I have a feeling that this new book, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, is going to get a pretty thorough pasting. John Lloyd (who does know his Russia, he was FT chief out there in the 90s) is most unimpressed with her knowledge of the place.
• the fact and failure of the 1991 putsch against Gorbachev (which she
describes as a simple grab for power by Yeltsin) which ended any
lingering authority in the Soviet presidency and the Communist party,
whose destruction removed the backbone of the whole system;
She describes the first coup as a power grab by Yeltsin? Eeek! It was an unsuccessful power grab by Soviet hardliners. Not sure if anything else she writes on the subject can be trusted (even to be factually true, let alone her interpretation of it) after that.
The conspiratorial version of history, even as its first draft,
isn’t adequate to understand a process as complex as the Soviet
collapse and the Russian transition to some form of democracy and
capitalism. Naomi Klein’s effort to do so, in two chapters of her
latest bookThe Shock Doctrine,
isn’t so much wrong (some of it isn’t wrong) as hugely over-determined
by a thesis that puts a cabal of neoliberals in Washington, Harvard and
Moscow in charge of destroying the Soviet Union/Russia – and
succeeding, at least for a time.
This was, she says, "one of the greatest crimes committed against a democracy in modern history".
The fall of the Soviets is a crime against democracy? What has that woman been smoking?
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