The aim was to guarantee a swift — and irreversible — transition to capitalism for the countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain. But rather than ushering in a new era of prosperity, the mass privatization policy advocated by Western-trained neoliberal economists helped bankrupt Russia and other former Soviet bloc countries. So say Cambridge and Harvard sociologists in a study claiming to be the first to trace a ‘direct link’ to the ‘economic failure and corruption that followed.’