Thirty years ago, March 1994, E. Wayne Merry, a career Foreign Service officer, filed a dissent cable that remained firmly under wraps until last month, when the estimable National Security Archive at George Washington University published it on its website. Many are now comparing Merry’s cable to George F. Kennan’s Long Telegram in its scope and prescience. Merry tells me he finds such comparisons embarrassing—but they are, in my view, both unavoidable and well earned.
One big difference of course is that people in positions of influence listened (at first, anyway) to Kennan, but dismissed Merry—and with predictably disastrous results for the U.S.-Russia relationship. The Harvard-inspired economic policies that fell under the rubric of “shock therapy” (which sought to turn what had been a planned, socialist economy for the preceding 70 years into a free market system on Anglo-American lines overnight) contributed to the largest demographic and economic collapse of a modern industrialized country ever recorded in peacetime. Russian economists and scholars compared the economic and social consequences of the American-imposed austerity program on Russia to that which might have been expected from a “medium level nuclear attack.”
Merry, who served as chief political analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow 1990–1994, saw what so many within the Washington political establishment chose not to see, that the imposition of the set of foreign economic doctrines on Russia was destroying the lives of ordinary people—as well as transforming U.S.–Russia relations for the worse.
The story of Washington’s malfeasance toward Russia in the 1990s is not new. The Nobel winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted the folly of Washington’s meddling in the post-Soviet space in The Russia Question (1994); the Soviet dissident Andrei Sinyavsky castigated Russia’s Westernizers in The Russian Intelligentsia (1997); here at home, famed Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen railed against the incompetence of Clinton administration and the myopia of both the scholarly community and the media in Failed Crusade (2000).
Hellbound and Down 