Someday I'm going to have to figure out the motivations of Anatoly Chubais. How to understand the change from the Chubais of late 1991--who wanted, more than anything, an honest and fair privatization process--to the Chubais of late 1993--who said that the privatization process needed to assign huge numbers of shares to "red directors" to recognize the realities on the ground if anything was going to happen--to the Chubais of late 1995--who believed that the government should give away the rest of Soviet industry for a song (for otherwise it would soon be stolen anyway) and in the process create strong plutocrats who would be powerful political allies for the government?
Posted by DeLong at June 04, 2002 01:07 AMWhatever happened to Chubais? And the rest of the old-school reformers?
For that matter, where is Yeltsin?
Posted by: Paul on June 6, 2002 08:48 PMYeltsin is retired. Chubais is running an electricity company.
Posted by: Brad DeLong on June 13, 2002 08:34 PMIn his "Globalization and it's discontents" Joseph Stiglitz accuses Lawrence Summers of publicly supporting Chubais by inviting him to his house. According to Stiglitz, Chubais was then the least popular official in Russia and higly involved in the corrupt privatisationprocess in Russia wich led to huge inequalities. Did key officials in the US government supported Chubais and the corrupt privatisation? If so, why? Did they knew then that the whole scheme was corrupt?
Posted by: Ivan janssens, Belgium on July 6, 2002 06:15 AMWell, former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott reports in his book, _The Russia Hand_, that Summers and his deputy David Lipton denounced the loans-for-shares program--the more corrupt side of privatization--as "bad economics, bad civics, and bad politics."
So I think the answer is clear. Contrary to what Stiglitz says, the U.S. government opposed corrupt privatization, while supporting normal privatization.
Posted by: Brad DeLong on July 7, 2002 05:44 PM