Yep, my father’s family was from Russia and I’ve thought about visiting but it just never seemed be without obstacles that I never felt motivated to overcome. Things like the war with Ukraine just re-emphasizes why my ancestors were glad they were no longer there, even if they did not leave willingly.
I’m going to take issue with this. In terms of offering Russia an alternative to its 1000-year history of despotism, it seems to me that the West has actually done everything it could possibly do. Russia in 1992 was not a defeated power upon which we could impose our will. Insofar as Russia today is not a liberal democracy living in peace with its neighbors, that is really on the Kremlin, not on the West.
What the West has managed to do – well beyond what anyone dared to imagine in the 1980s – is to project its influence, in a constructive way, into Eastern Europe and several of the former Soviet republics. Western policy toward what was once the Soviet sphere of influence has, overall, been a stunning success. Eastern Europe’s relative peace and prosperity today should not be taken for granted.
Probably should get its own thread? I’d be interested in pursuing our alternatives to what we actually did (seems like we didn’t assess it correctly at the least) but it may be a hijack to discuss this topic here.
I think this is an important long term factor. Eastern European nations becoming wealthier and more democratic has caused resentment among Russians to date but eventually even they will grow weary of being the sick man of Europe.
The former Soviet Bloc may never become liberal in the way western European countries are (heck, neither are we) but they can be liberal democracies.
Political instability for a nuclear state is problematic no matter how you cut it. What happens to all those nukes while chaos or even civil war reigns? Russians were able to pull it off last time, but that’s no guarantee for future success.
The way I see this happening is that Ukraine agrees to officially cede Crimea in exchange for NATO membership and a generous rebuilding/military aid package.
Yeltin’s “shock therapy” experiment with capitalism was encouraged by the IMF and advisors from the Bush administration. The failure of this was arguably one of the most painful individual moments for Russian citizens in their recent political history. It did two things: it helped create the oligarchs; and it caused a distrust of western democratic values amongst the people. The West could have helped Russia to transition to democracy with much more care. If they had I think the problems we see now would not exist. Putin is not the West’s fault, but we could have done much better.
I don’t believe that this is a fair representation.
I recall back during the Greek debt crisis that the Greeks were complaining about Germany telling them to implement austerity measures. Except…they weren’t, they were (primarily) telling them to enforce tax collection:
http://www.oecd.org/competition/greece-competition-review-2013.htm
It’s not just important what the recommendation is, it’s also important what the actual person hears, what they do, and how well they do it. If I tell someone to earn more money and they interpret that as “Go rob a bank.” It’s not reasonable to point to their imprisonment and say, “Well, clearly, you gave them bad advise.”
The advise given to Yeltsin followed examples and analysis based on Chile, Bolivia, and West Germany after the war. Poland followed an alternate strategy of therapy and seems to be called a “success”, and Belarus skipped shock therapy altogether
If you compare some metrics on Poland, Belarus, and Russia:
Crime rate by year - Poland Belarus Russia
GDP per capita by year - Poland Belarus Russia
There’s really not much of a difference even though Poland is held up as a successful reform, Belarus tried to go the slow road, and Russia “failed”. They all had their crime rate double and then stay that way for some time. Probably, the real takeaway is that there is no good way out of Communism that we have yet discovered. There’s a limit to what you can do economically when you need a massive cultural shift. Probably the only way to do it successfully would be with a top-down occupational government like Japan post-WWII, that can preserve the peace and get outsiders, with a history of working in a modern economy, placed in a large enough number of positions to influence the process in the right direction and kick start everything.
Just from the name, I think it can be taken as assumed that “shock therapy” isn’t expected to be an entirely pleasant process. I think the hope would be that you move through it fast enough that it doesn’t have any long term effects.
Russia, prior to the Ukraine war, was doing pretty well economically. There was a large income gap but the average quality of life for the majority was fairly middle-class by our standards. So in terms of moving things onto a better path, quickly, it does seem to have been a success. There was a 5-10 year period of suckiness, during the shock years, and then it all straightened out and largely went the right way.
Note: The Macrotrends data for crime Poland didn’t include 1989 data and so doesn’t show the initial jump. It also skipped from 2000 to 2008, without intervening years. Thus, I am using a different source even though this could mean that the methodology was different. For purposes of detecting trends, rather than doing numeric comparisons, I feel like that’s okay.
Can’t argue with this.
But the Russians knew very little about capitalism.
If someone had never dropped a drop of alcohol you’d advise them to try a light beer or have a sip of wine first. The west cheered them on as they reached for the vodka.
Yea, but the U.S. doesn’t know anything except capitalism; they couldn’t have given Russia different advice even if they had wanted too. The Russians should have listened to someone else, like the Scandinavians.
If you’re looking for a swimming instructor, don’t ask a fish, even if the fish is encouraging you to swim.
If I am to believe my ex-wife and my daughter (who live in Moscow), the average citizen is feeling the effects of the sanctions. And that is in Moscow, theoretically the best and richest city in the country.
I can imagine that the sanctions are biting at all levels, especially when it comes to the technology needed to manufacture high-tech weaponry.
The fact that Russia is buying ammunition and weaponry from Iran and (of all places) North Korea tells me that their armaments industry is in really bad shape right now.
Sanctions are not all about how much money you have available for spending.