Andrei Illarionov, one of last high-profile classical liberals with a significant voice in Russian public life, has been removed (New York Times; requires simple registration) by President Putin from some of his responsibilities as chief economic advisor to the Kremlin for his outspoken criticism of the Russian government. In recent months Andrei has been remarkably bold in his criticism of the Russian government’s handling of Chechnya, of Ukraine, of the Yukos affair, of the centralization of power in the hands of the Kremlin, of press freedoms, of the judiciary, and of much more.
The election of Viktor Yushchenko in Ukraine (which Illarionov praised at a widely covered news conference last week) has given hope to Russian liberals that Tsarist-style centralization can be resisted and that there is more hope for authentic liberalism in the region.
The good news from the New York Times article:
Last week, however, the Echo of Moscow radio station demonstrated that he had some support away from the Kremlin’s walls.
The station, even as Mr. Illarionov appeared on the air, conducted a swift call-in poll, asking listeners to answer one question: Should Mr. Illarionov stay in government and try to influence its decisions, or quit?
The poll lasted four minutes. More than 9,200 people called; 86 percent said he should stay.
Illarionov and his team were Cato’s primary partners in the conference on “A Liberal Agenda for the New Century: A Global Perspective” held last April in Moscow. (My paper on “The Role of Institutions and Law in Economic Development” is available in English here and in Russian here. The entire conference, including the remarks by Illarionov, can be listened to or read here.)
NOTE: I’m back from my trip to Austria, where I did some applied research into Austrian skiing theory. I was also interviewed by Die Presse (organized by Rahim Taghizadegan and Julian Rauchdobler of www.liberalismus.at; I’ll post the interview or article if and when it appears) and met with some friends from Greece and Serbia, organized by my old friend Panagiotis Evangelopoulos, who is now teaching economics and doing pioneering work in law and economics in Greece. So, I’m back and will be blogging a bit more, having been reinvigorated by lots of Tiroler Groestl, Tafelspitz, and other tasty Austrian dishes.
Mr. Palmer-
I have been a libertarian for about a year now (always socially liberal; became economically liberal due to one of my ECON classes @ George Mason University), and you may be hearing a lot from me.
Anyway…This isn’t specifically about that, but I need your help countering this piece from Mr. Raimondo: http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=4072 particularly this part:
“Yushchenko is a creature of this system, and his tenure at the National Bank of the Ukraine was marked by the corruption so characteristic of the political culture: a scandal involving falsification of the country’s credit ledger — essentially lying to the International Monetary Fund about the quantity of Ukrainian cash reserves. As the Financial Times reports:
‘Under his control, the bank was involved in a damaging row with the International Monetary Fund over the use of IMF loans to falsify the country’s credit position – allowing some politicians, but not Mr Yushchenko, to benefit personally. He survived the ensuing scandal.’
A PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) audit confirmed the suspicions of IMF officials that Western lenders have been systematically deceived by Yushchenko’s NBU:
‘By giving a misleading impression of the size of Ukraine’s reserves, the NBU’s reserve management practices may have allowed Ukraine to receive as many as three disbursements under the stand-by arrangement in effect at that time that it might not otherwise have been able to obtain. Ã?Â?Ã?¢Ã?¢?Ã?¬Ã?Â?Ã?¦ The three disbursements in question that would have been affected by the transactions examined in the PwC report were based on October, November, and December 1997 figures. They total SDR 145 million (about US$200 million).’
Thanks a lot.
P.S. I know that DiLorenzo’s book about Lincoln had errors (I saw the link on your page to the review from the, I believe, Independent Institute), but do you know if his new book “How Capitalism Saved America” is accurate; I hope it is, because it’s really good.
UPDATED 12:05 am, January 6, 2005
Adam,
I will write a longer note a bit later, after I ask some of my knowledgeable Russian and Ukrainian friends for their responses, but one thing was quite clear from the context of Raimondo’s charges: he searched long and hard to find anything negative about Yushchenko and all he could come up with were some quite indirect insinuations of accounting problems at the national bank. That’s remarkably weak. The articles on Yushchenko in the Financial Times and other publications (staffed with real reporters with real understanding and expertise in financial matters) have generally stated that Yushchenko is well known for his honesty and probity — the reverse of Raimondo’s feeble search for dirt. But I will look into this further and get back to you.
Regarding DiLorenzo’s book, I have not read it. Given the remarkable pile of inaccuracies and errors in his earlier book (and those were just the ones that reviewers managed to check; how many others did they not manage to verify were erroneous?), I would not cite anything by DiLorenzo unless I had checked the sources he cites and verified that they were both accurately cited and reliable sources. Mr. DiLorenzo has amply demonstrated that his research consists of finding support for whatever he already believes, getting half of that wrong, and then throwing it all at the wall, in the hope that some of it will stick. His standards of evidence are sadly far below what one would expect.
FYI: I was just sent this interesting link from an exchange about Ukraine that was evidently occasioned by one of Justin Raimondo’s flaming emails (one that seems much milder than the ones I receive from him): http://www.postmodernclog.com/archives/cat_ukraine.html#000922 .
UPDATE: I have since read through the various items from which Mr. Raimondo has plucked his quotations. (It’s amazing how useful google is to shrill propagandists posing as journalists, such as Raimondo.) I was struck by how weak the claims were (and that’s remarkable for a full time slanderer such as Raimondo) and also by how unsubstantiated were the insinuations that Viktor Yushchenko is somehow a corrupt figure. None of the documents credibly claims that Viktor Yushchenko personally profited from any policies connected with him. Further, Mr. Raimondo suggests quite clearly, on the basis of an IMF release of a Pricewaterhouse-Coopers audit report of May 4, 2000 (http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/nb/2000/nb0026.htm ) that Viktor Yushchenko or someone he knows absconded with “all that money” (“about US$200 million”), but the report to which he links in fact makes no such claims or suggestions. It covers IMF disbursements to the National Bank of Ukraine, not disbursements from the NBU to anyone else. Mr. Raimondo has failed to substantiate any of his claims or to support in any reasonable way any of his insinuations about Viktor Yushchenko.
Interestingly, the Anders Aslund essay that Mr. Raimondo cites (http://www.ceip.org/people/aslDubrovnik.html ) states something rather different from what Mr. Raimondo tries to suggest: “The macroeconomic stabilization was preceded by a strict and highly responsible monetary policy initiated in December 1993. The political success of this monetary policy is proven by the continued tenure of Governor Viktor A. Yushchenko since December 1992. He could have been ousted by the parliament, so his survival is a sign both of his political skills and that it has been possible to sell restrictive monetary policies.” Not much evidence of corruption or mismanagement.
Andrei Illarionov rocks alright.
He was one of the first Europeans to point out Kyoto was expensive bunk.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3152424.stm
>>>>I was just sent this interesting link from an exchange about Ukraine that was evidently occasioned by one of Justin Raimondo’s flaming emails (one that seems much milder than the ones I receive from him):<<<<<
Tom: I challenge you to prove that Justin has sent you any email. Post them.
If you want, Tex, I’ll forward some to you. They’re rather too nasty for posting, I fear. (All about Raimondo’s nasty hatred of gay people and his, shall we say, private thoughts about their personal lives.) The other things you could do would be to A) search through some of the comments on the sections under “The Fever Swamp,” where you’ll find some remarkable Raimondo comments posted and B) wonder whether one really ought, as a general matter, to post private correspondence.
You may be, for all I know, a decent person. If so, what are you doing working with such a hate-filled and nasty person as Justin Raimondo?
In any case, it’s a shame that discussions of truly courageous persons such as Andrei Illarionov have to be dirtied by references to the kind of gutter denizens who would mock and make fun of Viktor Yushchenko’s having been poisoned. So no more discussion of Raimondo, antiwar.com, lewrockwell.com, or DiLorenzo on this posting. What is good and noble should not be sullied by any more references to what crawls out of the gutter.
Jean-Pierre ChevÃ?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?¨nement was once quoted “off-on record”: “un ministre, ca ferme sa gueule ou ca dÃ?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?©missionne” . ChevÃ?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?¨nement, a decent man with the wrong ideas, got it right there… even if A. N. Illarionov is not a Minister himself, the rules of the political game are the same everywhere. See today’s editorial in the NYT.
Nowadays, as a political operative, there are three exciting challenges on this planet: Accept a job as 1- Hamid Karzai’s bodyguard, 2- Donald Rumsfeld PR- or 3- Illarionov’s spokesman.
NV
Mr. Palmer-
Thanks for the debunking. It wasn’t true, but this is one of those “just in case it was…” situations.
Thanks again.