Thread by @j2dumfounded

Picked up this beauty from 1997 at a thrift store yesterday.
©️Cornell University

Who am I to resist a book with a blurb from Dimitri K. Simes of the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom?

I thumbed through it noticing its lovely map, and notations made by the original owner. They seemed a trail of breadcrumbs...that led me to Michael Ledeen, of all people.

Here is the lovely map.

The first dog eared page, 74, is annotated with

“A theft operation”

Referring to privatization under the “loans-for-shares” program that you’ve probably read about in Red Notice by Bill Browder.

Page 80 is the only bookmarked page. It is multimedia — a pink Post-it ™️ note and the fragment of a check.

We should note that 42% of the Russian stock market is accounted for by 42% oil & gas giants, 21% by electric utilities, 13% by metals, and 11% by telecommunications.

Two underlined items:
1. Finally, the reformers had not been able to persuade the government to include all the companies in the program of rapid privatization
2. many of which were held back from voucher privatization yet constitute 100 most valuable companies in the country.

On page 84 we find this penciling in of the paragraph regarding the “bellwether” metal industry in Russia. “Of Russia’s 400 metallurgy firms, only 12 remain in state ownership.”

OK, when I read “aluminum” I think “Deripaska”.

Nothing more until two tiny red dots on Page 170:
“The years from 1993 to 1995 might’ve gone better for large & midsized privatized companies had the government been able to impose a hard budget constraint on the companies & stop the subsidies.”
40% GDP April 96 = liabilities.

“Total misconception” our original owner writes, encircling a sentence, “This is a hopeful start.”

I promised you Michael Ledeen.
He “has pointed out that the democratic revolution sweeping the world is marked by push for individual human rights over state power.”

OO is right.

Sigh. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory or something. For more information we are recommended to Rutgers.
Nowadays at ... not to be found. Try searching for the program; I did.

The closest we come is credits for the authors.

And the search engine offers up this tale of hubris and corruption, “How Harvard lost Russia”
institutionalinvestor.com/article/b150np…

Because I forgot to put quotes around “Rutgers”.

Holy moly even with quotes around Rutgers you find this, the same story, How Harvard Lost Russia as a 33 page PDF
cemi.ehess.fr/docannexe/file…
but still no mention of Rutgers. I surmise the “Russian Research” program moved there?

OMFG it didn’t take long to find Blavatnik’s origin story.

[Please, use the Oxfod comma, folks.]

^Oxford

My typos are legion.

Groovy, baby…Schliefer, of Harvard, writing about himself and Blasi in the introduction to Kremlin Capitalism on page 3.
They were strategic advisers to the Russian government and organized & directed the Russian National Survey research upon which this book is based.