"Hey Brad, I really would like an answer to the question. What was that socialist Roosevelt thinking when he allowed Stalin to take over all of Eastern Europe in 1945, rather than telling him to get the Red Army back behind the 1939 border or we would blow up Moscow? He condemned half a continent to half a century of Communist slavery. What was going on? Blindness? Amoral opportunism? Pure evil?"
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. ------------------------ Engagement in practical terms here seems to have entailed sending advisors like Jeffrey Sachs, whose name is practically a synonym for "incompetent hack" in Russia, and the incredibly cold-hearted creep Anders Aslund, who is famous for having said. "How cares about pensioners? They're not revolutionaries," who knew nothing about Russia -- and are pretty corrupt themselves, as witness the current lawsuit against Harvard University -- and pushed for such brilliant economic moves as flooding the country with imports at a time when domestic production was uncompetitive and pushing for a quick change to a market in a country in which half the population worked for the defense sector, which is completely dependent on government orders. It also entails illegally aiding Yeltsin when he stole the elections in 1996 because god knows we can't let the Russians themselves decide to elect those dastardly mildly nationalist, social-democratic populists in the KPRF, even though most people would as soon lynch Yeltsin as look at him. The IMF went through a whole series of cartwheels, promising funds so Yeltsin could say he was going to start paying pensions in order to increase his popularity -- funds which actually were never delivered, incidentally.
The US had a lot of influence during the Yeltsin years. Yeltsin's speeches on economic policy were written by Sachs. The Yeltsin-era elite practically lived off IMF money. In fact. the IMF basically financed the first Chechen War.
Blaming Yeltsin-era corruption on Soviet corruption is silly. Corruption during the Yeltsin period was 10 times what it was even under the late Brezhnev. Corruption was the result of complete chaos and the total lack of an effective legal system, and a financial collapse which forced civil servants to take bribes if they wanted to possess an income large enough to live on. I can imagine what the Enron people would have tried in a similar situation. Would they have behaved differently from Berezovsky? I highly doubt it. And, by the way, the big benefiters in the privatization process were not part of the nomenklatura, they were the entrepreneurs who started during the Yeltsin era. Berezovsky, for instance, sold used cars.
Fie.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal