It was March 1994, more than two years after the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the debates within the U.S. Embassy in Moscow were heated.
Diplomats in the economic section, backed by the Treasury Department in Washington, argued ardently that radical free-market reforms were the only path for post-Soviet Russia and that democracy would surely follow. Political advisers believed, equally passionately, that such "shock therapy” would only worsen the devastating dislocation Russians were already suffering with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russian people, they warned, would end up blaming America — and democracy itself — for their woes.
In the heat of the debate, E. Wayne Merry, the top political analyst in the embassy and one of the most forceful critics of shock therapy, set out a detailed case against it in a long telegram provocatively titled "Whose Russia Is It Anyway? Toward a Policy of Benign Respect.”
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