The expert assessed Chubais’s article on non-payments in the 1990s: “Admission of defeat”

These policies are no longer relevant.

The well-known Russian economist and politician Anatoly Chubais, who has been abroad for the last year, has publicly tried to explain why the reforms of the 1990s, to which he was directly involved, failed. It turns out that the root of evil is in the total non-payments that literally tormented the Russian economy at that time. This formidable phenomenon could not be predicted and overcome in time, admits the author of an article published in the latest issue of Voprosy Ekonomiki. Meanwhile, independent experts assure, there are other failures with the reforms at that time, and very deep roots.

Chubais is presented as an independent researcher from Glasgow (UK) in an analytical piece entitled “Non-Payments in the Russian Economy of the 1990s: An Unforeseen Institution”. According to him, the fight against the non-payment crisis took almost ten years, starting in 1994, when the government created an operational commission to eliminate its causes, headed by Chubais himself – at that time the deputy prime minister. In 1996, her rank was raised to a presidential commission.

“Unfortunately,” the author writes, “we have to admit that the developers of the concept of reforms could neither predict the emergence of this destructive institution, nor give its scientific explanation in a timely manner, nor promptly overcome it in practice.”

Chubais identifies two types of non-payments in the economy: vertical and horizontal. The former refers to the situation when an enterprise does not fulfill its obligations on taxes and fees to the budget system. And the state and the treasury, in turn, behave exactly the same way with enterprises. Horizontal non-payments should be understood as the failure of an enterprise to fulfill its financial obligations to suppliers within the terms agreed between them. According to Chubais, “the underlying cause of vertical non-payments in the 1990s was the weakness of the state, and horizontal ones – the weakness of the institution of private property.”

“Indeed, this was one of the reasons why the so-called reformist government was criticized,” says the director of the Center for Economic Policy Research at the Faculty of Economics of Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov Oleg Buklemishev. – Criticism was largely to the point: these people considered money to be the fundamental principle of the economy and the universe. They had no doubt that if they put things in order in the financial economy, then success awaits them in everything else. However, this position cannot be called the central element of the reforms. A complex phenomenon does not have a universal and simple explanation. It is only clear that the planned plan did not give the result that was expected. Chubais’ interpretation is reminiscent of the famous phrase “victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is always an orphan.” Apparently, on his part, this is in some sense an admission of defeat.

The non-payments themselves were generated by the legacy of the planned Soviet economy and the state, which could not balance, reduce income and expenses, Buklemishev argues. The interlocutor of “MK” does not have an answer to the question why Chubais suddenly decided to act as an economic columnist, and whether he will do this regularly in the future. Buklemishev recalls that the author of the sensational article in Voprosy ekonomiki urgently fled Russia shortly after the start of the NWO without making any statements. And it is very strange that a person refers to the events of thirty years ago in a situation where there are things more relevant, when a lot is at stake in the country and the world, when I would like to hear from him some explanations and forecasts regarding what is happening now, and not long ago past. “Is there nothing else to talk about?” Our interlocutor asks a rhetorical question.