Worth reading both his cover note and the original memo, now declassified, in full.
The most interesting aspect of this whole affair was the crucial role played by the Treasury. They were running the American effort in Russia, and would not listen to career foreign service officers’ critique of their policy. When Merry wrote a critical memo, it was squashed by the Treasury: “it would give Larry Summers a heart attack.”
Thank you for sharing! I read the background and context he wrote for the release and am still working my way through the memo. Really interesting to read what seems to be a sober assessment from 1994 of the political situation in Russia and the inner machinations of the American state during the policy of shock therapy from someone who was in the thick of it. I tend to find it hard to determine how much of what can appear to be (and is often described as) incompetence is a result of drinking the free market Kool-Aid and how much is pure cynicism. Merry himself seems to be a true believer in the good intentions of the United States (as are many bureaucrats), and I’m sure there is some level of simple bullheadedness and ignorance at play in how American officials completely failed to understand the dynamics in Russia, but obviously some of those ghouls knew exactly what they were doing.
It can be quite taxing to read all-caps text, so in the interest of making the text more readable (and accessible) I’ve started working on a standard capitalized version with corrections to obvious typo using the existing OCR as a base while omitting repetitive elements like the headers and footers. I’ll post what I’ve finished below (Parts I-IV), which amounts to just under one-third of the memo, and hopefully I can finish the rest tomorrow. I’d appreciate any and all feedback! For those who rely on screenreaders, I’m curious if precise editorial brackets such as “U[n]fortunately” are a nuisance. Also, I’d really appreciate if anyone knows where the full text could be posted once it’s complete so that more people can make use of it. I don’t want any credit, but I’m sure there’s a better place for this than the comments of a Hexbear post.
If anyone wants to take a crack at it themselves, all I’m doing is pasting the OCR’d text into VS Code so I can convert everything to lowercase (Ctrl+Shift+P, Transform to Lowercase), and then going through looking for typos, OCR errors, and missing punctuation. I manually capitalize the beginning of sentences, but otherwise I leave 95% of the capitalization to a final Perl pass, adding terms as I go. Nothing fancy: I just stick them in a file and run
Perl script
#!perl s/\bamerica/America/g; s/\bunited states/United States/gi; s/\brussia/Russia/g; s/\bsoviet/Soviet/g; s/\byeltsin/Yeltsin/g; s/\bwest/West/g; s/\bgaydar/Gaydar/g; s/\bfedorov/Fedorov/g; s/\byegor/Yegor/g; s/\bboris/Boris/g; s/\bshakhray/Shakhray/g; s/\bshokhin/Shokhin/g; s/\bkozyrev/Kozyrev/g; s/\bchernomyrdin/Chernomyrdin/g; s/\bmoscow/Moscow/g; s/"russia's choice"/"Russia's Choice\"/gi; s/\bgorbachev/Gorbachev/g; s/\baleksandr/Aleksandr/g; s/\byakovlev/Yakovlev/g; s/\brutskoy/Rutskoy/g; s/\bkhasbulatov/Khasbulatov/g; s/\bthe communist party/the Communist Party/gi; s/\bkremlin/Kremlin/g; s/\bduma\b/Duma/g;(yeah, most of those
\baren’t strictly necessary, but it’ll be just my luck when he brings up Prussia on page 20)edit: finished! I’ll probably take another pass at some point and see if I can whip up an EPUB or something.