Jeffrey Sachs Introduced "Shock Therapy" to Poland Before Bringing It To Post-Communist Russia (and then Ukraine)

 I can't let people (even those on the left) continue to even mention this guy in passing like he's some foreign policy hero now. The problems we're seeing in Europe and Asia right now are due to the damage Sachs' shock doctrine did to countries like Poland and Russia and Ukraine.

From Sachs' own website (referencing a statement he gave in 1994): 

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the Soviet Union in 1991 are watershed events in world history. Naturally, the real import of these monumental events has been especially hard to judge in their immediate aftermath. Each succeeding year, we gain important new perspectives on their meaning. This is certainly true in the economic realm, where debates about the transition from communism to market economy have been especially lively and contentious. 

As the economic advisor to the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1989, I urged Poland to undertake a rapid transition to “normal” capitalism, on the model of Western Europe. When the first post-Communist government in Poland came to power in August 1989, the new economic leader, Deputy Prime Minister Leszek Balcerowica, adopted a radical strategy for the rapid transformation of Poland to a market economy. This strategy has subsequently won the somewhat misleading sobriquet of “shock therapy.” The strategy has been widely debated since its inception in Poland on January 1, 1990. It has been adopted, in modified form, in much of the rest of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, including Russia after 1991.1 (For an earlier description of Poland’s reforms, see Sachs 1993. For a conceptual overview of “shock therapy,” see Sachs 1994c.)

With five years of experience of economic reform in Eastern Europe, the strategy can be more clearly understood and evaluated. The strategy seems to be winning the test of time. Not only have the early “shock therapy” countries — especially Poland and the Czech Republic — outperformed most of the other countries, but the idea of radical, comprehensive transformation to a market economy is increasingly being adopted in countries that earlier shunned the strategy. The newly elected president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, recently declared his intention to lead such a reform effort in his country.

We already know how shock therapy went in Russia. But what about Ukraine under Leonid Kuchma? While even Wikipedia couldn't polish his corruption-riddled rule, it's clear that whatever economic reform were planned paled in comparison to other initiatives: 

Its first president from 1991 to 1994 was Leonid Kravchuk, an ethnic Ukrainian and former Communist Party agitprop specialist who's remembered for steering Ukraine toward independence but also for chaperoning an oligarchic system.

The next president, Leonid Kuchma, is also ethnic Ukrainian and was a Soviet aerospace engineer and manager. His two terms in office were characterized by corruption, election rigging, a tightening of the kleptocracy and the suppression of critical media outlets. By the end of the 1990s, he was blamed for imposing authoritarian rule on Ukraine.

At least two high-profile investigative journalists were killed under suspicious circumstances during his watch, and most notoriously, evidence showed he quite possibly ordered the murder of one of them, Georgiy Gongadze, in September 2000.

The killing of Gongadze, a Georgia-born journalist and political activist, became one of Ukraine's most consequential events, galvanizing its nationalist movement and sparking a spate of anti-government protests.

Gongadze was deeply involved in Georgian and Ukrainian politics both as an activist and journalist. He'd fought for Georgian independence against the Soviets before finding refuge in Kyiv.

In the spring of 2000, he created a muckraking publication, the Ukrainska Pravda, that ran exposes about high-level corruption inside Kuchma's government. In September that year, he was abducted and his body was found in a forest decapitated and doused in acid.

His murder sparked large demonstrations against Kuchma and laid the grounds for what came to be known as the “Orange Revolution,” a mass uprising between November and January in 2004–2005 that foreshadowed the “Maidan Revolution” 10 years later.

Faced with massive protests and mounting evidence of his involvement in Gongadze's assassination, including an audio recording that allegedly linked him to the killing, Kuchma declined to run for reelection and instead threw his support behind Viktor Yanukovych, an eastern Ukrainian politician, former prime minister and oligarch of Belarusian, Russian and Polish ancestry.

While Sachs's "shock therapy" may have ended communism, but it introduced a form of capitalism that helped make Russia and Ukraine the countries they are today.