The United States directly funded and staffed Russia’s austerity program

Evidence

Summers was adamant that, for Russia, “the three ‘- ations’— privatization, stabilization, and liberalization— must all be completed as soon as possible. Maintaining the momentum of reform is a crucial political problem.” As a foreign interest, the United States was keen to solve this crucial problem: President Clinton passed billions in aid to Yeltsin, and USAID lavishly funded the Harvard Institute for International Development, directed by the economist Jeff rey Sachs, to advise Yeltsin’s austerity project. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1596

Categorization

• XREF: Related to the book’s earlier chapters on how foreign creditors and the Bank of England engineered interwar austerity in Italy and Britain — Washington’s 1990s role in Russia parallels that pattern.