-------------------- That's the impression I got from reading it. Those silly Russians just will never get anything done without our wise, beneficent help, even though they have more scientists and engineers than any other country in the world and an educational system that makes Berkeley look like the Learning Annex. Let's also forget that everything we're advising them to do is in total contradiction to Russian culture. It's for their own good after all. Bleech.
The best way for the US to help Russians is get the hell out of the country and let them develop their own path. Western economic paradigms are just not applicable here.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal
^^^^^^^^^
It was not my issue area when I was in the Treasury--it was David Lipton's. It was a long time ago, on another side of the continent, and besides the historical possibilities that then seemed to fan out from the present are dead.
And I didn't keep the paper trail that I usually keep on my issue areas that allows me to distinguish between what I actually thought then, and what I wish now that I had thought then.
But my memory is that at Treasury senior staff meetings David Lipton would tend to make the following points, in descending order of importance and frequency:
(i) We need to engage. We need to work with the government that Russia has, trying to influence it in ways that will make its policies better for the Russian people. We do not have the luxury of being able to stand aside in our moral purity holding our noses, and waiting for a perfect Russian government to appear.
(ii) Massive corruption is the context and setting, not the product, for economic reform. Since the death of Stalin doing business "on the left" is the only thing that has kept the command economy from freezing up totally. It will be a matter of decades before corruption can be reduced significantly.
(iii) We have no clue how to keep the old command-economy system functioning, even if we wanted to, and nobody else has any clue either.
(iv) Therefore we need to advise the Russian government to do as much reform as it can as fast as it can,because there are good reasons to believe that a Russian system caught halfway between would be worse than either command or market.
(v) We are going to have to accept that the ex-nomenklatura are likely to wind up with enormous wealth. They can halt reform on the local and the national level at almost every step if their demands are not met. And so their demands for property and control are likely to be met. But, once again, we don't have the luxury of disengaging and waiting for a reform process that will produce the egalitarian distribution of wealth that we would like.
(vi) Things are likely to go badly. We have little influence. We have little monetary aid to give. Russia lacks most of the institutional arrangements that we simply assume exist in every country. If we want to look good in a decade, we should stand aside and make gloomy predictions. But not to try to give what help we can would be a betrayal of our obligations to the Russian people.