Review, Janine Wedel, Collision and Collusion (3)

Janine Wedel, Collision and Collusion, Palgrave Macmillan (2001).

Common acronyms: Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID); United States Agency for International Development (USAID; main distributor of US government aid); Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics (RFSFR, constituent of the USSR)—after 1992, the Russian Federation (RF);

(Part 1; part 2)

SUMMARY

One of the maddening things about this book is that Prof. Wedel seems to have no discernible philosophy.  On the one hand, she objects to the strategy, adopted by USAID, of attempting to bypass existing governments in favor of direct assistance to privatizing firms (praising European programs that did the opposite; see p.36); on the other, she objects to the US government being co-opted by specific politicians (the gist of Chapter 4).¹ On the one hand, she objects to capricious control over funding by bureaucrats in Washington (who did not give field representatives enough autonomy—pp.33-34); on the other hand, region organization of US aid rather than national programs gives program managers too much power to shift funding to politically pliant governments (endnote 74, p.35). On the one hand she objects to the politicization of economic policies, so that consultants took sides in political elections.² On the other hand, she attacks the arrogance and certitude of the (naturalized Russian-)American advisers.

Wedel mentioned³ that much of her research came from Anne Williamson, author of Contagion (unpublished).  Her testimony to Congress⁴ at once struck me as a version of Wedel's own account of events, but without the diffidence. While Wedel's account seems to hover between explicitly blaming USAID for Cold War 2, and backpedaling, Williamson minces no words (there are subtle differences: Wedel is a trained anthropologist, whereas Williamson discusses the Russians as if  they were a challenging breed of horse, bred centuries ago to require a firm guiding hand.). Williamson praises Larisa Pyasheva (or Piasheva), a staff adviser to Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov, as having concocted a plan for privatization that would have totally and suddenly resolved all the country's problems at once; and blames the US for total disaster by failing to seek her out and compel the Russian authorities to implement her plan.⁵ That, and her admiration for Wilhelm Röpke's presumed creation of postwar Germany, suggested that Russia was a totally blank slate on which a cohesive USA could write whatever it wanted—"us," with our global monopoly on agency and our unique potential to know the Truth (if only "we" really wanted to).

Anne Williamson may, or may not, be an avatar of Janine Wedel herself.  Wedel  is the well-nigh Quelle of allegations that the US government, deceived by Harvard, decisively and maliciously intervened to promote fake market liberals like Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar (instead of real ones like Grigory Yavlinksy or Larisa Pyasheva), thereby turning Russians against the ideals of democracy and free markets.  Even Matt Taibi and Mark Ames (in The Exile, 2000, p.237), distinguished journalists themselves, cite Prof. Wedel's work as evidence of this. Wedel's writing is extremely abstract, focused mainly on expenditures as conclusive evidence of agency; this agency is always decisive,and always misguided (actually, insidious).

Click for larger image Russian Constitutional Crisis,  October 1993

And while most journalists have subtly different narratives and focuses when writing about crises, Wedel's and Williamson's are the same.  In contrast, authors at The Exile (and its successor, Exiled where a lot of archives from The Exile are routinely printed) are generally hostile to capitalism and its ideological hold over the USA; Williamson's (and Wedel's) premise is that the authorities in the USA betrayed capitalism.  No one would think to publish Anne Williamson's views in The Nation; but Janine Wedel?  Perfect fit. 

Anyone with the slightest familiarity with the authors who wrote for Exiled, or friends like Matt Bivens (1997), knows these people are not remotely admirers of USAID.  But they're also not enthusiasts for the ideology of free markets embraced by Janine Wedel. For them, the problem was not that voucherization was adopted (whether under foreign pressure or not), it was that privatization was given top billing.  If I have understood them correctly, the real problem was that actual markets, let alone free markets, simply did not exist in Russia c.1991-1996; so "privatization" would necessarily mean plunder, not competitive management. And arguably radical market reforms really weren't what Russia needed, then or now.

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Review, Janine Wedel, Collision and Collusion (2)

Janine Wedel, Collision and Collusion, Palgrave Macmillan (2001).

Common acronyms: Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) United States Government (USG); Government of the Russian Federation (RFG) Russian Privatization Center (RPC); State Property Committee (GIK, in Russian)

(Part 1)

THE CHUBAIS CLAN

Anatoly Chubais

Here may be a good time to remind readers that I am not a specialist in Russia or its process of privatization. However, I was motivated to do some investigation into the chapter on Harvard's Institute for International Development (HIID), since this is such a momentous historical event. It implicates many of the top intellectuals of contemporary economics, including Anders Aslund, Andrei Shleifer, and Jeffrey Sachs; and the Harvard (Kennedy) School of Government. It stimulated a wave of mistrust of foreigners, and in particular, of the USA. At the same time, many of the winners in this scandal went on to become decisive actors in the political life of Russia.

So what really happened?


In Leningrad (later renamed St Petersburg), a reformist mayor named Anatoly Sobchak formed a group of supporters, deputies, and advisers that Janine Wedel calls the "Chubais Clan" after its key national-level principal, Anatoly Chubais.¹ A startlingly large number of major oligarchs and national officials in Russia would come from St. Peterburg and be linked to this clan; other authors have linked Vladimir Putin to the Chubais Clan, although he (naturally) denied any contacts with Anatoly Chubais personally.

The Chubais Clan, according to Wedel, was uniquely capable of influencing the Russian government, to the point that the Russian state was practically a projection of the Clan's intent (p.101; also, Wedel, "Clans, Cliques, and Captured States"—2001). For the record, it is true that Vice-President Al Gore had a close working relationship to PM Chernomyrdin and Deputy-PM Anatoly Chubais, and this has been used a reproach against the Clinton Administration generally; once again, US leadership allowed itself to become the best friends of a wildly unpopular head of state.

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