PRINT INTERVIEWS AND MENTIONS (Selected)
The Boston Globe
January 15, 2002.
MEET THE MAN BEHIND THE MIND (Excerpt)
Alex Beam
"Janine Wedel, author of the expose "Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe" (how very unsurprising that this book is sold out in Harvard Square), notes that, while at the Treasury, Summers actively supported $40.4 million worth of no- bid government grants for Harvard's IID programs in Russia.
"Approving such a large sum of money as a noncompetitive amendment to a much smaller award was highly unusual," Wedel told me."
Full text of the article available in PDF format.
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The Boston Globe
May 25, 1997
Probe of Russian work shocks Harvard adviser (Excerpt)
David Filipov and David L. Marcus
"Harvard's connection with Chubais has detractors in the United States as well. Janine R. Wedel, a research professor at George Washington University, wrote in an article in the journal Demokratizatsiya, published in Washington, that the HIID project often relied on presidential decrees to advance its agenda while avoiding Russia's Communist-dominated parliament and the bureaucratic maze within ministries. In other words, a group committed to broadening democracy and the rule of law circumvented democratic institutions.
"The Communist concept of a planned economy was simply replaced with a capitalist one, in which the Western donor filled the gap left by the Communist Party," Wedel wrote.
Wedel and others suggested that the impact of American advisers associated with such an approach was bound to contribute to anti-American sentiment in Russia. A recent article in the popular Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, for example, alleged that Chubais had robbed Russia of millions of dollars, that Hay was a CIA agent, and that US advisers in general "were effectively collecting economic information about the situation in the Russian economy" that "ends up in the hands of American financial-industrial corporations."
Full text of the article available in PDF format.
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The Boston Globe
May 21, 1997
US halts Harvard contract in Russia (Excerpt)
David L. Marcus
"This is a big deal because Harvard has been put in charge of the much of the portfolio in support of market reform in Russia," said Janine R. Wedel, an associate professor at George Washington University, who is working on a book that examines Western aid to eastern Europe, Russia and Ukraine.
She recently authored an essay critical of the Harvard Institute for International Development in the academic journal "Demokratizatsiya," published in Washington. She wrote that the Harvard Project in Russia wields too much power and plays favorites with a "clique" of government officials and former officials from St. Petersburg.
One of those officials is Anatoly Chubais, who served as Boris N. Yeltsin's first deputy prime minister until he was fired last year. The Harvard Institute then hired him as an adviser, Wedel said. She says that Chubais, who is back in the Cabinet as first deputy prime minister, had used some of the groups funded through the Harvard project for his own political purposes."
Full text of the article available in PDF format.
