G7 Summit in July 1991, he had every reason to expect a hero’s welcome.  For the previous three years, he had seemed not so much to stride across the    international stage as to float, charming the media, signing disarmament treaties and picking up peace prizes, including the Nobel in’ 1990.

       He had even managed to do the previously unthinkable: win over the

American public. The Russian leader so thoroughly challenged Evil Empire caricatures that the U.S. press had taken to calling him by a cuddly nick name, “Gorby,” and in 1987, Time magazine took the risky decision of making the Soviet president their Man of the Year. The editors explained that unlike his predecessors (“gargoyles in fur hats”), Gorbachev was Russia's

(p 219) own Ronald Reagan-“a Kremlin version of the Great Communicator.” The Nobel Prize committee declared that thanks to his work, “It is our hope that we are now celebrating the end of the Cold War.”

    By the beginning of the nineties, with his twin policies of glasnost (open- ness) and perestroika (restructuring), Gorbachev had led the Soviet Union through a remarkable process of democratization: the press had been freed, Russia’s parliament, local councils, president and vice president had been elected, and the constitutional court was independent. As for the economy, Gorbachev was moving toward a mixture of a free market and a strong safety net, with key industries under public control —a process he predicted would take ten to fifteen years to be completed. His end goal was to build social democracy on the Scandinavian model, “a socialist beacon for all mankind.”

    At first it seemed that the West also wanted Gorbachev to succeed in loosening up the Soviet economy and transforming it into something close to Sweden’s. The Nobel Committee explicitly described the prize as a way of offering support to the transition—“a helping hand in an hour of need.” And on a visit to Prague, Gorbachev made it clear that he couldn’t do it all alone:

“Like mountain climbers on one rope, the world’s nations can either climb together to the summit or fall together into the abyss,” he said.

    So what happened at the G7 meeting in 1991 was totally unexpected. The nearly unanimous message that Gorbachev received from his fellow heads of state was that, if he did not embrace radical economic shock therapy immediately, they would sever the rope and let him fall. “Their suggestions as to the tempo and methods of transition were astonishing,” Gorbachev wrote of the event.

    Poland had just completed its first round of shock therapy under the JMF’s and Jeffrey Sachs’s tutelage, and the consensus among British prime minister John Major, U.S. president George H. W. Bush, Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney and Japanese prime minister Toshiki Kaifu was that the Soviet Union had to follow Poland’s lead on an even faster timetable. After the meeting, Gorbachev got the same marching orders from the IMF, the World Bank and every other major lending institution. Later that year, when Russia asked for debt forgiveness to weather a catastrophic economic crisis, the stern answer was that the debts had to be honored.’ Since the time when Sachs had marshaled aid and debt relief for Poland, the political mood had changed—it was meaner.

    What happened next—the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s eclipse

(p 220) by Yeltsin, and the tumultuous course of economic shock therapy in Russia—is a well-documented chapter of contemporary history. It is, however, a story too often told in the bland language of “reform,” a narrative so generic that it has hidden one of the greatest crimes committed against a democracy in modern history. Russia, like China, was forced to choose between a Chicago School economic program and an authentic democratic revolution. Faced with that choice, China’s leaders had attacked their own I, people in order to prevent democracy from disturbing their free-market plans. Russia was different: the democratic revolution was, already well under way—in order to push through a Chicago School economic program, that peaceful and hopeful process that Gorbachev began had to be violently interrupted, then radically reversed.

      Gorbachev knew that the only way to impose the kind of shock therapy being advocated by the G7 and the IMF was with force—as did many in the West pushing for these policies. The Economist magazine, in an influential 1990 piece, urged Gorbachev to adopt “strong-man rule. . . to smash the resistance that has blocked serious economic reform.”’ Only two weeks after the Nobel Committee had declared an end to the Cold War, The Economist was urging Gorbachev to model himself after one of the Cold War’s most notorious killers. Under the heading “Mikhail Sergeevich Pinochet?” the article concluded that even though following its advice could cause “possible blood-letting. . . it might, just might, be the Soviet Union’s turn for what could be called the Pinochet approach to liberal economics.” The Washington Post was willing to go further. In August 1991, the paper ran a commentary under the headline “Pinochet’s Chile a Pragmatic Model for Soviet Economy.” The article supported the idea of a coup for getting rid of the slow-going Gorbachev, but the author, Michael Schrage, worried that the Soviet president’s opponents “had neither the savvy nor the support to seize the Pinochet option.” They should model themselves, Schrage wrote, after “a despot who really knew how to run a coup: retired Chilean general Augusto Pinochet.”

       Gorbachev soon found himself facing an adversary who was more than       willing to play the role of a Russian Pinochet. Boris Yeltsin, though holding       the post of Russian president, had a much lower profile than Gorbachev, who       headed all the Soviet Union. That was to change dramatically on August 19,       1991, one month after the G7 Summit. A group from the Communist old guard drove tanks up to the White House, as the Russian parliament building is called. In a bid to halt the democratization process, they threatened to attack....

The rest is tragedy, a country where the state adopted neoliberal deregulations and sold its resources for 10 cents on the dollar, and the standard of living plummeted, where life expectancy dropped over 10 years, where poverty is the norm, and the promise of growth was the deception to sell the neoliberal policies.  This is the neoliberal shock doctrine plan, a plan drawn up by the globalizers.  Ms. Klein’s book (also available as an audio book) should be on everybody’s book case well worn--jk.