Russian President Vladimir Putin has long regarded the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “geopolitical catastrophe.”
The invasion of Ukraine, now approaching its one-year anniversary, could be seen as the culmination of his years-long quest to restore the Soviet empire. While this effort will almost certainly fail, Putin may succeed in reviving one of the USSR’s worst features: its centralized, sclerotic economic system.
With Russia’s economy straining under Western sanctions, some of the country’s leading economists and mathematicians are advocating a return to the days of five-year plans and quantitative production targets. In an interview marking the centenary of the Soviet Union’s founding, economist Ruslan Grinberg called for the reinstatement of the planned economy — an opinion that could be easily dismissed were Grinberg not the head of the influential Institute of Economics at the Russian Academy of Sciences.