THE FUTURE REMAINS: Revisiting Revolution

 
09.03.2017
 
University
 
Maxim Bouev

A season of events marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution is organized in partnership with the State Hermitage Museum, the European University at St Petersburg and UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies supported by the Vladimir Potanin Foundation.

As part of the series of events a round-table discussion took place on March 1 in London chaired by Maxim Bouev, Head of the Department of Economics of the European University, St Petersburg.

What Happened in 1917? – Peace, Bread, Land: The Economics of Revolution

The discussion was aiming to bring together leading UK scholars and theorists with their counterparts from across the New East for critical explorations of the legacy of the Russian Revolution and our shifting views across the last 100 years.

What was the fate of the Petrograd Stock Exchange? Did the Bolsheviks create a model for modern systems of healthcare?

The event interrogates the most intriguing aspects of the economic transformation of Russia after 1917. With expertise in informal economies, corruption and social welfare, as well as professional experience of the ins and outs (and ups and downs) of the financial sector, the panel addressed the impact of Russia’s economic fate from Revolution through to ‘shock therapy’ and after.

Participating speakers:

Christopher Davis is the Reader in Command and Transition Economies at the University of Oxford. He studies the economies of the USSR/Russia and Eastern Europe, and his specialist fields of research are demography, social welfare and the economics of the health and defense sectors.

Sergei Guriev is Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, London, Professor of Economics at SciencesPo, Paris, and is a research affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, London. His principle research interests are corporate governance, political economics and labour mobility. In addition to his numerous academic posts and publications, he has also contributed columns to the New York Times, the Financial Times, Vedemosti, the Washington Post and the Moscow Times, amongst others.

Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at SSEES, UCL. She is an expert in informal governance in Russia and her research interests include corruption and informal economies. Her books include Russia's Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange (Cambridge University Press, 1998), How Russia Really Works: Informal Practices in the 1990s (Cornell University Press, 2006), and Can Russia Modernize? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2013).