West has share in Russian turmoil

In the midst of the turmoil, both political and economic, in Moscow, some images from Western television remain fixed in the mind. In one President Clinton tells a near-moribund President Yeltsin there is no "painless" way forward; in another an agitated Michel Camdessus of the International Monetary Fund calls on Russia not to print money "for the wrong purposes".

But while the most of the blame for the current economic and political catastrophe must be laid at the door of Russia's successive governments, Western countries and institutions are by no means blameless.

Let us take Mr Clinton first. He has recently left Ireland rejoicing in the glory of his only real foreign-policy success. We, hopefully the beneficiaries of that success, rejoice with him.

His Russian policy, however, has failed and his view that pain must be inflicted is typical of a politician who knows he is not going to feel the pain himself. Neither, by the way, will Mr Yeltsin, who feels no pain these days in any event, and neither will the vastly wealthy Victor Chernomyrdin.

The oligarchs, led by Boris Berezevosky, will not feel the pain and neither will the darling of the Harvard economists, Anatoly Chubais, who presided over Russia's patently corrupt privatisation process.

Put in the Chinese sloganising which gave us "Let a thousand flowers bloom" this attitude about "pain" in solving economic problems could be neatly put as: "Let a million grannies starve."

The West's share of the blame for today's disaster has its origins, in my view, in an attitude which saw Russia governed not in the interests of its people but, for the second time this century, in the interests of economic ideology.

Nothing was to be allowed shake the belief that an untrammelled market would cure all ills. European ideas such as the social market were looked on with scorn.

Later the West's unequivocal support of Mr Yeltsin's unconstitutional shelling of the democratically-elected if less-than-admirable Russian parliament in October 1993, gave the President a clear message.

Many readers may be taken aback by this statement, but five years ago when Moscow was convulsed by the events which led to the shelling of the parliament and the withering fire which caused the deaths of about 150 people at the TV station at Ostankino, Mr Yeltsin's actions were greeted with joy.

At the time, the Western media, mainly British and American it should be noted, described the "October Events" in terms of a battle between the democratic forces of Mr Yeltsin and the communist rebels who opposed him.

In the cold light of history it has emerged that only six of Mr Yeltsin's armed supporters died in the October events, while the others were made up of drunken demonstrators and Western TV cameramen whose job forced them into the front line.

In his book An Empire's New Clothes, Bruce Clark, a former correspondent in Moscow for the Times (of London), puts October 1993 into its true perspective. His research destroys the myth of a battle between a democratic Boris Yeltsin and the evil parliament.

That parliament's speaker, Ruslan Khasbulatov, by the way, has been described variously and at different times by the Economist as a free market reformer and a hardline rebel.

In 1993, Western political leaders, led by the President of the United States, welcomed the shelling of the Russian White House out of fear of what might happen if someone other than Boris Yeltsin came to power.

The message to Mr Yeltsin could not have been more explicit: "You can do anything you want and we will back you."

Boris Yeltsin did anything he wanted. In little over a year Russia was engaged in a murderous war in Chechnya. Mr Clinton in an off-the-cuff remark compared the conflict to the American Civil war and this was used frequently by Moscow to justify the destruction of Grozny and the deaths of tens of thousands of non-combatant civilians.

Wars cost money and lots of money was spent on guns rather than food. While all these people were dying Mr Camdessus and the IMF continued to supply credits to Russia. The IMF, indirectly therefore, was a sponsor of the carnage in Chechnya. There were no statements at that time about spending money for "the wrong purposes".

But economists are not necessarily big on morality. An old Russia hand, Robert Haupt from Australia, in his posthumously-published book Last Boat to Astrakhan asserted that to expect morality from an economist was rather like expecting your plumber to be an expert on Schopenhauer.

But the IMF and the World Bank made basic mistakes in their own areas of expertise. Money put forward to modernise the coal industry was stolen in front of their eyes by Russia's corrupt managerial classes. It is reasonable to believe that similar heists were performed in other industries.

But the money, with one or two delays, kept coming in. Western institutions placed their trust in the "arch-reformer" Mr Chubais, a man cordially despised by Russians of all political stripes, but a good friend of the managerial classes. Growing evidence that Mr Chubais was not strong on probity was conveniently ignored.

One assumes that each time the IMF authorised a tranche of payments it satisfied itself that Russia was using the money for "the right purposes". If that has not been the case then the organisation can be accused of gross negligence, if it has then there are serious questions to be asked about its judgment.

Did it believe that things were going well in Russia because that was what it wanted to believe? It seems reasonable to ask, therefore, whether the IMF considers itself a fool or a knave.