On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, Strobe Talbott was quoted as saying:
> In short, we didn't "look on, smiling," while the oligarchs made out,
> literally, like bandits in the Great Fire Sale of Privatization
> (especially, as you say, in the loans-for-shares scheme of 1995-96, when
> they engaged in an orgy of government-sanctioned insider trading in
> exchange for their support for Yeltsin against Gennady Zyuganov, the
> Communist leader).
>
> That said, we'll never know whether Yeltsin would have won without
> loans-for-shares (that's a counterfactual as well). But I'm confident
> that it mattered a lot that he did win -- and that in the world of
> either/or choices, that one was crucial for Russia. And while we'll have
> to wait and see whether (as I'd predict) the oligarchs, as a phenomenon,
> will fade as Russia moves forward, the Communists are already a spent
> force.
That looks to me pretty much like an admission from the horse's mouth that the US administration decided to okay the loans for shares scheme because they thought that Yeltsin couldn't stay in power without it; and that keeping him power was crucial, in order to keep the communists out -- even if it destroyed the country economically. And that surveying the enormous destruction they sanctioned, they (or at least Talbot) still seems to think it was worth it.
If this is the best defense, then I can't see any reason then why loans for shares shouldn't be identified as "actually existing reform;" why no reform at all wouldn't have been preferable on Hippocratic principles; and why the US can't fairly be blamed for a Russia's economic destruction, since the policy was clearly intentional. They were out to kill communists of a sort that didn't exist anymore. And they were consciously willing to destroy Russia to do it.
Michael