Opinion: We should have had a Marshall Plan for Russia, by George Fiala

My current brain first came into existence in the 1950’s, after the two world wars and the Great Depression—right in the middle of the Cold War. Growing up through the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, we were all taught that the Soviet Union was the big enemy, making the threat of nuclear disaster always lurking.

I never really met any Russians, so I had no reason to like or dislike them. I did have a friend whose parents were from the Ukraine. He hated Russia with a huge passion, but I just thought he was weird that way.

The 1980’s brought us Ronald Reagan, a cold war warrior, whose big foreign policy goal was defeating the Soviets. Proxy wars, in which we supported one side and the Soviets the other, proliferated and the expense helped weaken Russia economically. What made things worse for them was a plunge in the price of oil in the late 1980’s. Oil was then, as now, a big part of their national income. I remember paying less than a dollar for gas on a drive through New Jersey back then.

A lack of money basically brought down the Iron Curtain. People saw that Communist life was less comfortable than a Western existence, and the eastern bloc and the ‘stan’ states left the union, leaving Russia to itself.

I remember wondering why the new Clinton administration wasn’t more helpful to the country that was supposedly our big enemy all those years. It ended up that the 1990’s were horrible for the average Russian. You would think that a whole country that was against the West needed to have reasons to be for the West if we were going to establish a good, long-term relationship.

Instead, we sent them dubious economists, including Jeffrey Sachs and David Lipton to give them “shock therapy.” That policy is the opposite of the term “Develop, Don’t Destroy,” used by those against radical real estate development plans in Prospect Heights in the 2000’s.

Shock therapy left ordinary Russians on their own, forced to adjust to an unfamiliar capitalism without any help or education. The result was to create fabulously wealthy oligarchs who took advantage of the plan and took all the state businesses for themselves, and an impoverished rest of them in which alcoholism and suicide rates grew exponentially throughout the 1990’s.

Seemingly we didn’t care at all. Instead we watched as a former Soviet spy Putin was given the reigns of government by promising to restore ‘order’ and fix things.

Fast forward to today, and the same Putin threatens to break asunder established liberal democracy, returning us to a world of nuclear fear.

I spent almost a decade studying international relations on a graduate school level, and our responsibility for Russia’s situation was never discussed.

We did study the Marshall Plan which sent lots of American aid to all of Europe, included the defeated parties, to help them rebuild after World War II. A big reason was to avoid the disaster of the first World War. The revengeful Versailles Treaty which ended that war set the stage for the next one, as Germany was punished and instead of help, were made to pay for damages.

While I always liked Bill Clinton, I consider his lack of economic help for our former cold war enemy his greatest mistake.

Finally, this month, I read somebody who agrees with me. Right after the Ukraine invasion, Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev very publicly resigned, defected and spoke out against the war. This month, in an article in the esteemed Foreign Affairs magaine, he writes:

“If Ukraine wins and Putin falls, the best thing the West can do isn’t to inflict humiliation. Instead, it’s the opposite: provide support…  Providing aid would also allow the West to avoid repeating its behavior from the 1990s, when Russians felt scammed by the United State.”

And avoid a future leader like Putin.