The Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna invites to its regular Transformative Salon on October 1, 2026 at 7:00 PM, this time with Tobias Rupprecht (Humboldt University of Berlin). The Salon will be moderated by Jannis Panagiotidis (RECET).
Venue: Café Merkur, Florianigasse 18, 1080 Vienna.
Common wisdom has it that neoliberal advisors and organizations imposed harmful reforms on Russia after the collapse of Communism. Going against this dominant narrative, Tobias Rupprecht offers a revisionist account of Russia’s post-Soviet marketisation from the perspective of the advisors and ministers who oversaw this transformation. He shows that there was a significant minority of economic liberals from late Soviet academic and dissident circles who sought to chart a new path, believing free prices and private property were the foundations of a ‘civilized country’. Liberal reformers faced a profound dilemma – one for which Western advisors had no solution either: Should they commit to democratic political activism and risk irrelevance, or align themselves with those in power and be co-opted by an authoritarian state determined to re-assert its imperial strength?
Tobias Rupprecht is a DFG Heisenberg Professor at Humboldt University of Berlin. In his current research, he deals with Russia in global history since the 19th century. The present talk is based on his recently published monograph The Tragedy of Soviet Market Economists: The Failed Quest to Civilise Russia, 1972–2022 (Cambridge UP, 2026). He is also the author of Soviet Internationalism after Stalin: Interaction and Exchange between the USSR and Latin America during the Cold War (Cambridge UP, 2015).
Jannis Panagiotidis is Scientific Director of the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on the history of anti-East European racism, on East-West migration during the Cold War, on post-Soviet migration, and on the history of free movement. He has also published on the global history of ethnic Germans from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
FREE ENTRY! No registration required.
