tious but self-defeating foreign policy, and a corrupt and inept elite short of energy and ideas. The crisis facing Soviet society as the union disintegrated came from several sources, but the economic problems, the growing crime rate, the inter-ethnic violence, and the political struggles all derived from the deep crisis rising questions about the legitimacy of Soviet political institutions and the identity of the Soviet people (McKay, Hill, & Butler, 1996, 1112-1113).
Observers note that Russia has been moving toward a market economy, though they wonder if the people will continue on this road. Official Russian statistics indicate that there has been a decline in production in state-run industries, but there has also been a rise in private-sector activities. The standard of living has improved in Moscow and St. Petersburg for most people, but life has worsened for those who are old and on a pension ("Russia: What's Next," 1992, 20).
Since the time of the failed coup attempt in 1991, the Russian economy has been in a transition to a Western-style capitalist country. This only partially identifies the goal, since there are several different types of Western capitalist country. Each of the Western models is sufficiently similar, though, that the path taken by the Russian socialist system will be clearly in a new direction (Leitzel, 1995, 1). Russia has a market economy and has included capitalist-style behavior for as much as 25 percent of all economic activity in the pre-reform USSR, some of which was even legal. The legal portion was dominated by collective farm markets:
Farmers who worked on the large state and cooperative farms also were permitted small private plots for growing produce and raising a limited amount of livestock. The output from these private plots provided the legal source for private sales of food on "collective farm" markets in Soviet cities (Leitzel, 1995, 27).
Prices at these markets were m...