Tainted Transactions: An Exchange

National Interest, The, Summer, 2000 by Jeffrey D. Sachs, Anders Aslund, Marek Dabrowski, Peter Reddaway, Igor Aristov, Wayne Merry, Michael Hudson, David Ellerman, Steven Rosefielde

Wedel claims: "[dot{A}]slund was also involved in business activities in Russia and Ukraine", and in her Demokratizatsiya article: "He had 'significant' business investments in Russia." The truth is that while advising any government, I have never been involved in business activities or invested in that country; though I have given lectures and briefings on the state of their economies.

She complains that two of my associates, who worked for Chubais, set up an investment bank after having finished their work for Chubais. So what? High U.S. Treasury officials often come from and go to investment banks.

In her Demokratizatsiya article, Wedel claimed: "[dot{A}]slund helped to deliver Swedish government monies to the [Russian Privatization Center]." I would have been happy to do so, but I did not. Wedel writes that I attended a dacha in Arkhangelskoe when the Gaidar team prepared its government program there, but I have never visited that dacha. Nor is it true that my assignment in Ukraine "explicitly included public relations on behalf of that country."

In public appearances, Wedel has asserted that I have made a huge amount of money on USAID, but USAID has never financed any advisory work of mine. Nor have I worked for HIID, which she also has alleged. My work in Russia was financed by the Swedish government and the Ford Foundation through the Stockholm Institute of East European Economics.

This is a long list of allegations that I know to be wrong because they involve me personally. There is no reason to believe that she is more truthful about anything else, as Wedel's text abounds with inaccuracies. Aleksander Bevz has never headed the Gaidar Institute. Maxim Boycko replaced Alfred Kokh as chairman of the State Property Committee, not the other way around, as Wedel reports. Jeffrey Sachs and David Lipton were rarely in Moscow together, and so on.

Many of these facts can be easily checked. Most of Wedel's claims have been made three or four times in almost identical wording, as she is in the habit of republishing the same article many times, so it is not a matter of typographical errors.

In short, Wedel's main shortcoming is that she lacks the faculty to distinguish truth.

I found Janine Wedel's article deeply wrong in its description and interpretation of East European and Russian transition processes, and of the role of foreign aid to this region.

Marek Dabrowski, former first deputy minister of finance of Poland, currently vice chairman of the Center for Social and Economic Research, Warsaw:

My impression is that the author intentionally and consciously manipulates facts and sources of information in order to support her conspiracy theory and address far-fetched and certainly unfair personal insinuations against key Russian reformers such as Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais, and leading Western experts trying to help Eastern Europe and Russia such as Jeffrey Sachs, David Lipton and Anders Aslund. Her style of writing and methods of work remind me of the worst instances of Communist Party propaganda, which I had occasion to experience not so long ago as an East European national.