LEGAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS OF RUSSIA’S TRANSITION TO CAPITALISM

1989 – 1999

Abstract

In the early 1980s, the adoption of Western legal and economic models became more intense and
accompanied economic reforms, when the sliding away from dependence on USSR conceded
peoples’ democracies to some extent an autonomous economic policy. This served as a
breakthrough in the planned economy. The drive towards self-government and cooperatives,
acquired during the period of the socialist economy, is the first step to opening up the market and
trying to reconcile it with the planned one. Their development manifested a shift from the
imposition of a single Soviet model to the circulation of legal models in the Communist bloc.
Influenced by these innovative impulses, USSR undertook its own restructuring with the
perestoika, announced in 1985 by Mikhail Gorbachev. However, the Soviet state and the
peoples’ democracies proved to be in crisis: the more they opened up to the market and the
private economy, the more divided the energy of the centrifugal and reformative forces became.
USSR opened up to foreign investment in 1987. In 1988 the commercial and the social legal
norms entered into force in USSR and throughout Eastern Europe to regulate the new reality.
USSR, established with the 1924 Constitution, legally ceased to exist in 1991. In its place, the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was created, and the Russian Federation inherited
its international relations from the former Union. The last multinational state was divided after
the downfall of the Ottoman Empire and Austro-Hungary. Soviet law ceased to apply. Russian
law returned in the Russian Federation, and national law returned in the states of Central and
Eastern Europe, having emerged after the dissolution of the USSR.