 | The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry Subjects: Area Studies; Economics Finance Business & Industry; Humanities; Politics & International Relations; Central Asian Russian & Eastern European Studies; Business Management and Accounting; History; European Politics; World/ International History; Russian & Soviet Politics; Public & Nonprofit Management; In 1991, a small group of Russians emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union and enjoyed one of the greatest transfers of wealth ever seen, claiming ownership of some of the most valuable petroleum, natural gas and metal deposits in the world. By 1997, five of those individuals were on Forbes Magazine's list of the world's richest billionaires. Marshall Irwin Goldman was born in Elgin, Illinois on July 26, 1930. He received a bachelor's degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1952 and received master's and doctoral degrees in economics from Harvard University. After being drafted and serving as a teacher in the Army, he joined the faculty at Wellesley College in 1958 and remained there until he retirement in 2002. He was also the associate director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University from 1975 to 2006. He was an authority on the Soviet economy. He diagnosed deficiencies in Moscow's economic policies and was among the first Kremlinologists to predict the downfall of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. He wrote several books including U.S.S.R. in Crisis: The Failure of an Economic System, Gorbachev's Challenge: Economic Reform in the Age of High Technology, and Petrostate: Putin, Power and the New Russia. He died from complications of dementia on August 2, 2017 at the age of 87. (Bowker Author Biography) |
