As the Soviet Union fell, Russia embraced capitalism. But Russia's definition of a "free market" doesn't exactly align with other parts of the globe.

Was the Soviet Union a capitalist country?

Many scholars agree that the economy of the Soviet Union and of the Eastern Bloc countries modeled after it, including Maoist China, were state capitalist systems, and some western commentators believe that the current economies of China and Singapore also constitutes a form of state capitalism.

Was the Russian Empire capitalist?

The economy of the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century was a complicated hybrid of traditional peasant agriculture and modern industry. But small islands of modern industrial capitalism, brought into being by state policy, coexisted with the primitive rural economy. ...