kingsassassin Fri 27-Sep-19 19:25:55
It's probably worth flagging up that when classic Dom was in Russia, it was full Yeltsin
YYY to this. I think this is incredibly important because of what it portends for the UK.
Interesting to note that Ireland's own Declan Ganley (currently a big defence contractor in the US but former sponsor of the Irish No vote to the Lisbon Treaty) also cut his teeth in business in Russia during the Yeltsin years.
Some very interesting perspectives on what happened in Russia during the Yeltsin years here:
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/yeltsin/policy/policy.html
I find this comment very convincing -
It became apparent, at least to me, fairly early onand, you know, this is by simply following the Russian principle, that many Russians were reporting, that what was supposed to be going on, which was an empowerment of the average person, bringing him into a market system, making him a stakeholder, et ceterawas not going on at all, but [that] there was really kind of a large-scale heist going on of the former Soviet economy. And a lot of people were talking about that, fairly early on in the process here, but there was sort of cognitive dissonance about it in the West
What I remember of coverage of this period in American media was breathless reports of the lines of people waiting to get into the Moscow McDonalds, and nauseating backslapping in the American media about democracy, as if the two were in some way linked.
The narrative that business interests and the interests of democracy have self explanatory and indissoluble links is one that accounts for the most of the deeply embedded problems of the US, including the appeal of Donald Trump. It's one that has also found fertile ground in the UK. It's important to ask who and what benefits most from this narrative, and who and what loses.
Along with the glib lie there was lots of head-shaking about older Russians selling their war medals to tourists too, and no attempt to conceal the gloating.
I disagree with Albats - the reason Russia didn't descend into civil war was the strength and deep conservatism of the institutions of the Russian Communist system (yes, the armed forces and KGB among them) along with the massive distaste of the Russian people for mayhem and preference for order and stability (aka deeply held conservative instincts) born of bloody and bitter experience. Revolution and civil war and the destruction of what we know as 'society' are not the fun and profitable sport for the masses that they are for the Tories and Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ilk.
The American prism fails - refuses, actually, for many important reasons - to frame what happens outside of America (and especially what happens inside America) from any pov that is not in accord with the Fourth Grade level of historical analysis that can be summed up as 'the march of democracy/ funny how it all works out in the end and we are all better people for getting past what we put other people through'. This simplistic analytical approach fails to address the multitudes of institutional issues in the US and completely misrepresents almost everything that happens abroad. It's the opium of the people.
So instead of appreciation for and careful analysis of the fact that the collapse of the USSR (and with it the imperial and communist dream, the loss of global prestige and power and the wholesale economic collapse along with the collapse of public morals) did not result in total political disintegration and the creation of a dangerous political vacuum, you get this pious word porridge:
In other words, Russia has had an authoritarian system of governance for centuries. It had the experience with Soviet style communism for seven decades prior to this. It makes it very difficult for the kinds of things one would hope to see happen.
I agree with Janine Wedel:
However, what was, I think, not understandable and not excusable was the sheer arrogance and the hubris with which many of these advisors entered the scene and said we have the answers. We know what to do. And they came with their cliches and tried to sell people on both sides of the Atlantic on these cliches and on the idea that they had the answers.
E. Wayne Merry comes right up to the truth and then fails to see it:
American policy has always declared that what we wanted to see in Russia and in the other countries of the Soviet Union was the growth of democracy, civil society, rule of law, and, the growth of a market economy, free enterprise, capitalism. There's always been a problem in understanding that those two things don't necessarily go hand in hand. In some cases you may have to choose one or the other.
And I think what did happen is that by force of circumstance, the U.S. government was forced to choose. And we chose the economic over the political. We chose the freeing of prices, privatization of industry, and the creation of a really unfettered, unregulated capitalism, and essentially hoped that rule of law, civil society, and representative democracy would develop somehow automatically as a result of that.
I disagree with 'force of circumstance'.
It was greed on the part of American big business that inspired the approach.
I mean, part of this was an ideological view - very prevalent in Washington, in both the Bush and Clinton administrations - that capitalism brings democracy as an inevitable consequence. And this is really an ideological belief, not a tested demonstrable theory applicable to a place like post-Soviet Russia.
Two words - 'Raw' and 'Materials'.
...
Q "And you've said that we push policies that essentially said 'greed is good?"
This is an important insight though:
I think our attitude was that what Russia really needed in its culture was the idea of greed. That the Soviet Communist egalitarian leveling approach had been so deadening to enterprise, so deadening to individual initiative that there was a view that a little greed would be a very healthy thing in Russia.
I think what many of these people did not understand was that greed had been part and parcel of the Soviet Communist system. It had simply operated under-the-counter. Nobody got along according to the rules in the Soviet Union, and that in fact the basis for a very large-scale organized crime existed well back in the Soviet period and began to flourish enormously during perestroika, and once all the controls were off within the end of the Soviet Union, these criminal gangs and many of their new associates in business suits had the ability to rob what is still an enormously rich country and make fantastic sums of money.
I don't think that in post-Soviet Russia the real problem was a lack of greed. The problem was a lack of genuine law, because in the Soviet period, what passed for law, what passed for legality, what passed for law enforcement, were so discredited in the minds of the Russian people - and quite legitimately discredited - that what was really needed in the post-Soviet Russia was a new culture of law, a new culture of civic society, not a culture of greed
And the lack of a robust culture of law suited US business interests very well.
Q "What if anything did our policies have to do with creating the oligarchs?"
I think our policies had a great deal to do with creating the oligarchs. I know there has been more recent tendency by the spokesmen from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and from the U.S. Treasury to claim that this was really all things Russia did to itself. But in the early post-Soviet era, Washington - both through the IMF and U.S. Treasury - played an enormous role in determining what kinds of economic policies would be created, what kind of winners and losers there would be.
Some of the people who later came to be called the oligarchs were among the most favored private businessmen in terms of doing all kinds of contractual relationships and in having the kind of political access that made it possible for them to create these enormous financial institutions and engage in all kinds of nefarious economic and political activities. The idea that we in the West, we Americans, or the international financial institutions, or some of the big European financial institutions, have clean hands in this matter, I think is simply wrong.
Lilia Shevtsova:
I think the West surrendered its own identity and in effect gave up the rules of its own game when it worked with Russia. For some reason, when it worked in Poland and Hungary, the West supported parliaments, referendums, and all the democratic institutions. But in Russia, they accepted a czar. The reforms could be carried out in a very demanding way, with the help of the oligarchs. It's what I call a political double standard. Essentially, the entire policy of the West was based on a lack of belief that the Russian people would understand and accept liberal democracy as its own. That's why it decided to hit it over the head, to put a czar above the people, and to work through a very small group of technocrats
Shevtsova forgets that the difference between Russia and Hungary/Poland was the fact that Russia has massive wealth in raw materials that western business wanted to get its hands on and needed friendly natives to help achieve that.
I agree with the gist of Donald Jensen's and Thomas Graham's comments.
This period of Russian and American history is incredibly important and needs to be studied as a signpost for what is to come in the UK and also in Europe if the EU is weakened.