Letter: Russian extremes

Sir: The last six years of "Western-style reforms" in Russia have been a failure, and in some ways worse than useless. The shock therapy monetarist policies of the IMF and, ironically, the previous Chernomyrdin regime, have pushed 70 per cent of the population onto or below the poverty line. Twenty-year qualified doctors and university lecturers earn $100 a month in a country where, even before devaluation, imported food was dearer than in the UK. GDP in Russia has dropped by 50 per cent since 1991.

Is it enough to blame the Russian government for not implementing IMF conditions, such as improved tax collection, public spending cuts and legal reform? Clearly most of the blame must lie with an inherently rotten elite who have profited handsomely in personal terms from the privatisations of recent years while doing little to stimulate genuine reform. But the IMF and Western governments cannot escape culpability.

Their insistence on almost overnight privatisations of a lumbering command economy as a condition for loans has created the monster of the oligarchs, and the austerity measures of the shock therapy have crippled ordinary people. Small wonder that only 3 million Russians pay their taxes when even the middle classes (if we can use such a word) can barely afford to buy fruit or normal quality meat. Billions of dollars of loans have continued to pour into a black hole of corruption, mismanagement and Swiss bank accounts.

Even if Chernomrydin gets his coalition, come winter and hyperinflation, even the stoical and resilient Russian people may snap. The spectre of a hard man such as Lebed or even a military coup is a very real one.

EDWARD COOKE

Chichester, West Sussex