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

What is ironic is that the "free-market" strategy that has been followed excludes from the market precisely the arms-length investors that U.S. policy has claimed to attempt to attract as the mainspring in allocating Western capital funds.

David Ellerman, economic adviser to the chief economist, the World Bank:

... My only "problem" with Professor Wedel's article is that it attempts to tell the story in such detail that it will allow those who intellectually sponsored what is, in my personal opinion, one of the biggest debacles of the last half of the twentieth century to continue to avoid analyzing the forest by bickering over the details of the bark on the trees.

Steven Rosefielde, professor of economics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:

Janine Wedel's "Tainted Transactions" makes an important contribution to the "Who lost Russia?" saga by investigating the nexus between "radical" economic transition theory and Western foreign assistance....A few facts and comments might prove illuminating.

First and foremost, it needs to be stated bluntly that there is no scientific theory of how to transform a command economy efficiently into a well-functioning competitive market system. Theorists cannot even demonstrate the necessity of general equilibrium with a production sector under perfect competition, so there certainly isn't a shred of justification for suggesting that Yegor Gaidar's and Anatoly Chubais' radical reforms should have produced good results. The policies they adopted, often called "shock therapy", were analogous to removing the control rods from a nuclear reactor, and insisting that the ensuing chain reaction would create a better power system.

The Soviet/Russian basis for this strategy dates to the late eighties when Stanislav Shatalin, Gregory Yavlinsky and others developed their infamous 500 Days program, which promised perekhod--transition to competitive free enterprise by the end of 1993. They weren't sincere. Shatalin disclosed his real agenda at Duke University in 1991 when he declared that, "It didn't matter if the transition took 500 days, or 500 hundred years, as long as it destroyed Communism!" The debate between the "shockers" and the "gradualists" was never really about economic "optimality"; it was a rhetorical struggle between a generation of young Turks egged on by Gorbachev, who saw radicalism as a highway to political power, and the old reformist economic guard like academicians Oleg Bogomolov and Yuri Yaremenko, who--like Western Nobel laureates Kenneth Arrow; Paul Samuelson and James Buchanan--understood the necessity of building legal and market structures before leaping into the abyss. The failed putsch in August 1991, and Gor bachev's refusal to allow the military to arrest and execute Yeltsin later that fall when Russia, Belarus and Ukraine seceded from the Soviet Union, enabled the radicals to triumph, as their predecessors had during War Communism and the Stalin era. Their Luddite politics not only instantaneously brought about an economic implosion that has caused 5.4 million premature adult deaths through 1997, but opened the Pandora's box of vicious criminality, just as anyone conversant with the history of Gulag and Soviet mafias would have predicted.