International audienceRussia's economic transition, even before the 1998 financial crisis, has been the subject of many contradictory analyses between those who pushed for increased efforts to liberalise the national economy, and those who insisted on the importance of debt, the fragility of the banking system and the dangers of international speculation. The liberal optimists claimed the strategy of "shock therapy", the priority development of the private sector under IMF-supported policy, the structuralists insisted on the depth and duration of the recession, due to inappropriate public choices and institutional and behavioural inertia, and the protesters insisted on a development that was mindful of the specificity of the Soviet economy,...