Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 08:39:10 -0700
From: mckeever <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Demodernizing of Russia
>From the following list for personal use only
Johnson's Russia List
#2316
20 August 1998
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
#3
The Nation
September 1, 1998
Why Call It Reform?
By Stephen F. Cohen
Stephen F. Cohen is a professor of Russian studies and history at New
York University. His most recent book, Rethinking Russia, will be
published next year by Oxford.
As Russia’s economic collapse spirals out of control, rarely if ever has
American discourse about that country been so uncaringly and dangerously
in conflict with reality. With its endless ideological mantra of a
purported “transition from Communism to free-market capitalism,” almost
all US government, media and academic commentary on Russia’s current
troubles is premised on two profoundly wrong assumptions: that the
problem is essentially a “financial crisis” and that the remedy is
faster and more resolute application of the “reform” policies pursued by
President Boris Yeltsin since 1991.
Treating Russia’s agony as a case of the “Asian flu”—as merely a matter
of bolstering a faltering stock market, banking system and currency with
more budgetary austerity and tax collection, ruble devaluation and
Western financial bailouts—is like rearranging deck chairs on the
Titanic. Russia’s underlying problem is an unprecedented,
all-encompassing economic catastrophe—a peacetime economy that has been
in a process of relentless destruction for nearly seven years. GDP has
fallen by at least 50 percent and according to one report by as much as
83 percent, capital investment by 90 percent and, equally telling, meat
and dairy livestock herds by 75 percent. Except for energy, the country
now produces very little; most consumer goods, especially in large
cities, are imported.
So great is Russia’s economic and thus social catastrophe that we must
now speak of another unprecedented development: the literal
demodernization of a twentieth-century country. When the infrastructures
of production, technology, science, transportation, heating and sewage
disposal disintegrate; when tens of millions of people do not receive
earned salaries, some 75 percent of society lives below or barely above
the subsistence level and at least 15 million of them are actually
starving; when male life expectancy has plunged to 57 years,
malnutrition has become the norm among schoolchildren, once-eradicated
diseases are again becoming epidemics and basic welfare provisions are
disappearing; when even highly educated professionals must grow their
own food in order to survive and well over half the nation’s economic
transactions are barter—all this, and more, is indisputable evidence of
a tragic “transition” backward to a premodern era.
Even if economic growth were miraculously to resume tomorrow, Russia
would need decades to regain what it has lost in the nineties, and
nothing can retrieve the millions of lives already cut short by the
“transition.” Indeed, as a careful statistical study by Professor
Stephen Shenfield of Brown University shows, an even greater and
possibly inescapable economic and social disaster is rapidly
approaching.
Why call this “reform,” as does virtually every US commentator?
Certainly, very few Russians any longer do, except to curse Yeltsin and
his policies, especially those long and zealously promoted by the
Clinton Administration. Russian economists and politicians across the
spectrum are now desperately trying to formulate alternative economic
policies that might save their nation—ones more akin to Franklin
Roosevelt’s New Deal than to the “neoliberal” monetarist orthodoxies of
the State and Treasury departments, the IMF, World Bank and legions of
Western advisers, which have done so much to abet Russia’s calamity.
But when President Clinton goes to Moscow in early September, he will no
doubt tell Yeltsin publicly, as he often has done in the past and Vice
President Gore did when he visited in July, “Stay the course!” For many
Russians, it will mean that America welcomes what has happened to their
country and does not care about their ruined lives.
