May 18, 2023

TAKING THE CAPITALIST ROAD WAS THE WRONG CHOICE FOR UKRAINE – INTERVIEW WITH EXPERT RENFREY CLARK


Natylie's Place:  Understanding Russia

 

TAKING THE CAPITALIST ROAD WAS THE WRONG CHOICE FOR UKRAINE – MY INTERVIEW WITH EXPERT RENFREY CLARK


By Natylie Baldwin, Covert Action Magazine, 5/5/23 
 

Renfrey Clarke is an Australian journalist. Throughout the 1990s he reported from Moscow for Green Left Weekly of Sydney. This past year, he published The Catastrophe of Ukrainian Capitalism: How Privatisation Dispossessed & Impoverished the Ukrainian People with Resistance Books.

In April, I had an email exchange with Clarke. Below is the transcript.

Natylie Baldwin: You point out in the beginning of your book that Ukraine's economy had significantly declined by 2018 from its position at the end of the Soviet era in 1990. Can you explain what Ukraine's prospects looked like in 1990? And what did they look like just prior to Russia's invasion?

Renfrey Clarke: In researching this book I found a 1992 Deutsche Bank study arguing that, of all the countries into which the USSR had just been divided, it was Ukraine that had the best prospects for success. To most Western observers at the time, that would have seemed indisputable.


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Also see:  Sowing Seeds of Plunder: A Lose-Lose Situation in Ukraine