They thought they were free... Russians queue up to buy 'food' at the first McDonalds 'restaurant' to open in Moscow, Russia in 1990. 500 more would follow...
Boris Yeltsin never actually said the words across the top of this page, at least not within earshot of this writer. But he might as well have. Everything the Russian President and his new partner, Mikhail Gorbachev, declared and did in the past few tumultuous weeks, and will do in the next few, adds up to that simple message. The Soviet Union, or whatever we ultimately call
the collection of diverse, bumptious entities on Europe's eastern flank, is wide open to Westerners with checkbooks. Says a senior Western diplomat in Moscow: ''
Opportunities like this come up maybe once a century.''
Sure, all the horrendous problems remain. The country is still lurching through a hair-curling depression. Gross national product has fallen by 10% in the first half of this year. The budget deficit has ballooned to $33.5 billion. To pay bills, the government is rolling the presses, which has led to an inflation rate of 250% and rising.
Moscow by some estimates is more than $60 billion behind in hard currency payments to foreign creditors. Finally, rising cries for independence from all the familiar ethnic groups, and a few nobody ever heard of, are enough to rattle even the most seasoned geopolitician -- or the most intrepid investor.
Yet you need only focus on what was happening under cover of the coup to see why
Western businessmen should be at least a little euphoric. On the second of the junta's three days in power, while the world was watching Yeltsin's heroic stand,
the KGB began 157 criminal investigations into what it called
economic crimes. These included ''
concealment of superprofits'' and ''
links with criminal groups.''
Comment: It's more of the same baseless allegations, repeated ad nauseam in the media, that led up to the Iraq war, the Libyan invasion, and the current Syrian intervention. The psychos in power will use every trick in the book to attempt to demonize and destabilize their targets.
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