Skip to content

Elusive Development

A blog about development challenges in the developing world

  • Home
  • About the author
The Capitalism of the Good: When the West Becomes a Victim of Its Own Virtue
  • Dmitry Pozhidaev
  • May 26, 2026May 27, 2026
  • No Comment

The Capitalism of the Good: When the West Becomes a Victim of Its Own Virtue

Among analytical resources covering contemporary Russia, Re:Russia occupies a distinctive and important place. At a time when much commentary on Russia oscillates between ideological certainty and

Read More

Militarised accumulation and the irrational rationality of the Iran war
  • Dmitry Pozhidaev
  • May 12, 2026
  • No Comment

Militarised accumulation and the irrational rationality of the Iran war

Mainstream explanations for the Iran war usually oscillate between two inadequate answers. One personalises the conflict: Donald Trump is impulsive; Benjamin Netanyahu is politically cornered; Iran

Read More

How (Not) to Read Adam Smith
  • Dmitry Pozhidaev
  • March 12, 2026

How (Not) to Read Adam Smith

Adam Smith is too important a thinker to be read through ready-made ideological templates. His work does not belong to any contemporary doctrine in a simple or direct sense, least of all to the kin

Read More

When Communism became illegal again
  • Dmitry Pozhidaev
  • February 8, 2026

When Communism became illegal again

Across parts of Eastern Europe, Communism is increasingly treated not as a political tradition to be debated but as an ideology to be restricted, equated with Nazism under the language of “extrem

Read More

“Emergency! Today.” Was the Soviet Economy Really Planned?
  • Dmitry Pozhidaev
  • January 20, 2026
  • 1 Comment

“Emergency! Today.” Was the Soviet Economy Really Planned?

Reading Brezhnev Through Mitrokhin’s Lens Introduction: Was It Really a Planned Economy? Winter holidays are supposed to be for rest. Naturally, many of us use them to do unpaid intellectual labo

Read More

Overvalued for Whom? The Ruble in a New Hierarchy of World Money
  • Dmitry Pozhidaev
  • December 19, 2025

Overvalued for Whom? The Ruble in a New Hierarchy of World Money

Here’s a piece in the Kyiv Independent trying to solve the riddle of the ruble’s strengthening in 2025. The ruble has strengthened despite what Konstantin Sonin calls the “classic macroeconom

Read More

Rethinking Lenin’s Economic Legacy: Beyond “Ones and Tooze”
  • Dmitry Pozhidaev
  • December 7, 2025December 11, 2025

Rethinking Lenin’s Economic Legacy: Beyond “Ones and Tooze”

FP’s podcast Ones and Tooze has recently launched a new mini-series to mark two key dates in twentieth-century history: the beginning and the end of the Soviet Union (December 1922 and December 1

Read More

Can Socialism innovate? Soviet lessons and the dependent resilience of global capitalism
  • Dmitry Pozhidaev
  • December 6, 2025
  • 1 Comment

Can Socialism innovate? Soviet lessons and the dependent resilience of global capitalism

Introduction It has become almost an article of faith among economists that a key reason for the demise of the Soviet economic system, and of “really existing socialism” more broadly, was its i

Read More

Russia’s 1917 October Revolution: A warning, an alternative, a challenge
  • Dmitry Pozhidaev
  • November 9, 2025
  • 1 Comment

Russia’s 1917 October Revolution: A warning, an alternative, a challenge

Each anniversary of Russia’s 1917 October Revolution (November 7 in the new style calendar) offers an opportunity to reflect on the global significance of that historic event. For some, it is a c

Read More

Would Marx Approve This Year’s Nobel?
  • Dmitry Pozhidaev
  • November 7, 2025

Would Marx Approve This Year’s Nobel?

Innovation won the Nobel this year. Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt were honored for a simple engine: invention plus incentives plus diffusion equals growth. Marx wouldn’t quarrel w

Read More

Posts pagination

1 2 3 … 9
Powered by WordPress