The idea of stabilization of the economy was to stop the fall of GDP by means such as cutting pensions and student grants. The idea of Liberalization of prices, this involved increasing previously high prices for the Russians, but low prices to outside of Russia, because of the poor exchange rates, such as bread and vodka. This should increase revenue from exports out of Russia. The idea of privatisation was to reduce the amount of state owned activities and have more privately owned businesses.
Through out the next 5 years Russia continued to try and implement reform, the major ways included: Continuing price liberalisation, Privatisation and Stabilization for the shock therapy; Regionalisation; Marketisation; and implementing External Economic Relations. Although there was great hopes towards the reform of Russia unfortunately there have been many political impediments, which either hinder or slow down the process of reform. The main impediments of reform include: the size of the Russian economy; the state it has been left in; the time it is going to take to get Russia back on track; the great lack in confidence in and out of Russia; the great lack of foreign investment; the problem of existing foreign debt; and the problem of corruption which has been opened due to reform.
Russia is so large that it is hard to implement new policies and laws, as it takes time to do the implementation to all the states. Russia was left in such a bad state post-soviet. Russia was also left with a large foreign debt from the Soviet Union, it was predicted, "at the end of 1991, the debt was estimated at US$65 billion, an increase of over 100 percent since the end of 1986." This has made reform a hefty struggle to rebuild the economy and it is predicted that even after Russia gets back on track it will still have lost so much, such as lives lost through the poor standards of living, for example, in 1992 on quarter of the population were at levels below the poverty line, which is living on less than $16 month and the dramatic drop in life expectancy.
