ABSTRACT
For the men who would become Boris Yeltsin's closest economic advisers, however, the way Aslund framed the problem had political appeal. Princeton's Stephen Cohen stood almost alone in March 1993 when he deplored "the many US intrusions into the cauldron of Russian politics" and pointed out that, because of the strong influence of US advisers in Yeltsin government's economic reform program, to many Russian citizens, "their misery seems to be 'made in the USA'". Food appeared immediately, but stabilizing ruble and developing an economic reform plan acceptable to the legislature would prove to be more elusive. There were several other Western economists among the Russian and Soviet governments' cadres of advisers during this period. Among the fundamental factors Jeffrey D. Sachs named "truly radical economic reform". When prices were liberalized in January 1992, the governor of the Nizhnii Novgorod Oblast, Boris Nemtsov, began working with Grigorii Yavlinskii and specialists from the International Finance Corporation on a plan for economic reform.
