"Anders Åslund is known for making bold predictions, which initially arouse controversy but become common wisdom a few years later. He foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union in his book Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform (1989). He depicted the success of Russia's market transformation in How Russia Became a Market Economy (1995), when others saw little but chaos. After Russia's financial crisis of 1998, ijlund insisted that Russia had no choice but to adjust to the world market (Building Capitalism, 2002), although most observers declared the market economic experiment a failure. - Why did not Russia choose Chinese gradual reforms? - Why are the former Soviet countries growing much faster than the Central European economies? - How did the oligarchs arise? - Where are the postcommunist countries heading? These are just some of the questions answered in his new book How Capitalism Was Built which tells the story how all but three of twenty-one former communist countries were transformed into market economies from 1989 to 2011, but less than half of them became democracies. Anybody who wants to understand the often confusing dramas unfolding in the region and to obtain an early insight into the future will find this book useful and intellectually stimulating"--