Undaunted by the potholed road the Russians are traveling towards a market economy, Marshall Goldman here explains not only what has happened under Boris Yeltsin, but also what is likely to happen next in the most enigmatic nation in the world.

Trenchant analysis combined with first-person reporting is a Goldman hallmark; in Lost Opportunity he provides the clearest picture yet of how Boris Yeltsin took on the task of reforming the Russian economy. Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin was won over to the idea of shock therapy, administered by Yegor Gaidar, a young economist eventually appointed acting prime minister. Gaidar did not push economic reforms alone.

He was encouraged and supported by Western economists, including some who had advocated similar tactics in the former Soviet satellites. But as Goldman starkly reveals, the Russian economy, beset by supply blockages that left goods scarce and prices high, lurched from one unsuccessful quick fix to another.

Apparatchiks intent on becoming power brokers in the new state, profiteers, and the notorious Russian mafia further exploited the confusion, opening the way for a strong showing of nationalist extremists in recent elections.

In contrast to the Russian experience, alternative lessons of history from the post-Second World War revivals of Japan and Germany to the gradualist approach to a free economy in China and Hungary come under close review. In a stunning summing-up, Goldman shows the clash between economics and history that has dogged Russia through the centuries from the revolution in 1917 to the present. Lost Opportunity is a sure-footed account of a slippery period.