#4 - JRL 7283
From: Jerry Hough <jhough@duke.edu>
Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2003
Subject: Re: Yeltsin

Of course, if one had the hypothesis that Yeltsin is following the model of the last two Chinese leaders and is still ruling from behind the
scenes, things look very different. People like Voloshin, Chubais, and
Khorodovsky would be his chief control agents. VTsIOM would be
subordinated to him, not independent. An attack on any of these would
look far more important than it does, and the interests of Russian democracy and American business would seem far less one-sided than
they do to many. It is striking that in any the talk about the
"privatization" of 1995, people don't recall the fraud perpetrated on American investors with the claim that these were not state enterprises and don't wonder how people so bankrupted in Russia
recovered so well. If Putin were to win in such a model, oil would
normalize and and an industrial policy would result in many orders for
American manufactured equipment. Of course, all of this is just
musing about a hypothetical and, no doubt, improbable hypothesis, but there is an interesting discussion of what happened in 1995 in a Brookings book on economic reform.