Jeffery Sachs didn't tell Russians to sell their women into slavery.
Neither did Soviet authorities.
People like Sachs, given the economic policies they advised the Yeltsin administration to implement, contributed to laying the groundwork for the catastrophic economic and social conditions prevailing in the Russian Federation during the early post-Soviet years, of which the increase in prostitution was merely one consequence among many.
And 2/3rd or more of Russian problem was due to weak infrastructure and corruption everywhere that has nothing to do with Sachs at least I think so.
The wrong choices of Russian policy-makers during those years were directly inspired by neoliberal western advisers, not by communists. With sounder policies, much better results could have been obtained, no matter the state of infrastructures inherited from the USSR.
Also, in a country turned upside down that goes through a systemic transition at every level (political, administrative, ideological, social, cultural, economic), uncontrolled economic laissez-faire policies are a recipe for disaster as they create an ideal breeding ground for all sorts of corruption.
Indeed a must read but at the end of day it was their own corruption and failing to do anything about it , the oppression of people in eastern Europe and their republics was what caused the uprising. USSR was a dead horse and nobody was happy about it but also nobody dared to talk about it.
The USSR collapsed neither as a result of a large scale popular uprising, nor did a real economic meltdown take place (this occurred once western-leaning capitalists had taken over). Its downfall came as a result of its leadership headed by Gorbachev having decided to sabotage the system from within via ill-advised types of reforms. I'm not saying the USSR wouldn't have benefited from reforms, but these ought to have taken a completely different if not opposite direction to what Gorbachev introduced.
More profoundly, the countdown to the Soviet Union's fall was initiated right after Joseph Stalin's demise, when he was succeeded by people who thought western imperialists can be appeased or reasoned with, that coexistence as rivals is possible with the totalitarian US regime, or that the Soviet Union might gain in taking a little page out of the western system's book here and there.
Can you tell me about those funds . Let for start compare defence ministry and IRGC.
For example .?
The IRGC receives almost twice as much as the Army from the defence budget, while other organizations like the Joint Staff, the Ministry's Research and Innovation Organization, the Basij etc receive their own shares, but when it comes to construction and development in the civilian realm then obviously other institutions overall have more means at their disposal than Sepah.
The IRGC have proven to be the best infrastructural project managers in Iran hands down. Whatever meaningful budget they obtain, they deliver. They actually are the ones who put funds to good use. Their potent missile force, Iran's main asset of deterrence against the global "superpower", was developed on a shoestring budget in international comparison. Same applies to the civilian projects undertaken by Sepah's Khātam ol-Anbiyā Garrison. Then we may look at the automobile industry, which is managed by liberals, how mediocre and ambivalent its development has been compared to the wealth it generated for itself.
And how is Sepah's record comparable to an administration like Rohani's, whose abysmal performance is well documented? And by that I mean its productivity or how well it managed to translate budgets into concrete achievements.
This is without mentioning the fact that we're talking about an administration which openly proclaimed its disbelief in governmental intervention concerning many crucial areas such as housing for the poor (with the corresponding Minister publicly stating he takes pride in the fact that not a single new public housing unit was built during his tenure!), as well as its disbelief in self-sufficiency when it comes to strategic sectors such as agriculture. In other terms, an administration which was ideologically predisposed not to invest a lot, not to put too much effort into public development projects in the first place, convinced that these tasks should be delegated to the 1% privileged class of private capitalist oligarchs and above all to foreign investors who were nowhere to be seen. The exact opposite of the IRGC's way of thinking.
