On November 13, AEI will host a lecture by Yegor Gaidar, acting prime minister during the first government of President Boris Yeltsin and the architect of the free-market revolution in post-Soviet Russia. Mr. Gaidar will relate the lessons of the Soviet state’s failure to the new direction of the Kremlin in the last few years, including the recentralization in politics and the economy, as well as growing fiscal dependency on energy prices.

How will the Kremlin’s campaign to recapture the economy’s “commanding heights” and its apparent abandonment of structural reforms affect long-term growth? As Russia increasingly displays many of the characteristics of authoritarian regimes and “petro-states,” what are the risks to the development of a liberal economy and a democratic society?

After the lecture, Mr. Gaidar will participate in a luncheon discussion of Judge Stephen Williams’s book Liberal Reforms in an Illiberal Regime, 1906–1915: The Creation of Private Property in Russia, a work dedicated to the hundredth anniversary of pre-revolutionary economic reforms in Russia. Please note that a separate registration is required for the luncheon.