On March 28, 1994, as the British-U.S. “shock therapy” economic policy was depopulating post-Soviet Russia, a critique of that policy was drafted by the chief political analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. The memo, drafted by E. Wayne Merry, was not distributed, and remained suppressed for thirty years. Following an FOIA suit filed by the National Security Archives, it was published on Dec. 18, 2024, under the title “The Long Telegram of the 1990s: ‘Whose Russia Is It Anyway? Toward a Policy of Benign Respect.” (The original “Long Telegram” was drafted by George Kennan from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in Feb. 1946, warning of the dangers of an aggressive post-war Soviet Union, laying out what became the policy of “containment.")
In his summary. Merry writes that “democratic forces” in Russia are in trouble. “We are not helping with a misguided over-emphasis on market economics. There is no reason to believe the Russian economy is capable of rapid market reform.” He criticized what passes for “democracy” today, when those allegedly supporting democracy over-rule the outcome of the voters, as in the EU attack on Hungarian and Romanian voters. He attacks the idea of an aggressive response toward a government “when the economic choices of that democracy do not achieve an American standard of ‘success.’ ... If Russia elects to follow a non-Anglo-American school of economics, it will be in excellent company.” America should be concerned, he continued with “the fate of Russian democracy but not to the choices that democracy may make about the distribution of its own wealth and about the organization of its means of production and finance.”
