Harvard economist Jeffery Sachs, whose ideas for quickly transforming communist economies to market-based systems were dubbed “shock therapy,” saw his name become synonymous with pain. Though he’d overseen successful reforms in a similar sitution in Poland, fellow Harvard acolytes Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais had a lot less luck when appointed economic czars in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. Russians early on associated “shock therapy” with inflation and the removal of public safety nets they’d grown used to in Soviet times (though residents were awarded their apartments as property, and kept a few other important subsides like cheap home energy). I wish I’d taken a picture, but I remember seeing graffiti on an apartment building when visiting the arctic mining town of Vorkuta during the 1998 crisis. It read, ФОК ТЕРАПИЯ: “Fuck Therapy.”
Several weeks ago I heard from fellow Substacker and former Intercept writer Ryan Grim, to whom Sachs had sent a note and an essay. With the professor’s permission he was kind enough to let me read it. I was shocked. The gist of the Sachs essay was not that U.S. economic policies toward Russia were misguided or poorly executed, or even that he’s been misunderstood. Rather he described an American strategy in which economics were subservient at all times — and crucially, from the start — to a security mission. Led by military and security agencies that believed “the cold war never ended,” the U.S. viewed subjugation of Russia and NATO expansion as primary goals from the very beginning. In hindsight, this makes a lot more sense than the conventional wisdom, which is that Bill Clinton, Strobe Talbott and Dick Cheney tried to be friends with Russia, and just made a dog’s breakfast of it.
After Yeltsin was in office in what was now democratic Russia, Sachs thought for sure authorties would change their minds. No go. Here, he describes meeting with former George H.W. Bush Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger after proposing his “Marshall Plan” on TV
Ordinary Russians certainly believed Americans wanted to be their friends. I know this because they wanted to be my friend, throughout the “messy transition” period when people like Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin made exaggerated displays of bro-ship. However, I recall Russian attitudes turning after the bombing of Kosovo in 1999, and especially as NATO began expanding toward Moscow. Most Americans have not heard the story that in negotiations for the dissolution of the Soviet empire, James Baker III promised Eduard Shevardnadze NATO would not “leapfrog” East Germany toward Russia. CIA whistleblower Melvin Goodman confirmed that story to me years ago, and I remember it meant a lot to Russians.
In the telling of Sachs, NATO expansion all the way to Ukraine was a goal from the start. Why not bring in Russia as an imperfect, but more stable and democratic partner? Because “the men in the suits,” as Sachs described the natsec officials behind the White House, never wanted any part of a Russia that retained significant military power, or its own sphere of influence. “They sought and until today seek a unipolar world led by a hegemonic US, in which Russia and other nations will be subservient,” Sachs writes.