The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold - Softcover

Fiona Hill is a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program at the Brookings Institution. Trained as a historian at St. Andrews University and Harvard University, she has published extensively on a wide range of issues related to Russian and Soviet history, Russia's economic and political transition, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and energy and security issues.

Clifford G. Gaddy is a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy and Governance Studies programs at the Brookings Institution and a visiting professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University. His previous books include Russia's Virtual Economy (Brookings, 2002) and The Price of the Past: Russia's Struggle with the Legacy of a Militarized Economy (Brookings, 1996).

"As a result, according to The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold, 23 of the world's 25 coldest cities with populations over 500,000 are in Russia. The maintenance of the massive Soviet misallocation of people and industrial plant constitutes an enormous tax on the Russian economy today." —Kim Iskyan, Slate

"Russia is the wrong shape. Too big, far too long, flat for much of the way and accursedly mountainous in between; but above all, as Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy show in this fascinating study, the wrong shape economically.... " — The Economist

"Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy focus only upon one example, that of Russia over the past two centuries (especially in its Soviet phase); but it may have more general implications about the complex relationship between geography, history and human society. Even if their study only applies to Russia, it upsets most previous thinking about the sources of national power.... Hill and Gaddy make an interesting point. Economic power and prosperity are measured, not by sheer landmass, but by the number and efficiency of the transactions taking place within them.... But what seems clear after reading 'The Siberian Curse' is that you won't get far in nation-building if you set up shop in places where even high-carbon steels quickly succumb to the cold." —Paul Kennedy, Yale University, Tribune Media Services

"This incisive polemic, however, argues that if Russians hope to attain prosperity they should abandon their eastern territories, where not a single settlement is economically viable. Of all the political pathologies to emerge from the Soviet experiment, none were so grandiose and manifestly disastrous as the attempt to fashion an industrial utopia in the Siberian wasteland." — The New Yorker

"The disastrous impact of Soviet planning on the geography of the Russian economy is a hitherto neglected but vital subject. Those still wondering why market reforms have achieved only limited success in Russia since the collapse of Communism cannot afford to overlook this timely and original book." —Niall Ferguson, Senior Research Fellow, Jesus College, Oxford University

"As Brookings Institution scholars Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy have recognized in their unusual and rich new book The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold, the famous extremity of Russia's climate has as much to do with political history as with nature.... The Siberian Curse aims at nothing less than to demythologize the Siberian cold through a persuasive, engagingly written, economically and historically grounded argument.... Full of compelling arguments and practical recommendations, The Siberian Curse is also engagingly hopeful in its conception." —Christine Evans, The Moscow Times

"The authors' diagnosis is sound and their prognosis grim. But, assert Hill and Gaddy, recovery is possible. Russia must downsize its cold cities and encourage a mass migration of the population westward, to concentrate the country's workforce and brainpower in European Russia." — Russian Life

"Many scholars have written on the influence of the cold and the problems of distance in Russia. In The Siberian Curse, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy seek to bring new rigor to the task.... Provides a new way to look at Russian reform.... Hill and Gaddy show us that Siberia's development did not make sense." —Cristina Chuen, Monterey Institute of International Studies, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

"This book is a fascinating study that brings together historical analysis with statistical measurements, and points out the path-dependence of transitional economies and regional economic devleopment." —Hiroki Nogami, The Developing Economies

"In The Siberian Curse, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, scholars at the Brookings Institution, offer a refreshing, well-documented addition to the literature on post-Soviet Russia." —Andrew Meier, The Wilson Quarterly