Angelo Segrillo

Angelo de Oliveira Segrillo (born October 4, 1958) is a Brazilian historian specialized in Russia and in comparative studies of Russia, the West and Brazil. He holds a B.A. from Missouri State University, a master´s degree from the Pushkin Institute (Moscow, Russia) and a doctorate from Universidade Federal Fluminense (Brazil). He is an associate professor of history at the University of Sao Paulo.

Segrillo´s doctoral dissertation — published under the title O Declínio da URSS: um estudo das causas (“The Decline of the USSR: a study of its causes”) — was the first major Brazilian academic work using first-hand research into the formerly classified Soviet files. He analyzed the decline of the Soviet economy in its last decades not as a purely internal process, but as accompanying (and associated with) the changes in the world economy, which was moving from Fordist to Post-Fordist paradigms. The rigid, vertically oriented Soviet system had been competitive with the West in the decades when the (similarly rigid, vertically oriented) Fordism was paramount. However, when flexible post-Fordist paradigms (such as Toyotism) came along and set new rules for the game, the USSR started having problems of adaptation to these new requirements of flexibility. An abridged version of this argument can be seen in English in a short essay titled The Decline of the Soviet Union,[1]

Notable among other books written by Angelo Segrillo in Portuguese are Rússia e Brasil em Comparação (“Russia and Brazil in Comparison”, a comparative analysis of Russian and Brazilian political parties in the process of democratization since 1985) and Rússia: Europa ou Ásia (“Russia: Europe or Asia?”, about the debates between Westernizers, Slavophiles and Eurasianists and how these identity questions shape Russia´s foreign policy today between East and West).

Among his works in the English language, Professor Segrillo proposed a new index to measure political and economic democracy in his 2012 article, Liberalism, Marxism and Democratic Theory Revisited: Proposal of a Joint Index of Political and Economic Democracy.[2] He also presented the first complete translation into English of Peter the Great´s original Table of Ranks in a 2016 paper.[3] In 2020, three of the main books by A. Segrillo were translated into English: The Decline of the Soviet Union: An Analysis of the Causes,[4] Russia: Europe or Asia?, and Karl Marx’s “Capital” (Vols. 1, 2, 3) Abridged.