Second, a more technical premise was that priority had to be given to macro-economic policy, backed by aid conditionality to force the Russian (and Ukrainian) government to adhere to it, over and before micro-economic (structural) policy. First, it was reasoned that pro-market reforms had to be introduced quickly, so that there was no time for ‘socialist’ forces to regroup and block reform. So, what was the foreign-directed strategy? Although different proponents had variants, it enshrined a doctrine fostered by economists at Harvard, LSE and elsewhere known as ‘shock therapy’, designed with one objective, turning Russia and Ukraine into capitalist economies. One way of putting it is that it failed to lay the ghost of Stalinism, and created fertile ground for its resurgence. The precise details of what has been happening were not predicted or predictable, but it was clear at the time that the fault lines leading to today’s quagmire lay in that strategy. Today, I believe that the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is partly attributable to the neo-liberal strategy led by the USA in that period. I even met the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen of The Netherlands as they played walk-on parts in helping to legitimise the expensive regime change plans.įrom the outset, I strongly opposed what was happening, and gave numerous speeches and published articles and several books to that effect. I was then appointed director of a programme set up by the ILO to advise governments in the region on social and labour policies in what was euphemistically called the ‘transition’ from ‘communist’ to a ‘market’ economy.īased in Budapest, for about four years I interacted with senior government ministers and officials of Russia, Ukraine and neighbouring countries while also having numerous meetings with economists and officials from the USA, other countries and international bodies such as the World Bank, the latter all committed to their version of regime change. In 1990, on behalf of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), I organised an international conference on labour policy in Moscow, which emerged as a report just as the Soviet Union was dissolving. Let me preface this article by saying that, fortuitously, I witnessed what the USA, the UK and others did on the ground. This is because it embraced Russia and Ukraine thirty years ago. But the regime change initiative that deserves our scrutiny today was the United States’ most ambitious and most relevant to the latest demand for change, which one would dearly like to see. To put it mildly, they have not been unmitigated successes. US President Biden has called for ‘regime change’ in Russia, a statement that should recall previous US-led regime change crusades – in Chile (1973), Iraq and Afghanistan, among many.
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