The Wall Street Journal
April 5, 1998
By CHRISTIAN CARYL
(Mr. Caryl is the Moscow bureau chief for U.S. News & World Report.)
Russia is a titanic mess. How it managed to fall so far is a puzzle that
will occupy the pundits for decades to come. But the U.S. foreign-policy
establishment is already hotly debating one particularly thorny
question: Namely, how much of the mess was America's fault? It's a
question that seems particularly germane at a moment when Russia has
just received a new lease on life from the International Monetary Fund
-- under the peculiar circumstances of a NATO-led war against a country
that enjoys Russian support.
Official Washington, of late, has replied in no uncertain terms that "Russia was never ours to lose." If only it were that simple. Obviously Russians must bear the primary responsibility for their own mistakes
(or, to be precise, those of their leaders). Yet the fact of the matter
is that the West had plenty to win in Russia -- which was precisely why
we spent the better part of the past decade pouring billions of dollars
into the place while studiously overlooking some of its most obvious bad
habits. The stakes were high, and for good reason. A democratic,
peaceful and prosperous Russia would have been the crowning achievement
of a tortured century that began with yet another, albeit far less
promising, revolution.
Janine Wedel's admirable new book, "Collision and Collusion"
(St.Martin's Press, 286 pages, $27.95), is not only about Russia.
Strictly speaking, it is a study of Western aid programs to the
countries of the former Soviet bloc in the postcommunist era. As Ms.
Wedel shows, this was not a trivial effort. By her count the
industrialized countries committed $80 billion in various kinds of aid
to these countries. Much of that money consisted of so-called grant aid
(mainly technical-assistance projects designed to give Easterners
urgently needed know-how), and it is this piece of the pie that she
focuses on.
Her task is not an easy one. This was a gargantuan and in some ways
utopian undertaking, the biggest planned knowledge transfer in recorded
memory. It ranged from power-lunching suits from Harvard who supervised
the biggest privatization effort in history (in Russia) to earnest
tree-huggers who gave Hungarian friends advice on cleaning up the
environment (and, perhaps more important, on fund-raising and lobbying).
It was a process inescapably marked, as Ms. Wedel puts it, by successive
phases of "triumphalism," "disillusionment" and "adaptation" -- in other
words, by all-too-human alternations of euphoria, mutual exasperation
and sober acceptance of real-world limits.
Some of her discussion is a bit on the technical side, more about
procedures than principles, but Ms. Wedel, an anthropologist who
moonlights as a journalist, is good at conjuring up the sense of
adventure and psychological complexity that ensued as West and East got
to know each other up close. She carefully charts the misunderstandings
and cultural collisions as Western aid-givers tried to impose their own
terms of reference on societies they were usually poorly equipped to
understand. Much of this discussion, while illuminating, is aimed more
at policy wonks than at lay readers.
It is the fourth chapter of this book, about Russia, that should be
declared obligatory reading. Ms. Wedel shows how officials in the
Clinton administration, in the early 1990s, made the fateful decision to
channel aid to a key sector of Russia's economic reform program -- the
gigantic and ambitious program of privatization -- via a small coterie
of Kremlin civil servants around the "young reformer" Anatoly Chubais.
The reformers ultimately succeeded in transferring the lion's share of
the state-owned economy into private hands, but they did so using
methods that were overtly corrupt. (The auctions for some of the most
lucrative companies were won, at fire-sale prices, by the same banks
that ran the auctions, for example.)
On the U.S. side, the Clinton policy makers bypassed the usual public
bidding process in the name of "national security," awarding consulting
contracts to a select group of Harvard economists with contacts to the
Chubais circle. Ms. Wedel wonders whether "the strategy of focusing
largely on one group" furthered "the aid community's stated goal of
establishing the transparent, accountable institutions so critical to
the development of democracy and a stable economy."
In fact, rather than broadening ownership and creating a new middle
class, Chubais-style privatization boosted a tiny group of business
tycoons into positions of unparalleled dominance -- with all the
distorting effects that became so vividly obvious in the financial
collapse last August.
Ms. Wedel argues, convincingly, that the lack of accountability on both
sides ultimately compromised all those involved. Today, Mr. Chubais is
perhaps the most hated man in Russia -- and the favoritism shown him by
his Western backers has blackened their reputations among Russians,
perhaps irrevocably. Aid, it would seem, can hurt as well as help. It's
a lesson that readers of this excellent book would be well advised to
contemplate.
On the web at Johnson's Russia List, #3227, 6 April 1999.
Back to top |