Luke Ford

New York Times:

Or this about the powerful media magnates who arose under Mr. Yeltsin: “They dressed like a Westernized elite, spoke like one, sent their children to Western schools, but they lacked the most important attribute of an elite — a sense of responsibility for, and historic consciousness of, their own country. They behaved like caricatures of capitalists in old Soviet journals.”

That’s what made for so much confusion among Western watchers as Russia floundered in uncharted post-Soviet waters. We used terms like businessman, politician, democrat or journalist to describe the people who came to the fore in the new Russia, but, in fact, we were only looking at something far different and usually far less savory.

Is the reviewer Serge Schmemann trying to say they were Jews? The article never mentions Jews, which is weird in that Jews played a major role in the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and in the development of Russia after communism.

Professor Goldwin Smith wrote on “The Jewish Question” in the late 19th Century:

Jewish ascendancy and the anti-Semitic movement provoked by it form an important feature of the European situation, and are beginning to excite attention in America. Mr. Arnold White, Baron Hirsch’s commissioner, says, in a plea for the Russian Jews (“The Truth about the Russian Jew,” Contemporary Review, May 1892), that “almost without exception the press throughout Europe is in Jewish hands, and is largely produced by Jewish brains;” that “international finance is captive to Jewish energy and skill;” that in England the fall of the Barings has left the house of Rothschild alone in its supremacy; and that in every line the Jews are fast becoming our masters. Wind and tide, in a money-loving age, are in favor of the financial race…

A community has a right to defend its territory and its national integrity against an invader, whether his weapon be the sword or foreclosure. In the territories of the Italian Republics the Jews might, so far as we see, have bought land and taken to farming had they pleased. But before this they had thoroughly taken to trade. Under the filling Empire they were the great slave traders, buying captives from barbarian invaders and probably acting as general brokers of spoils at the same time. They entered England in the train of the Norman conqueror. There was, no doubt, a perpetual struggle between their craft and the brute force of the feudal populations. But what moral prerogative has craft over force?

Mr. Arnold White tells the Russians that, if they would let Jewish intelligence have free course, Jews would soon fill all high employments and places of power to the exclusion of the natives, who now hold them. Russians are bidden to acquiesce and rather to rejoice in this by philosophers, who would perhaps not relish the cup if it were commended to their own lips. The law of evolution, it is said, prescribes the survival of the fittest. To which the Russian boor may reply, that if his force beats the fine intelligence of the Jew the fittest will survive and the law of evolution will be fulfilled.

In 1891, a Jew responded to Goldwin S,mith.

When I read about the complaints against Jews by Russian officials, it sounds like typical complaints by natives against high-IQ tribes (such as Chinese, Brahmins, Japanese) who dominate high-IQ occupations.

Vice-Consul Wagstaff wrote in Correspondence Respecting the Treatment of Jews in Russia, No. 1, 1882, pp. 11, 12:

It is chiefly as brokers or middlemen that the Jews are so prominent. Seldom a business transaction of any kind takes place without their intervention, and from both sides they receive compensation. To enumerate some of their other occupations, constantly denounced by the public: they are the principal dealers in spirits; keepers of “vodka” (drinking) shops and houses of ill-fame; receivers of stolen goods; illegal pawnbrokers and usurers. A branch they also succeed in is as government contractors. With their knowledge of handling money, they collude with unscrupulous officials in defrauding the State to vast amounts annually. In fact, the malpractices of some of the Jewish community have a bad influence on those whom they come in contact with.

It must, however, be said that there are many well educated, highly respectable, and honorable Jews in Russia, but they form a small minority. This class is not treated upon in this paper. They thoroughly condemn the occupations of their lower brethren, and one of the results of the late disturbances is noticed in the movement at present amongst the Jews. They themselves acknowledge the abuses practised by some of their own members, and suggest remedial measures to allay the irritation existing among the working classes.

Another thing the Jews are accused of is that there exists among them a system of boycotting; they use their religion for business purposes. This is expressed by the words “koul,” or “kagal,” and “kherim.” For instance, in Bessarabia, the produce of a vineyard is drawn for by lot, and falls, say to Jabob Levy; the other Jews of the district cannot compete with Levy, who buys the wine at his own price. In the leasing by auction of government and provincial lands, it is invariably a Jew who outbids the others and afterwards re-lets plots to the peasantry at exorbitant prices. Very crying abuses of farming out land have lately come to light and greatly shocked public opinion. Again, where estates are farmed by Jews, it is distressing to see the pitiable condition in which they are handed over on the expiration of the lease. Experience also shows they are very bad colonists.

Their fame as usurers is well known. Given a Jewish recruit with a few rubles’ capital, it can be worked out, mathematically, what time it will take him to become the money-lender of his company or regiment, from the drummer to the colonel. Take the case of a peasant: if he once gets into the hands of this class, he is irretrievably lost. The proprietor, in his turn, from a small loan gradually mortgages and eventually loses his estate. A great deal of landed property in south Russia has of late years passed into the hands of the Israelites, but principally into the hands of intelligent and sober peasants.

From first to last, the Jew has his hand in everything. He advances the seed for sowing, which is generally returned in kind — quarters for bushels. As harvest time comes round, money is required to gather in the crops. This is sometimes advanced on hard conditions; but the peasant has no choice; there is no one to lend him money, and it is better to secure something than to lose all. Very often the Jew buys the whole crop as it stands in the field on his own terms. It is thus seen that they themselves do not raise agricultural products, but they reap the benefits of others’ labor, and steadily become rich, while proprietors are gradually getting ruined. In their relation to Russia they are compared to parasites that have settled on a plant not vigorous enough to throw them off, and which is being sapped of its vitality.

M. Pierre Botkine, Secretary of the Russian Legation in Washington, wrote in the Century Magazine (Feb. 1893)

The actual meaning of the anti-Semitic measures prescribed by our government is not animosity to the religion of the Jews; neither are those measures a deliberate hunting down of the feeble by the powerful; they are an effort to relieve the Empire of the injurious struggle against those particular traits of Hebrew character that were obstructing the progress of our people along their own line of natural development. It may be said in general, that the anti-Semitic movement in Russia is a demonstration by the non-Hebrew part of the population against tendencies of Hebrews which have characterized them the world over, and to which they adhere in Russia.

The Hebrew, as we know him in Russia, is “the eternal Jew.” Without a country of his own, and, as a rule, without any desire to become identified with the country he for the time inherits, he remains, as for hundreds of years he has been, morally unchangeable and without a faculty for adapting himself to sympathy with the people of the race which surrounds him. He is not homogeneous with us in Russia; he does not feel or desire solidarity with us. In Russia he remains a guest only — a guest from long ago, and not an integral part of the community. When these guests without affinity became too many in Russia, when in serious localities their numbers were found injurious to the welfare and the prosperity of our own people as a whole, when they had grown into many wide-spreading ramifications of influence and power, and abused their opportunities as traders with or lenders of money to the poor — when, in a word, they became dangerous and prejudicial to our people — is there anything revolting or surprising in the fact that our government found it necessary to restrict their activity? We did not expel the Jews from the Empire, as is often mistakenly charged, though we did restrict their rights as to localities of domicile and as to kinds of occupations … Is it just that those who have never had to confront such a situation should blame us for those measures?

There were similar complaints about Jews in the United States but because America was a Protestant nation, which is an individualist religion, Jews were not generally regarded as primarily Jews but as people who just so happened to be a part of the Jewish religion.

No Protestant country has ever slaughtered its Jews. Jews have done better in Protestant countries (England, Canada, United States, Australia) than in corporate countries (such as the Catholic ones of France, Italy, and Spain).

Frederick Law Olmstead wrote in Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom (2nd ed., pp. 252, 253),

“A swarm of Jews has within the last ten years settled in nearly every Southern town, many of them men of no character, opening cheap clothing and trinket shops, ruining or driving out of business many of the old retailers, and engaging in an unlawful trade with the simple negroes, which is found very profitable.”

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of the Jews in San Francisco in his book Across the Plains (p. 100):

“Jew storekeepers have already learned the advantage to be gained from this [unlimited credit]; they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their bond-slave hopelessly grinding in the mill. So the whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and except that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you may see Americans bound in the same chains with which they themselves had formerly bound the Mexicans.”

Steve Sailer wrote in 2014:

Over 1/5th of Putin’s Billionaires Are Jewish

From Global Voices:

The Upsetting Ethnic Taxonomy of Russia’s Richest Businessmen
Posted 28 October 2014 22:14 GMT

One of Russia’s most popular news websites, the once vaunted Lenta.ru, finds itself at the center of a scandal today, after publishing an ethnic breakdown of Russia’s 200 richest people. According to the study, 44.5 percent of Russia’s wealthiest citizens are ethnically Russian, 21 percent are Jewish, 12 percent are Ukrainian, followed by smaller percentages of Tatars, Armenians, and a dozen or so other nationalities. “Overall,” the report concludes questionably, “it’s clear how different ethnic groups in a multiethnic country have used a collaborative solidarity and response to the beginning of the ‘capitalist era’ to build a new kind of economic and political life.”

Lenta’s study is based on Forbes’ 2014 ratings of Russia’s “200 Richest Businessmen,” though Elmar Murtazaev, Forbes’ chief editor, has already criticized the ethnic breakdown.

On Facebook, Murtazaev questioned Lenta’s judgment, implying that Forbes has considered analyzing the nationalities of its “top 200” list, but rejected the idea every year for the last decade. “What was published isn’t an investigation,” he argued online, calling Lenta’s work “nothing more than pure speculation.”

Funny, but Forbes Israel recently published a cover story in Hebrew listing the world’s Jewish billionaires. It’s almost as if wealthy Jews love reading lists of rich Jews.

(Indeed, Lenta’s authors themselves admit that many individuals on Forbes’ list don’t advertise their nationality, making it difficult to assign labels.)

Murtazaev isn’t the only one upset about Lenta’s study. Nikolai Svanidze, a media personality and a member of Russia’s Civic Chamber (a consultative body within the Kremlin), says Lenta’s article is racist—even fascist. Natalia Gevorkyan, another prominent Russian journalist, also disliked the piece, asking on Facebook if its publication embarrassed Alexander Mamut, who ranks 42nd on Forbes’ list and owns Lenta’s parent group, Rambler & Co.

In today’s world, it’s the duty of the media to comfort the comfortable. How dare journalists publish anything about billionaires that the billionaires would prefer hoi polloi not be informed about?

… As it happens, this isn’t the first time a Russian news site published an ethnic breakdown of Forbes’ top-200 richest men in Russia. Two years ago, Pavel Pryanikov’s website Ttolk.ru posted a nearly identical study (with roughly the same findings) that also looked at businessmen’s class history (tracking their socioeconomic trajectories from Soviet times). On Facebook, Pryanikov reminded readers of his website’s “been there, done that” accomplishment, and pointed out that it is hypocritical for Murtazaev to attack Lenta, as Forbes itself has ranked the world’s richest Jews and Armenians.

There are undoubtedly many reasons for apprehensions about Lenta’s study. Methodologically, it’s nearly impossible to establish the ethnicity of many of Russia’s oligarchs (whose mixed heritage defies classification). Ethically, on the other hand, liberals in Russia are averse to racial taxonomies that threaten to stir ethnic tensions. Indeed, the chief finding in both Lenta’s article and Pryanikov’s study is that ethnic Russians are heavily underrepresented in the Russian elite, relative to their numbers in the general population. Presumably, and perhaps justifiably, Russian nationalists’ critics fear statistics like these could catapult their adversaries to political prominence.

The single most dangerous worry since 1914 is that of a major land war in central and eastern Europe. Therefore, it’s important to debunk false assumptions that stoke perilous hatreds involving that region. One of the most destabilizing and least true myths at present is the widespread belief in the U.S. that the Putin regime in Russia is anti-Semitic.

By all objective evidence, Putin would be considered pro-Semitic, as is often pointed out by Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman. But Putin’s revival of state power in Russia has triggered old Jewish-American anti-Czarist reflexes.

In reality, Jews are doing extremely well under the pro-Semitic Putin, being disproportionately represented in the ranks of Russia’s billionaires by perhaps a couple of orders of magnitude. That’s an important fact that shouldn’t be hushed up: knowing the truth can help cool off the war fever.

Steve Sailer also wrote in 2014:

Stanley Fischer’s role in piratizing Russia’s wealth

In the 1990s, a small coterie of economists at Harvard and MIT, such as Jeffrey Sachs, Larry Summers, Andrei Shleifer, Jonathan Hay, and Stanley Fischer, played a crucial role in recent history by advising the government of Russia to rapidly privatize its economy. Much of the wealth of Russia wound up being stolen by a tiny number of oligarchs.

The President has nominated Dr. Fischer, who recently resigned after eight years as head of the Israeli government’s central bank, to be vice chairman of America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve. This might be a good time to reflect upon the successes and failures of Dr. Fischer’s recommendations in contributing to the Rape of Russia.

Fischer was not the public face of the experts from Cambridge, but he appears to have been a respected insider, as he remains today. His nomination to the Fed has been greeted with outpourings of praise from global financial insiders and very little skepticism from the less privileged.

As far as I know, nobody has ever accused Fischer of attempting to unethically profit off of the disaster he helped create in Russia, as the Federal government fined Shleifer and Harvard for doing.

Still, Fischer was there at the creation. He had numerous chances to speak out publicly about what was going horribly wrong in a Russia that looked to him and his friends for advice.

Fischer’s role in Russia in the 1990s can be seen from contemporary documents:

From the Christian Science Monitor, June 19, 1991:

Yeltsin Arrives In US to Discuss Trade, Politics
US-SOVIET RELATIONS

EVEN before Boris Yeltsin touched down on United States soil June 18, the newly elected president of the Russian Republic had scored public relations victories on two fronts. … 

Yeltsin arrives in the US at the height of debate over what the West should do, if anything, to prevent a possible collapse of the Soviet economy and promote genuine, lasting market reforms. 

The enthusiastic reception of Yeltsin’s visit could bolster Gorbachev’s bid for Western economic aid, because as a noncommunist and as the first democratically elected leader of Russia, Yeltsin could be instrumental in helping Gorbachev implement radical market reforms. 

Over the weekend the much-discussed “grand bargain” proposal linking Western aid to Soviet reform, drawn up by US and Soviet academics at Harvard University, was delivered to the White House and the Kremlin. 

… At the unveiling June 14 the plan’s architects did not project an exact cost of the proposal, which would provide credits and cash to ease the hardships that would result from the shift to a market system and a convertible currency. But Stanley Fischer, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who took part in the project, says for the first few years the figures would be “large between $20 billion and $25 billion a year, a cost to be borne by the Western industrialized nations. 

The first step, says Dr. Fischer, is for the Soviet Union to gain associate status at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which will then oversee the country’s economic restructuring. The big change, he continues, would start in 1992, when price controls would be lifted, trade restrictions would be eased, and the money supply and budget deficit put under control. 

When asked if Yeltsin will support the plan, Mr. Yugin said, “I think we will.” …

Gorbachev aide Yevgeny Primakov and First Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Shcherbakov, have distanced the Kremlin from Grigory Yavlinsky, the lead Soviet economist on the Harvard plan. 

Mr. Yavlinsky’s murky status is “convenient for everybody involved,” says Fischer of MIT. If the plan is deemed workable, everyone can embrace Yavlinsky’s work, Fischer says. If not, the Kremlin will not be seen as having failed yet again to follow through on an economic reform plan.

This seems to be a recurrent theme: Dr. Fischer was publicly proud of not just his economic theory bona fides but also of his practical political expertise in the murky terrain of post-Soviet Russia.

From the Christian Science Monitor, June 5, 1992:

Improving the World With Academic Advice

RUSSIA’S First Deputy Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar knows quite a bit about the problems Latin American nations have had with populism and hyperinflation. That’s because Rudiger Dornbusch, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) economist [and co-author with Stanley Fischer of the textbook Macroeconomics], “Fed-Exed” the Russian economic reformer a bundle of 15 or so books on that topic, figuring it would help him deal with Russia’s similar difficulties.

“He actually studied them,” says Dr. Dornbusch, one of several United States professors giving economic advice to the Russians. 

Another MIT economist, Stanley Fischer, got back last Saturday from Moscow after spending several days working with the Russian Central Bank. 

These two aren’t alone. A sizable group of well-known academics from MIT and Harvard University are acting as consultants, paid or unpaid, to foreign governments. Their advice is actually having some impact on world affairs. 

… “We do it because it is extremely interesting,” Professor Fischer says. While in Moscow, for instance, he learned enough about the political situation to anticipate the resignation of the Central Bank’s chairman, Georgi Matyukhin. He can even speculate on successors. Fischer also gives advice to Israel on visits to that country. 

Was Fischer simply embarrassingly naive about what these post-Soviet apparatchiks were up to? Or did he have some clue about the crimes being committed by those claiming to follow his advice?

Those seem like they would be interesting questions to ask him, so I’m betting no Congressman will ask them.

From the Christian Science Monitor, December 11, 1992:

MIT’s Mr. Fischer hopes Gaidar [the acting prime minister] will push ahead even faster with privatization of industry, getting the budget in shape, and other reforms. But the Russian government, he says, doesn’t have “a coherent policy” for dealing with the large enterprises within the “military-industrial complex.” 

From the 2003 book The Piratization of Russia by economist Marshall I. Goldman:

Gaidar [acting Prime Minister of Russia in 1992] was a strong proponent of a market system. He was an even stronger advocate of privatization and, for that matter, a whole package of near-simultaneous reforms that came to be known as “shock therapy,” and today is called the “Washington Consensus.” Gaidar had come to this concept as a result of his studies as well as from a series of discussions with economists from both Eastern Europe and the United States. Among those interacting with Gaidar at one stage or another were Jeffrey Sachs, Andrei Shleifer, Jonathan Hay, all of Harvard University, Anders Aslund of Sweden, and, later, the Carnegie Endowment and Richard Layard of the London School of Economics. IMF officials and Stanley Fischer in particular had long advocated something similar, that is, simultaneous and far-reaching economic liberalization (that is, micro policy reforms combined with determined macro restrictions to curb inflation).

From Wikipedia’ article on Yegor Gaidar:

Gaidar was often criticized for imposing ruthless reforms in 1992 with little care for their social impact. Many of Gaidar’s economic reforms led to serious deterioration in living standards. Millions of Russians were thrown into poverty due to their savings being devalued by massive hyperinflation. Moreover, the privatization and break-up of state assets left over from the Soviet Union, which he played a big part in, led to much of the country’s wealth being handed to a small group of powerful business executives, later known as the Russian oligarchs, for much less than what they were worth. As society grew to despise these figures and resent the economic and social turmoil caused by the reforms, Gaidar was often held by Russians as one of the men most responsible.[9][10]

So, was Fischer simply suffering from faulty Gai-dar? Or was his Gaidar working accurately, and the catastrophes suffered by the Russian people struck him as just a case of being unable to make an omelet without cracking some eggs? Or was the looting of Russia more a feature than a bug?

In 2011, after all these years, Fischer delivered the Gaidar Memorial Lecture, suggesting he doesn’t feel betrayed by his Gaidar.

From the appendix of a 1993 Brookings Institution book Privatizing Russia by Shleifer, Maxim Boycko, and Robert W. Vishny, here are Fischer’s comments on the success of the recommendations made by himself and his colleagues:

Comments and Discussion  

Stanley Fischer: Privatization stands out as the most successful element in the Russian reform program. Indeed, Russian privatization is even outpacing privatization in other countries in the former Soviet Union and in eastern Europe.

Conversely, the slower pace of privatization in countries like Poland shows that the Rape of Russia didn’t have to happen, or least not as disastrously.

This interesting paper, written by some of the important thinkers behind the program, helps explain why.  

… Apparently, the authors, like other observers, do not yet see much in the way of restructuring taking place.  

Does that mean that the authors should have urged delaying privatization until they had invented a scheme that would guarantee rapid restructuring? The answer is no, because it was crucial to move these firms out of direct state control. Should the lack of restructuring cause a slowdown of the privatization process? Again, the answer is no, for the same reason.

… Was there an alternative that would have produced more rapid restructuring? The answer is yes, but that decision belonged not to the privatizers but to Boris Yeltsin. He could have pushed for a more aggressive reform program, but chose instead to confront his congressional rivals more slowly.  

… The paper gives the impression that all politicians are bad. But at some point it becomes clear that Anatoly Chubais, Boris Yeltsin, and the reformers are good politicians. So this is really a paper about the good guys versus the bad guys, and we do not know what drives the good guys, and what differentiates them, except that we are on their side and they on ours.

… Beyond the privatization of industrial firms lies the challenge of privatizing agriculture and housing. Given the speed at which the current privatization is proceeding, the authors will soon be able to turn their talents to those problems. 

In 1994, Fischer became America’s man at the International Monetary Fund, its number two official. (By custom, Europe gets the top IMF guy, while America gets the top World Bank official.) On January 9, 1998, Fischer delivered this less than prescient speech:

The Russian Economy at the Start of 1998 

Stanley Fischer 

January 9, 1998 

Six years after the start of the Russian economic reform process, much has been achieved and the continued progress of the economy towards economic normalization is not in doubt. … 

Nineteen ninety seven was a year of achievement for the Russian economy. 

For the first time since 1992, the economy grew, albeit barely. The current account of the balance of payments was in surplus. The Central Bank of Russia once again proved its professionalism, as inflation continued to decline, and as late in the year it successfully fought off contagion effects from East Asia and maintained the currency band. At the start of 1998, with a broadened currency band, and a non-confiscatory currency reform under way, confidence in the maintenance of monetary stability should continue to strengthen. 

In 1997, as in 1996, central government revenue shortfalls constituted the major failure of macroeconomic policy. At the start of 1998, fiscal reform and performance remain both the crucial element and the crucial question at the center of Russia’s economic program with the IMF. The reform of the tax code and increased revenue collection are on one side of the equation; on the other side, increasing the efficiency of government spending and strengthening expenditure management deserve no less attention. Equally important for future growth is continued progress with structural reforms, whose implementation had for some years lagged until recently — but it must be noted and emphasized that the structural components of the Russian reform program moved ahead as agreed with the IMF (indeed even a little faster) during 1997. 

I am also happy to report that the IMF Executive Board yesterday completed the delayed sixth quarterly review of the Extended Fund Facility with Russia, and — laying particular stress on the fiscal action plan agreed between the Russian authorities and the Fund staff in December — agreed to disburse a $700 million tranche, thus bringing the program back on track. 

I. Achievements of the past six years. 

Six years ago, Russia set out on the road to a market economy by liberalizing prices and beginning to dismantle the instruments of central planning. In these six years, Russia has made remarkable progress in important areas. … 

Market development: A large and increasing share of Russian economic activity is channeled through market mechanisms. In its latest Transition Report, the EBRD estimates that 70 percent of GDP is accounted for by the private sector.4 This vibrant private sector, for all its imperfections, has become the major agent of economic growth and change. 

… The experience of other transition economies, as analyzed in a number of studies, suggests that Russia will move onto a sustained growth path as inflation falls and fiscal adjustment and structural reforms proceed. In many respects, Russia has an exceptionally favorable basis to achieve that end: important natural resources, including minerals and energy; a highly educated labor force, which is still employed to a large extent in the less productive state sector; and a potentially large domestic market with pent-up demand for consumer goods and social infrastructure. However, a major constraint to Russia attaining satisfactory rates of growth is that the process of structural reform has not gone far enough. 

Indeed, empirical analysis has shown that the main reason why growth in Russia and other CIS countries lags behind the record of the Eastern European and Baltic countries is the slower pace of market-oriented structural reform.6 While Russia has made substantial strides in some areas of structural reform (notably small scale privatization, the liberalization of the trade and foreign exchange system and, to a lesser extent, natural monopoly regulation), there are important areas where much more progress is needed. 

… With macroeconomic stability close to being attained, the focus now must shift to structural reform, particularly private sector development. A fast pace of economic recovery will demand substantial increases in efficiency and capital accumulation, and these in turn demand a competitive business environment. Certain elements of such a business environment (such as a market culture) cannot be developed rapidly or established by government action, but other major elements (including the legal and institutional framework) can be. Such efforts are under way in several areas: 

1. Faster, more transparent privatization and improved management of state-owned enterprises. The privatization program was stepped up in 1997 after a disappointing record in 1996, and the Government’s privatization plan for 1998 envisages a further acceleration. The new privatization norms call for an open, transparent, and competitive process — elements of which were missing in earlier waves of privatization.

You know, there’s an inherent trade-off between velocity and transparency of privatization schemes. The faster you push privatization, the more likely it is to turn out to be piratization. Is it really too much to ask that seven years or more after he began poking his nose in Russian affairs that Dr. Fischer might have figured that out by 1998?

… In summary, Russian economic reform is entering a less dramatic phase than that of the last few years: the most important battles in securing macroeconomic stabilization and creating a market economy have been won; but much remains to be done to secure the future growth of the economy. 

Up to this point, the optimists on Russia have been more right than the pessimists. There is good reason to believe the optimists will continue to be right.

Eight months and eight days after Fischer’s speech, Russia defaulted.

Dr. Fischer is a thoughtful man who is not always afraid to say he was wrong in the past; but nobody today seems to be interested in giving him a chance to publicly reflect upon anything he has learned from the world-historical mistakes that he and other elite economists made regarding Russia in the 1990s.

Who knows? Maybe he’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to the Russian people …

But, even if Fischer’s conscience is bothering him about the Rape of Russia, it’s not that likely that he’ll be given much of a chance to apologize for screwing up so badly. There really isn’t much of a market for skepticism about the documented track records of Federal Reserve leaders.

Thus, for years Alan Greenspan was treated as a genius by the media, because … what if he weren’t really a genius? What if he were just some Ayn Rand cultist? Well, that possibility was too horrible to contemplate, so everybody agreed to keep him in office over and over until almost his 80th birthday in 2006. What could possibly go wrong?

Instead, it’s best not to undermine confidence by asking our economic superiors to account for their track records.