by Harley Schlanger, EIR News:
On March 28, 1994, as the British-U.S. “shock therapy” economic policy was depopulating post-Soviet Russia, a critique of that policy was drafted by the chief political analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. The memo, drafted by E. Wayne Merry, was not distributed, and remained suppressed for thirty years. Following an FOIA suit filed by the National Security Archives, it was published on Dec. 18, 2024, under the title “The Long Telegram of the 1990s: ‘Whose Russia Is It Anyway? Toward a Policy of Benign Respect.” (The original “Long Telegram” was drafted by George Kennan from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in Feb. 1946, warning of the dangers of an aggressive post-war Soviet Union, laying out what became the policy of “containment.”)
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
In his summary. Merry writes that “democratic forces” in Russia are in trouble. “We are not helping with a misguided over-emphasis on market economics. There is no reason to believe the Russian economy is capable of rapid market reform.” He criticized what passes for “democracy” today, when those allegedly supporting democracy over-rule the outcome of the voters, as in the EU attack on Hungarian and Romanian voters. He attacks the idea of an aggressive response toward a government “when the economic choices of that democracy do not achieve an American standard of ‘success.’ … If Russia elects to follow a non-Anglo-American school of economics, it will be in excellent company.” America should be concerned, he continued with “the fate of Russian democracy but not to the choices that democracy may make about the distribution of its own wealth and about the organization of its means of production and finance.”
This summary is followed by a succession of paragraphs outlining why the imposition of an Anglo-American model goes against the desires of the Russian people (who view the “market” as alien and threatening, as the preserve of exploiters and speculators”), and takes the risk of recreating an adversarial relationship between Russia and the West.
Merry’s critique of the imposition of radical free-market transformation of Russia parallels the critique of U.S. policy by Lyndon LaRouche, though in a milder form, and lacking the alternative program advocated by LaRouche, who was released from prison in January 1994, just two months prior to when Merry’s memo was drafted. Following his release, LaRouche had a series of meetings with Russian scientists and economists, in which he presented his economic method of forecasting and how his method enabled the development of an alternative based on the American System of physical economy.
Years later, Merry issued a one-line summary, which has often been quoted by opponents of the Unipolar Order:
“We created (in Russia in the 1990s) a virtual open shop for thievery at a national level and for capital flight in terms of hundreds of billions of dollars, and the raping of natural resources and industries on a scale which I doubt has ever taken place in human history.”
Of course, the warning about American meddling in Russia inevitably bringing about a global showdown because of the reaction, was also stated in an even earlier one-liner (although not all the details correspond to how things have turned out):
Lyndon LaRouche wrote in Dec. 1991, “If Yeltsin, for example, and his government, were to go with a reform of the type which Sachs and Sachs’s co-thinkers demand—chiefly from the Anglo-American side—then the result in Russia would be chaos. In such a case, the overthrow of Yeltsin, or somebody, by a dictatorship and the restoration of a form of what is called totalitarianism, would probably occur. In that case, then we have a strategic threat.”
-Lyndon LaRouche, December 28, 1991
Fortunately for the world, instead of a totalitarian dictatorship, Yeltsin was replaced by a defender of Russia’s national sovereignty, Vladimir Putin. For the globalists, this has been a source of rage ever since Putin took over for Yeltsin!
Note that parallel to the imposition by the Anglo-Americans of the shock-therapy regime in Russia, the same U.S.-NATO oligarchs backed out of their pledge made in 1990-91 for no eastern expansion of NATO. These two parallel policies have led to the loss of trust by Russia in the West, and provoked the February 2022 Special Military Operation launched by Putin.
