Reddit mentions of Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism

> Sounds like more conspiracy bullshit with no actual proof

Dude, so many books and articles have been written about this. The fact that this is new to you does not make it a conspiracy theory. It's not even controversial.

Western economists at the IMF in the 90's prescribed a set of policies, now colloquially known as 'shock therapy', to emerging market nations. In Russia these were prescribed ostensibly to help clamp down on an incipient hyperinflation. The radical policies consisted of a simultaneous elimination of all price/currency controls, wholesale privatization of all state-owned industry, and trade liberalization. The results were devastating, and allowed for a looting of the Russian economy by Western capital and, later, by Russian oligarchs in collusion with Boris Yeltsin.

Jeffrey Sachs, who was one of Yeltsin's advisors, has written much about his role in the crisis, and still feels the need to defend his record. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate, has a chapter in his book Globalization and its Discontents called "Who lost Russia?" in which he lays the blame square at the feet of free-market economists prescribing economic shock-therapy. Some believe that Larry Summers lost his bid to become President of the World Bank because of his role in the Russian economic reform project(also see: How Harvard Lost Russia for more about Summers).

Other books:

Sale of the Century, by Chrystia Freeland(formerly the global editor-at-large at Reuters)

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

Years ago at a now-closed bookstore in Reno, I bought a book called Sale of the Century about Russia after the fall of the Iron Curtain. While the allegory isn't perfect, the synopsis shows some similarities to America's current situation:

> This new society did not just appear ready-made: it was created by a handful of powerful men who came to be known as the oligarchs and the young reformers. The oligarchs were fast-talking businessmen who laid claim to Russia's vast natural resources. The young reformers were an elite group of egghead economists who got to put their wild theories into action, with results that were sometimes inspiring, sometimes devastating. With unparalleled access and acute insight, Chrystia Freeland takes us behind the scenes and shows us how these two groups misused a historic opportunity to build a new Russia. Their achievements were considerable, but their mistakes will deform Russian society for generations to come.

An updated and modified version of this same strategy is being used here via Trump. The American oligarchs are trying to snatch our public lands to strip bare of anything valuable or pollute. We're forcing renegotiations of trade agreements and are in a trade war with China. If we are going through today what Russia went through 30 years ago, we're doomed unless we fight back against the tide.

Hmmm, gonna need some support or sources for that chief if you want me to take it seriously. Here, I'll get you started.

• Freeland is a Harvard-educated Rhodes Scholar. Let's not make light of the quality and pedigree of her educational qualifications.
  
• Freeland's journalistic career saw her working for the Financial Times (also as deputy editor and editor), The Washington Post, The Economist, The Globe and Mail (deputy editor), Thomson Reuters (managing director and editor of consumer news and editor of digital), and Reuters (global editor-at-large). Her work in these intensely dedicated positions often revolved around Russia and Eastern Europe (she was the Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times), which helped to develop her near encyclopaedic knowledge of Russian affairs—an area that is incredibly important for a foreign minister given our current global climate.
  
• Speaking of her journalistic prowess...that time you faulted her for not living in Canada? She was literally travelling the world as a foreign news correspondent. You know, doing the work that provides all of the fantastic foundational experience for a Minister of Foreign Affairs.
  
• Speaking of Russia, Freeland literally wrote the book on Russia's journey from communism to capitalism. Her second book on plutocracies was a New York Times bestseller and won the 2013 Lionel Gelber Prize for non-fiction reporting on foreign affairs (an award described by The Economist as "The world's most important award for non-fiction").
  
• Freeland served as the MP for Toronto Centre, an incredibly competitive political seat, from 2013-2015 during which she was made the Liberal Party's trade critic. During her time, she took an outspoken stance against Viktor Yanukovich's Russian-engineered puppet government, even going so far as conducting an extensive visit to Ukraine to meet with and show support for Ukrainian political opposition leaders, including the future President of Ukraine (a relationship that is still held today and is incredibly valuable considering Ukraine's recent history with Russia).
  
• Fun supportive aside:
  
  > Edward Lucas, a former reporter for The Economist, remembers Freeland as faster and defter than any of his colleagues. “I always felt that she was laps ahead of me,” he says. “On at least two occasions, I would be interviewing someone, having worked hard to find them. Mid-conversation, their phone would go off. They’d pick up and say, ‘Ah, Chrystia. Zdarova!’” Freeland’s early success rankled established male colleagues, says Lucas.
  
  
• Freeland was so dedicated in her support for free and fair elections in Ukraine after Russia's meddling that she was one of 13 Canadians banned from travelling to Russia by Putin himself (a distinction she publicly owned and considered an honour).
  
• One of Freeland's first Cabinet duties as Trudeau's Minister of International Trade (a position she held before she was made Minister of Foreign Affairs; you seem to be mistaken that she was part of the initial Cabinet formation, as she replaced Stephane Dion in the reshuffling of 2017) was overseeing Canada's negotiations of CETA. This trade agreement between Canada and the EU, a legacy project of Harper's government and the country's "biggest trade deal since NAFTA...expected to remove tariffs on 99% of goods that pass between Canada and the European common market", was signed in 2016 in part as a result of Freeland's involvement.
  
• In a show of continued support for the government of Ukraine against Russian pressure, one of Freeland's first actions after being appointed to Foreign Affairs Minister of Canada was extending Canada's 200 soldier military training mission in Ukraine until March 2019.
  
• When it was reported that Canadian-made military vehicles were being used against civilian Shia populations by the Saudi Arabian military, she quickly took action to conduct internal investigations into the matter.
  
• Freeland has taken an outspoken public stance against the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.
  
• Freeland took the time to raise issue with Xinjiang re-education camps and human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in China in a meeting with the Chinese Foreign Minister. While the result is chillier relations, I am personally all for a Foreign Minister standing up to China's silencing of one of its most glaring ongoing campaigns of human rights abuse.
  
• Despite your insistence that we were "fucked" in the USMCA agreement (an agreement so similar to NAFTA that Mickey Kantor, former US Trade Representative to Bill Clinton, described as "It's really the original NAFTA"), Forbes Magazine applauded her "strong negotiating skills" as they placed her in their 2019 list of leading world leaders. Personally, I applaud her for simply neutralizing the threat presented by Donald Trump, a man who sought to chaotically reshape NAFTA, an agreement he didn't even understand, simply to put his name on it.
  
  Feel free to comment, rebut, or add your own thoughts to this. Let me just say this though: you come across as someone who doesn't read about things, but rather listens for someone else to tell them what to say. You don't seem interested in learning about details, nuance, or process. You seem more interested in determining winners and losers, like some child pageant mother or a drunk sports fan at a bar.
  
  Feel free to prove me wrong, but given your current responses I'll just say this: you can feel free to hold any opinion as strongly as you like, but unless you can prove that understand why it was made beyond just "good decision/bad decision" and without sources don't expect anyone else to take it seriously.

In 1990s, during Boris Yeltsin presidency, Russia was poor, chaotic and corrupt but more free and democratic than today. There was real opposition and real political competition. There was really free press with competing POVs (although mostly controlled by oligarchs). Can be compared to pre-2014 Ukraine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Russia_(1992–present)

See Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism