrate the peculiar Russian benefits of Siberia and the frozen taiga. They should instead celebrate people moving away from them.
The Soviet build-up of isolated archipelagos of frozen towns had numerous negative consequences. For one, it inhibited a natural urban network. Outside of the two big cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia has a complete absence of any "medium-sized" cities in the 4 to 1.5 million range that are typical in almost all large nations. Also, the great number of million-plus Siberian cities also are much less efficient and comfortable than warmer cities would be. At -20 degrees manual construction workers are about 50% less efficient than at 0, and equipment is about 25% less efficient. At that temperature, compressors in internal combustion engines stop operating, tower cranes start to collapse. A little lower and unalloyed steel breaks, and fuel tanks must be insulated. During the Soviet period, cost was rarely calculated, however, so these Siberian areas were subsidized at about 25% of all expenses from the European "mater
ik" or mainland. Now, the government still subsidizes, at around 2-3% of GDP, but at a lower level, so many people are trapped in freezing and impoverished cities.
The authors offer no obvious solutions to Russia's dilemma, except to gradually move people away from Siberia and the North around the Arctic Circle (where which 7% of Russia's population lives, while in countries like Sweden its less than 1%), towards natural urban networks around Europe, with the help of gradually diminishing subsidies. Although the book often repeats itself and reiterates the same issues, this is about as original a look as one will get at Russia, one which takes into account demography, geography, and, above all, that greatest Russian curse, purblind ideology.
January 16, 2018
I thought this would be interesting. A simplification of its basic premise remains interesting, that the central planning legacy of Russian politics has created cities that are simply and broadly speaking unsustainable. But this is not an interesting nor insightful book. Here's what you need to know from the authors:
The only sentence of worth here is the last one. The rest are ideological straightjackets that reveal their own limitations from their onset. Without being able to contextualize why and how these changes were made, the resulting set of conclusions reveal more arrogance than insight.
If you're a rabid Russophile interested in market economy "solutions" and anticommunist policy, this is for you. Everyone else...
From the perspective of today's market-economy imperative, looking back over Russia's history reveals that misallocation was the dominant characteristic of the Soviet period. Resources (including human resources) were misused from the point of view of economic efficiency. The system produced the wrong things. Its factories produced them in the wrong way. It educated its people with the wrong skills, Worst of all, communist planners put factories, machines, and people in the wrong places. For a country with so much territory, especially territory in remote and cold places, location matters a great deal.
The only sentence of worth here is the last one. The rest are ideological straightjackets that reveal their own limitations from their onset. Without being able to contextualize why and how these changes were made, the resulting set of conclusions reveal more arrogance than insight.
If you're a rabid Russophile interested in market economy "solutions" and anticommunist policy, this is for you. Everyone else...
June 24, 2021
This was SUCH a good book. When it arrived for me at the library I was like, "What was I thinking?". I had just read an article about Fiona Hill and it said she had a new book coming out soon and I just impulsively thought to read her first book even though I wouldn't have said that Siberian city planning was an interest of mine.
This was so readable! You're going to read this review and say "Summer, that's ridiculous" but I was turning the pages and LOVING it. Hill has such a good narrative voice. She just carefully breaks down a very large and complicated subject and explains it to the layman in a perfect pace. She uses charts and anecdotes. She injects short paragraphs, set aside from the main text, that give the reader context. She clearly knows her subject like the back of her hand and this book is like taking a short course from her in person.
Really extraordinary, I'd recommend it to anyone. And the best part was, during the past couple of weeks, whenever I made a mistake or had a hard decision to make, I was like "Well, at least I'm not attempting to salvage cities built by GULAG labor in subzero temperatures!" It really puts your responsibilities in perspective!
This was so readable! You're going to read this review and say "Summer, that's ridiculous" but I was turning the pages and LOVING it. Hill has such a good narrative voice. She just carefully breaks down a very large and complicated subject and explains it to the layman in a perfect pace. She uses charts and anecdotes. She injects short paragraphs, set aside from the main text, that give the reader context. She clearly knows her subject like the back of her hand and this book is like taking a short course from her in person.
Really extraordinary, I'd recommend it to anyone. And the best part was, during the past couple of weeks, whenever I made a mistake or had a hard decision to make, I was like "Well, at least I'm not attempting to salvage cities built by GULAG labor in subzero temperatures!" It really puts your responsibilities in perspective!
January 5, 2022
This is a book by Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy about the future of Siberia in a post-communist Russia. It was written in 2003 but I only became aware of it more recently as Fiona Hill gained some recognition for her work at the NSC (and for her principles). My bad! This is a good book and well worth reading. Not only does it concern a part of the world about which I know little, but it also is an unusual book that combines national and international policy planning with some sound economic reasoning around which the arguments are structured.
The deceptively simple question motivating the book is how should Siberia be developed after communism so that the region (and Russia) can become more prosperous in a global market driven world. Simple, right? Put development money into innovative technologies, new ways to exploit the rich commodities in ground, and spice the whole mix up with incentives to encourage new settlers and entrepreneurship - lots of entrepreneurship! Well … no. While such policies might be an improvement over doing nothing, they will be unlikely to fundamentally improve the economic prospects for the massive Siberian region.
Why? Because of lots and lots of long-lived and poorly allocated productive assets that remain around from the central planning of the communist era.
Important economic decisions require not just good ideas but also the commitment of large amounts of long-lived productive assets whose value in sunk into particular uses and which cannot be turned around and redeployed into new (second best) uses without a significant loss of value (if they can be redeployed at all). These assets also get used up over time (depreciate), so even if they are initially deployed well, they need to be replenished or even replaced if they are to remain effective.
This is clear for events like plant closings. A big plant is opened to produce some new product and all goes well for a while. The product sells, workers are employed, the town around the plant prospers, and all is good … until the products stops selling and it is clear that demand for the product is gone or severely reduced. Then the volume of production at the plant is reduced and it closes. The workers no longer have their jobs and the town around the plant suffers. The history of the former GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio is a good example of such a story.
Now look at this problem at a higher level of aggregation. If people no longer by as many American cars, then the industry suffers and lots of plants close, along with plants in related industries. These assets simply cannot be turned around to new uses quickly if at all. Cities involved in this suffer (Detroit, Gary) and one starts to read a lot about “deindustrialization”, as well as hearing a lot more “hard times” country music and rock songs..
So far, so good? Now expand the focus to the largest region of the largest (geographic area) country on earth and allow the norm-market driven allocation of productive assets to proceed unimpeded for 70 years at the direction of Communist Party planners. The actual region of Siberia is three times the size of Alaska and half the size of the US. The full region of interest in Hill’s book is larger than the US and larger than Canada.
How does one go about reintegrating this region back into the global marketplace? To permit and even encourage workers to redeploy to new areas of economic interest would incent many of the millions of residents to relocate back to Russia west of the Urals and to the Moscow region in particular. Infrastructure is lacking to enable this even if the political will was present. It would be possible to build up transportation and communications infrastructure in Siberia and the Russian Far East, but to what purpose given the lack of economic rationale for what is already there?
The book provides lots of details on this but suffice it to say this is a really hard problem. Hill and Gaddy provide lots of recommendations for how to move forward but it is clear that economic progress here will require political relations that permit such progress. This may be one of the agendas behind China’s New Silk Road project. In any event, there are no easy answers here and it remains and likely will continue to remain as a problem in Russian development in the future.
The deceptively simple question motivating the book is how should Siberia be developed after communism so that the region (and Russia) can become more prosperous in a global market driven world. Simple, right? Put development money into innovative technologies, new ways to exploit the rich commodities in ground, and spice the whole mix up with incentives to encourage new settlers and entrepreneurship - lots of entrepreneurship! Well … no. While such policies might be an improvement over doing nothing, they will be unlikely to fundamentally improve the economic prospects for the massive Siberian region.
Why? Because of lots and lots of long-lived and poorly allocated productive assets that remain around from the central planning of the communist era.
Important economic decisions require not just good ideas but also the commitment of large amounts of long-lived productive assets whose value in sunk into particular uses and which cannot be turned around and redeployed into new (second best) uses without a significant loss of value (if they can be redeployed at all). These assets also get used up over time (depreciate), so even if they are initially deployed well, they need to be replenished or even replaced if they are to remain effective.
This is clear for events like plant closings. A big plant is opened to produce some new product and all goes well for a while. The product sells, workers are employed, the town around the plant prospers, and all is good … until the products stops selling and it is clear that demand for the product is gone or severely reduced. Then the volume of production at the plant is reduced and it closes. The workers no longer have their jobs and the town around the plant suffers. The history of the former GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio is a good example of such a story.
Now look at this problem at a higher level of aggregation. If people no longer by as many American cars, then the industry suffers and lots of plants close, along with plants in related industries. These assets simply cannot be turned around to new uses quickly if at all. Cities involved in this suffer (Detroit, Gary) and one starts to read a lot about “deindustrialization”, as well as hearing a lot more “hard times” country music and rock songs..
So far, so good? Now expand the focus to the largest region of the largest (geographic area) country on earth and allow the norm-market driven allocation of productive assets to proceed unimpeded for 70 years at the direction of Communist Party planners. The actual region of Siberia is three times the size of Alaska and half the size of the US. The full region of interest in Hill’s book is larger than the US and larger than Canada.
How does one go about reintegrating this region back into the global marketplace? To permit and even encourage workers to redeploy to new areas of economic interest would incent many of the millions of residents to relocate back to Russia west of the Urals and to the Moscow region in particular. Infrastructure is lacking to enable this even if the political will was present. It would be possible to build up transportation and communications infrastructure in Siberia and the Russian Far East, but to what purpose given the lack of economic rationale for what is already there?
The book provides lots of details on this but suffice it to say this is a really hard problem. Hill and Gaddy provide lots of recommendations for how to move forward but it is clear that economic progress here will require political relations that permit such progress. This may be one of the agendas behind China’s New Silk Road project. In any event, there are no easy answers here and it remains and likely will continue to remain as a problem in Russian development in the future.
November 28, 2010
Good scholarly examination of Russia's history of flawed industrial planning (particularly during the Soviet period) and the deep scars of inefficient, malformed economic geography it has left for today's Russian leaders to grapple with. This book pulls no punches in explaining just how dire the situation Russia finds itself in today truly is given the difficulties of restructuring given the large populations already living in Siberia's harshest climes and reliant on state support to keep these settlements going. Given this predicament, it is easier to empathize with Russia's overdependence on its lucrative oil and gas exports, and with the tough choices it faces in determining its future course.
December 20, 2019
Fiona Hill writes beautifully and clearly explains "how Communist planners left Russia out in the cold". It goes into the deep structural dynamics of a very big and very cold country, and how it cripples their economy. It explains why Russia has had so much difficulty breaking free of its Soviet past. Siberia's considerable resources can contribute to Russia's future prosperity, but not if the Russian government persists in trying to maintain the giant Soviet cities that communist planners left for it. Out in the cold, cold land of Russia.
Read
June 2, 2021I decided to pick up my first "Fiona Hill" book on Russia after she gave testimony during the first Trump impeachment House testimony. The other book, "Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin" was also co-authored by Clifford Gaddy. Both books very informative and eye opening to give us (an interpreted) Russian point of view on Russia -- why Russian policies that seem other-worldly to us make sense to them in some way.
That Siberia was economically targeted for extra-ordinary development by Stalin and post-Stalin leaders is explained, along the the extraordinary costs and drag on yearly GDP. This constant hold-back on Russia development is almost cemented into its future policies due to the large population centers that are maintained by geo-political forces.
Hill and Gaddy offer many examples and possible solutions to these problems while admitting that the political headwinds are significant. Russia, like many nordic countries (incl Canada) should contract and emphasize industries in livable (and economically workable) areas, and fight status-quo forces that constantly thwart progress.
An excellent, thoughtful read by experts.
That Siberia was economically targeted for extra-ordinary development by Stalin and post-Stalin leaders is explained, along the the extraordinary costs and drag on yearly GDP. This constant hold-back on Russia development is almost cemented into its future policies due to the large population centers that are maintained by geo-political forces.
Hill and Gaddy offer many examples and possible solutions to these problems while admitting that the political headwinds are significant. Russia, like many nordic countries (incl Canada) should contract and emphasize industries in livable (and economically workable) areas, and fight status-quo forces that constantly thwart progress.
An excellent, thoughtful read by experts.
December 28, 2023
Interesting feed on the Siberia development. The argument is more on the depopulation and the deemphasization of the entire region over the long term. According to the author, from the national interest perspective, it is an imperative to change the persistent idiology of placing the unproductive siberia as the focus for purely political reason ("land conquerer"), instead, more focus should be put in the European Russia based on the market mechanism. Interesting argument, but i dont think that would happen in Russia in reality. I dont think the top decisionmakers are still unaware of the uneconomical nature of developing siberia, but there is not much they can do to change it. Even putin had to adopt the worst solution of trying to maintain the status quo. This is the reality bro
March 17, 2022
What seemed at first to be a mostly academic analysis of one nation's political and economic follies, turned out to be one of the most massively readable and compelling books I picked up this year. For a text published before Putin's Kremlin really began to show its hand on the world stage, The Siberian Curse is no less relevant and insightful and stunning nearly 20 years later. If you've ever had any urge at all to pull the curtain back and see firsthand how a country's gears spin–or in this case break–then step right and up, and let Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy take you on a tour of the coldest economy on Earth.
September 15, 2022
Amazing book to understand the role of Siberia and Far East not only in Russian economy, but mentality. Really thought provoking (and a bit controversial and open to debate).
March 20, 2021
Best book on Russia that I've ever read. Period. This is what dreams are made of.
Must purchase a physical copy asap.
Must purchase a physical copy asap.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews