Letters

National Interest, The, Fall, 2000

ANPERS ASLUND

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Janine Wedel's "transactorship" article provides an insightful--and, ultimately, profoundly disturbing--analysis....

The main alternative approaches to economic restructuring--"shock therapy" and gradualism--are familiar, and have been thoroughly aired over the past decade. But what has largely been ignored since then (at least until Wedel's book and articles) is the critical question of how, in the Russian case, the "shock therapy" prescribed by Sachs et al. was fashioned and implemented, and how this process might be directly linked to the policy's disastrous failure.

Wedel's exposition of the murky tangle of interests influencing the central players in this process, and the shadowy netherworld they seemed to create and operate within--a world in which the principals were neither public nor private, neither official nor unofficial, neither clearly representing the United States nor Russia, and who seemed to have a monopoly over money and access--provides a persuasive diagnosis of how and why this epic opportunity was mangled.

An accounting for this failure by the principals whom she identifies is long overdue. And, certainly, they should be afforded full opportunity to respond to her claims, as it is only through this kind of give and take that the truth can be ferreted out.

But the nature of the principals' response to Wedel's article, in the Summer 2000 issue--ad bominem attacks, coupled with lengthy denials of largely small facts--does little to rebut the case she makes. In fact, the vehement, narrow nature of their responses adds credibility to the broader validity of the "transactorship" thesis she propounds.

JAMES W. BROCK

Miami University of Ohio

As Janine Wedel points out, there is little doubt that an army of economists, academics, bureaucrats and opportunists--both American and Russian--took part in designing and implementing the disastrous U.S. policy toward Russia in the last decade. I witnessed this remarkable free-for-all first-hand, as a diplomat in the U.S. embassy in Moscow from 1993-95. For whom many of these people-- including Jeffrey Sachs and his one-time confederates--formally worked or where they convened is of little importance. What matters is that their relationships to each other and to official Washington and Moscow were close, the money involved immense, their accountability minimal and their loyalties blurred.

Through much of the last decade the Clinton administration played a central role in Russian domestic politics. It used its personal contacts with Russian leaders, financial assistance and political support to promote the interests of a particular segment of the Russian elite in the view that this was advancing "reform." In its arrogant insistence that what it was doing was right--no matter what the social costs--and its indifference to what was actually going on in the country, the U.S. administration's behavior strongly resembled that of the oligarchs it now so vilifies. In fact, as Wedel demonstrates, U.S. policies are partly to blame for the oligarchs' rise.