I have read your message with a heavy heart, and I really sympathize with the Russian people in their sufferings. The advisors of IMF should, I thik, offer an apology to the Russian people as they know nothing about the theory of economics.
I am ready to tell the Russian people how to eliminate the economic crisis in Russia, though those arrogant IMF advisors were not willing to teach the Russian people about every thing. In my opinion, the only way to solve this crisis is to allow the badly-managed and salary-defaulting companies to go bankrupt and let their workers be out of job, to issue relief funds to the unemployed, and to encourage and help them to seek for new jobs.
At the beginning of this century, numberless crises once took place in the USA and West-European countries. Their governments are achieved great successes on solving their crises every time they make for use of the above-mentioned solutions. And they have kept utilizing this solutions up till now. It is because they have been doing so to eliminate economic crises, their economy is universally acknowledged as the strongest in the world.
The Russian government should make it clear to its people that this is the only way to eliminate their crisis. I hope from the bottom of my heart that the Russian people will follow these advice of mine and put it into practice as soon as possible.
Sincerely, Ju-chang He
SHENZHEN, P.R. CHINA Welcome to visit My Home Page at <http://www.geocities.com/WallStreet/Exchange/3058/> or <http://www.geocities.com/~juchang/>
Ariel Reinheimer wrote:
>
> America, Please Leave Us Alone To Solve Our Problems
>
> by Boris Kagarlitsky, Senior Research Fellow
> at the Institute for Comparative Political
> Studies
> of the Russian Academy of Sciences
>
> [Boris Kagarlitsky's response to Fred Hiatt's "Who Lost
> Russia?" in
> the Washington Post, which the Post declined to
> run.]
>
>
>
> I read Fred Hiatt_s "Who Lost Russia?" [Washington Post, September
> 20, 1998] with dismay.
> Though Mr. Hiatt agrees that the policies of IMF and G7 in Russia
> failed, he says that "to
> acknowledge the failure is not quite the same as saying the policy
> was wrong." One wonders how
> policies are to be judged, if not by their effects.
>
> According to Mr. Hiatt, Russia before the "reforms" had an advanced
> space and nuclear sector, but
> almost everything else was Third World; most of its factories
> produced goods worth less than the
> raw materials that went into them; many cities were built in remote
> and frozen areas where they
> were guaranteed to be forever wards of the state.
>
> Does he really think that Russia was a Third World country? Soviet
> industry was certainly inefficient
> and badly needed technological modernization. However, with all the
> problems it had Russia
> managed to export the products of its manufacturing. Only after the
> "reformers" came to power did
> Russia become totally dependent on the export of raw materials. Not
> only industrial exports declined
> but enterprise performance and ability to compete internationally
> or on the domestic market
> declined after privatization. The Russian economy became
> technologically even more backward
> and the scientific community is in chaos. The Russian companies
> which are still able to export
> anything now are those which were not privatized.
>
> Mr. Hiatt doesn't know or pretends not to know that the Russian
> population before 1991 had a very
> high level of education. That was our main asset and our chance to
> grow, assimilating modern
> technologies. It is Russia that is now "exporting" its specialists
> to the US, not the other way round.
> The people we "imported" from America were exactly those arrogant
> IMF advisors who new nothing
> about Russia and, as it turned out, knew very little about the real
> workings of financial markets, but
> who were willing to teach the Russian "barbarians" about
> everything.
>
> The educational level of Russian population is now lower than 10
> years ago, and our chances to
> rebuild the country are also lower. Living standards of the
> majority of people collapsed, life
> expectancy declined, infant mortality increased. We blame Stalin
> for killing people in the camps.
> What about people starving to death in a "liberalized" economy?
> What about hundreds of thousands
> of people who died because in the process of "reform" the health
> system collapsed? The
> communists at least acknowledged their crimes under Khruschev and
> Gorbachev. The IMF has
> never acknowledged the destruction they caused and probably never
> will.
>
> Now look at the countries where IMF advisors were not allowed to
> dictate policies. One of them is
> China, another is Belarus. China has had one of the largest growth
> rates in world history over the
> last 20 years. Belarus had 10% growth in 1997 (for Russia 1997 was
> its best year since 1989 with
> 0% growth). Industry in Belarus had been much the same as we had in
> Russia, but Belarus had no
> oil or gas to get easy money from abroad. Belarus didn't privatize
> their industry but restructured it
> and modernized it. Now they are exporting to the same markets to
> which the USSR had previously
> exported its industrial products. Russia lost these markets.
> Belarus is exporting to Russia and
> competing successfully with Western products.
>
> Of course Belarus is a police state and not a democracy. But there
> is one problem: its political
> system is identical with that of Russia! The only difference is
> that their police and bureaucracy are
> less corrupt. Have you ever heard of "Belarusian mafia"?
>
> Those who blame Russian corruption for the failure of the "reforms"
> fail to acknowledge that it was
> during the process of rapid privatization when corruption started
> to flourish. The Soviet system had
> a lot of corruption as well but this was multiplied by the
> "liberalization".
>
> The real story of what happened to Russia is very simple. There
> were tremendous problems and the
> Soviet system was in crisis. But the "reforms" did not address the
> real problems. They actually
> made things worse. And that is natural because so called reformers
> and their Western friends never
> intended to rebuild the country or to improve the performance of
> industry. Nor were they interested in
> democracy. What they wanted was just to use the crisis of the
> Soviet system as an opportunity to
> loot the country. In that sense the "reforms" were a total success.
> Not only did "New Russians" loot
> their own country; American companies did so as well. So don't be
> surprised that after 10 years of
> such "friendship" more and more Russians are becoming anti-American
> (which was never the case
> in the years of the "Cold War").
>
> Please, leave us alone and let us resolve our problems ourselves.
> And stop supporting the
> gangsters. Then, sooner or later we will get out of this mess and
> rebuild our country.
>
>
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