It is now common knowledge that Russia’s Vladimir Putin was personally behind efforts to intervene in the 2016 American presidential election. We also know that President-elect Donald Trump was Putin’s candidate of choice. What we don’t always talk about, however, are the American actions that led directly to the ascendancy of Putin in Russia. Were it not for decisions made by leaders in the United States directly after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia might today be a liberal democracy, free of Putin’s leadership. Putin, in turn, would not have been a position to tip the 2016 U.S. so that Donald Trump was able to eke out the measly ca. 100,000 votes that allowed him to carry the three crucial rust-belt states that gave him the electoral college.
The trajectory of influence from the United States to Russia is laid out in Naomi Klein’s brilliant book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Holt and Holt, 2007, p. 218-262). In a book jacket blurb the great John Berger concisely defined the shock doctrine as “the use of public disorientation following massive collective shocks — wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters — to push through highly unpopular economic shock therapy.” The shock therapy he alludes to consists of extreme free market measures of the sort advocated by Milton Friedman and the members of his Chicago School of economists. Klein explains how it works by comparing it to torture, “a set of techniques designed to put prisoners into a state of deep disorientation and shock in order to force them to make concessions against their will” (p. 16).
The route from Milton Friedman and the United States Government to Russia
Klein posits that the fall of the Soviet Union was the initial shock that paved the way for free market ideologues to claim Russia as their next laboratory, after previously having their way in places like Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. She points out that Mikhail Gorbachev intended to lead Russia in the direction of the Scandinavian socialist democracies and he had every expectation that he would receive the aid from the G7 nations that would have been requisite to achieve this goal. However, the IMF and the G7 — in both of which venues, the U.S., then represented by the administration of George H. W. Bush, played an outsize role — made that aid contingent on Russia’s adoption of radical shock therapy measures such as those that we have most recently seen imposed with tragic consequences in Greece.
When Russians — and crucially Gorbachev — proved resistant to the authoritarian imposition of shock economic measures along with the “strong-man” rule many U.S. and Western European rightwingers advocated in order to more efficiently implement radical changes, U.S. support shifted to Boris Yeltsin who had signaled his willingness to go all the way with the free marketeers. His supporters in the U.S. government went so far as to fund a team of what Klein calls “transition experts,” many of them representatives of Friedman’s Chicago School, who helped with privatization, establishment of a stock exchange and a Russian mutual-fund market.
The financial aid essential to making the transition, and which had been dangled before Yeltsin in order to get his cooperation, was however, withheld. The U.S. actors supporting Yeltsin preferred to take the free market economic experiment one step further, and subject the Russian economy to the rigours of a pure, unassisted free market without the initial aide that had been granted to countries like Chile in order to smooth the transition from one economic model to another.
Not surprisingly, living conditions in Russia became exceptionally dire, and when the Russian parliament, responding to growing unrest, stood against Yeltsin, the West’s handpicked strong-man brutally put them down in what can only described as an anti-democratic coup. Ironically, he had acquired power by standing up to dead enders who had attempted to restore the old Soviet state. Building on that earlier persona, Yeltsin’s heavy-handed approach to legitimate, democratic protest was represented in the Unites States press as yet another valiant defence of democracy. As Klein observes, “the majority of the Western press dismissed Yelstin’s parliamentary opposition as ‘communist hardliners’ trying to roll back democratic reforms” (p. 224). The reality, though, was very different:
In fact, these were the same politicians [...] who had stood with Yeltsin and Gorbachev against the coup by the hardliners in 1991, who had voted to dissolve the Soviet Union, and who had, until recently, thrown their support behind Yeltsin. Yet the Washington Post opted to cast Russia’s parliamentarians as “antigovernment” — as if they were themselves interlopers and not themselves part of the government.” (p. 226)
As we all know, the shock therapy prescriptions resulted in a privatization feeding frenzy that led to the emergence of fabulously wealthy Russian oligarchs who were, understandably, more than happy with Yeltsin’s economic program. As a result, however, of the suffering imposed on the wider public by the “brutal” austerity of the Chicago economic program, along with other hallmarks of dictatorship such as press censorship, Yeltsin’s public approval ratings sank drastically and threatened the economic “reforms,” — the goose that was busy golden eggs for the oligarchs.
Yeltsin attempted to deflect the issue by going to war in Chechnya, and the gate was opened to Putin who was able to ride what were assumed to be Chechnyan terror attacks — bombings that are now often attributed to the Russian government itself — into the Kremlin. Klein writes that “on December 31, 1999, with the war in Chechnya foreclosing serious debate, several oligarchs engineered a quiet handover from Yeltsin to Putin, no elections necessary.”(p. 237)
To summarize Klein’s account of the ways that U.S. action — and inaction — helped put Putin into a position to forcibly make Russia great again:
- In return for aid in the aftermath of the fall of the fall of the Soviet Union, American economic ideologues, abetted by the IMF and European fellow-travelers, insisted on radical free market reforms instead of smoothing a gradual transition to a social democratic form of government initially envisioned by Mikhail Gorbchev.
- In order to overcome resistance to austerity and implement these changes, the same team of players supported the installation of a virtual dictatorship under Boris Yeltsin who implemented a program of brutal austerity.
- Aid promised to Yeltsin to effect the transition was withheld.
- The American press consistently misrepresented democratic Russian efforts to fight against the Chicago School economic agenda.
So, thanks to the meddling of folks who had they instituted something similar to the post-World War II Marshall Plan, could have led Russia gently into the fold of Western liberal democracy, we have ended up instead with Putin — and a Putin who has grown steadily more dictatorial as an initial oil and gas inspired burst of prosperity has faded, and he has had to resort to nationalist boosterism and international meddling to help secure his sham democracy.
Putin: The gift that gives back
So what has the United States earned for its hard work to bring the freest of free markets to Russia? In one word: Trump. To elaborate:
- As Frank Rich observes, “There is evidence that Donald Trump and his administration-in-formation are partially, perhaps wholly, beholden to the Kremlin and/or those Russian oligarchs in its thrall. “ Rich adds that:
Perhaps Trump’s only real goal is to grab money from deep Russian pockets as fast as he can in opaque business deals managed by his sons while he’s in office. Even so, it’s entirely possible that he and Flynn will help facilitate Putin’s own political aims in exchange — all the while claiming that their motive is merely to band with Russia in “fighting ISIS.” What’s clear is that we are not going to get straight answers to any Russian questions.
- Apart from the question of Russian influence on United States policy, we have been gifted with a President who is unprepared as well as intellectually and morally unfit for the office.
- Trump appointees so far present a threat to the social values of fairness and inclusiveness that have become prevalent in the United States, their stated policy goals will destabilize the United States domestically — which is probably an added goodie for Russia — since citizens will have to mobilize to defend themselves from the depredations of the authoritarian, misogynist, white-supremacist, Trump cabal.
- Trump’s evident corruption, if unchecked, will have established a new norm going forward long after his presidency is over. Russia just helped establish the United States of Corruption.
- Already, salivating GOpers are, in service to Trump, attempting defang formal, institutional ethics watchdogs, going so far as to attempt to intimidate the Office of Government ethics for pointing out that Trump’ solution to his conflict of interest problems is no solution at all.
- The GOP congress, emboldened by the oxygen-sucking presidency of Donald Trump, is moving fast to institute a version of the Russian shock therapy in the U.S. As Michael Tomasky writes, Republicans may not like Trump, but he is their open sesame when it comes to finally realizing their long-term free-market goals, ”they’ll let him have his Twitter tirades and little victory dances in Elkhart, Indiana, over 700 jobs, as long as he lets them take apart the New Deal.” Hell, they like the Twitter and the victory dances — it distracts the easily distracted Trump base from the way they’re getting screwed. The pillaging has already started:
- Obamacare is on the chopping block right now, and they’re queueing up Medicare and Social Security.
- Medicaid will be shunted off to the states, but without adequate federal funds,
- Public functions such as education, infrastructure, prisons, veterans medical care, you name it will be privatized.
- And while everyday Americans suffer, rich folks will get big tax cuts.
- Farewell to civil liberties and press freedom, welcome to all propaganda, all the time. Trump’s violent anti-CNN tantrum on Wednesday should be warning enough about what’s ahead. Trump and the Republicans riding his coattails cannot succeed with silencing the neutral press.
- Trump and his Breitbart.com pal, Steve Bannon, can be expected to assist Putin in his efforts to destablize the EU by encouraging the ethno-nationalist parties that are emerging there in opposition to the Union. It is not good for anyone to see an authoritarian, nationalist bloc emerge from the ashes of the EU. Christopher Dickey and Aewin Suebsaeng write in The Daily Beast that:
… the election of Bannon’s man Donald Trump as president of the United States has made the globalization of Breitbart and its message infinitely more plausible than it ever was before, and politicians once considered Europe’s deplorables are now rushing to bask in the gilded glow of Trump and Bannon.
I hope that those folks in the United States who helped bring Putin to power in Russia are gratified by the fact that he has now given them the power to create the same conditions that led to the rise of a repressive, murderous dictator. And, I suspect that many of them are — or at least their rich backers are. Oligarchs stand up for oligarchs.
And one way that Oligarchs do that is buy the politicians who convince Bubba Jones, living on disability down in the boonies, that he has to vote for folks like Trump to defend Freedom. Remember all that Freedom and Constitution blather from Tea Partiers, who sprang fully formed, like Minerva from the forehead of Zeus, from the collective pocketbooks of the Koch brother’s donor circle? Nobody told them that the freedom they were so hot and bothered about was simply freedom for rich folks to rampage freely. Pray God that we don’t see a repeat of the way that shock therapists, hand-in-hand with oligarchs who alone stood to gain, led Russia down the garden path toward dictatorship — If it isn’t already too late to pray.