Participants

Judith Shapiro¹; Andrea Richter Hume⁵; Jefrrey Sachs³; Brigitte Granville⁴; Vladimir Mau²; Christopher Granville⁶;  ¹ London School of Economics, UK;  ² Independent Researcher, UK;  ³ Columbia University, United States;  ⁴ Queen Mary, University of London, UK;  ⁵ International Monetary Fund, United States;  ⁶ TS Lombard, UK

Discussion

This Roundtable proposes to offer an opportunity to begin to  learn from economic history, snd each. other with a discussion of the policy and practice of the chief international actors at the time  the Russian Federation emerged from the wreckage of the USSR with enough food to last two weeks. "We are even taking aid from the Wehrmacht," spit out  Boris Yeltsin at a press conference, when a reporter asked if it were really so desperate.

Participants were all observers on the spot, from different angles when the IMF and G7 gave a tiny trickle of aid to the bankrupt desingated successor state to the Soviet Union.  Jeffrey Sachs had promoted the urgent need for $30 billion as fiscal support and stabilisation of the ruble, which at the time seemed a large amount.  It did not happen.  The rest of the misery is history.of the period of the "Washington Consensus."  The end point selected here is 17 August 1998, when the Russian govenrment defaulted on its debt and removed all support for the ruble exchange rate, causing a sharp devaluation.  The overall focus, however, is on the years 1992 and 1993.

Would it have made a  historic difference?  Could it have meant that the 1993 White House confrontation, the subsequent election, and much else, even the current war, would have been averted?   Historians, especially from an eastern  or central European tradition, learn that "history has no subjunctive mood, " no "what if?"   The roundtable will also hope to show that at least in Economics the "what if" does not have to be idle speculation, but can be hard-headed analytics.  When analyses differ the contrast can be clera and evidence adduced.

The focus of this  session is proposed to be economics: what  happened and not why it did.  The modelling approach of economics allows that, though it  cannot be perfect: for example, it does not that easily add an equation  for  the chance that aid will be stolen.   It also allows less clearly to model how the economy affected population attitudes and politics. (We  have to do more guessing about why individuals voted as they did, from opinion polls and other imperfect instruments.)

The hope is to conduct this as a dialogue without  anger and blame assessment,  though that can only be an aspiration and task, particularly for the chair and organiser.

It is  proposed that at least the chair and two others be in London but more is possible.

Given the encouragement of hte Congress organisers a colloquium with more witnesses to history is possible and arguably of wide interest.