“We are being de-modernized.”<\/em> This article is part of the “In a Stranger Land” series. It should be read alongside:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Open with CAF\u2019s London conference account verbatim \u2014 the same small group, the same accounting firms, the same law firms, appearing in Russia, Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and America simultaneously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Establish the article\u2019s thesis immediately: this is not about communism failing. It is about a documented methodology \u2014 asset stripping, liability shifting, capital flight \u2014 executed by an identifiable small group across every jurisdiction where the legal and regulatory infrastructure could be captured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The standard \u201cstupid commies deserved it\u201d framing is the immunity illusion this article exists to puncture. Not by argument but by documentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Key primary sources:<\/strong> – CAF, \u201cFinancial Coup d\u2019\u00c9tat,\u201d Solari Report, 2001\/2009 – CAF, Schectman interview, January 2026 – Karen Dawisha, Putin\u2019s Kleptocracy<\/em>, 2014 – David Hoffman, The Oligarchs<\/em>, 2002 – Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century<\/em>, 2000<\/p>\n\n\n\n What Russia actually looked like before 1991 \u2014 not the propaganda version, but the documented baseline:<\/p>\n\n\n\n This section matters because it establishes what was destroyed. The de-modernization is measured from the documented baseline, not from an imaginary Soviet utopia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Soviet economy\u2019s genuine problems \u2014 inefficiency, lack of price signals, technological stagnation \u2014 were real and documented. They did not require the population to lose seven years of male life expectancy to fix. The mortality catastrophe was not a consequence of communist inefficiency. It was a consequence of the speed and method of asset transfer \u2014 documented by peer-reviewed epidemiology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Key primary sources:<\/strong> – World Bank development indicators, USSR\/Russia 1985-1995 – Nicholas Eberstadt, AEI, demographic analysis – The Lancet, peer-reviewed excess mortality studies – Novosibirsk Institute of Social Research, village documentation<\/p>\n\n\n\n The operational cast of characters in the Russian privatization \u2014 named, documented, cross-referenced with their appearances in other jurisdictions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Harvard advisers:<\/strong> Jeffrey Sachs \u2014 shock therapy architect, USAID-funded Andrei Shleifer \u2014 Harvard economics professor, personally invested in the Russian market he was paid to objectively advise on Jonathan Hay \u2014 Harvard Institute for International Development, personally invested<\/p>\n\n\n\n US Justice Department lawsuit: Harvard paid $26.5 million to settle fraud charges. Shleifer personally paid $2 million. The self-dealing was documented, prosecuted, and settled \u2014 then largely forgotten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The accounting firms:<\/strong> Price Waterhouse, Arthur Andersen, KPMG \u2014 the same firms appearing in every jurisdiction CAF identified in London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The banks:<\/strong> Citibank, Credit Suisse First Boston, Merrill Lynch \u2014 providing the financial infrastructure for capital movement offshore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The capital flow:<\/strong> Out of Russia \u2192 through Cyprus (documented offshore routing) \u2192 into New York Fed member banks \u2192 reinvested in the debt bubble the CalPERS president described as the destination in April 1997.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same banks CAF identified at HUD. The same mechanism she watched operate in American communities. The same capital flight her insider described as scheduled \u201cfor the fall.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Key primary sources:<\/strong> – US DOJ lawsuit against Harvard\/Shleifer: United States v. Harvard, Shleifer, and Hay – Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry Report, 1992 \u2014 BCCI and Russian money flows – Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century<\/em> \u2014 names the players in exhaustive detail – David Hoffman, The Oligarchs<\/em> \u2014 documents the individual oligarchs and their Western banking relationships<\/p>\n\n\n\n The voucher program \u2014 the mechanism by which state assets worth trillions were transferred to oligarchs:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every Russian citizen received a voucher representing their equal share of state enterprises \u2014 the democratization of capital, as presented. Within months, most vouchers had been purchased from desperate, hungry citizens for cash or vodka at a tiny fraction of their face value by people with capital and connections to accumulate them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The documented prices:<\/strong> – Gazprom \u2014 the largest natural gas company in the world \u2014 privatized at a valuation of $228 million. Current value: hundreds of billions. – Norilsk Nickel \u2014 world\u2019s largest nickel producer \u2014 acquired for $170 million in a rigged \u201cloans for shares\u201d auction. Current value: tens of billions. – Yukos Oil \u2014 acquired by Mikhail Khodorkovsky for approximately $350 million. Peak valuation before Putin\u2019s seizure: $40 billion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These are not rounding errors. They are the documented prices at which a country\u2019s productive wealth was transferred from its population to a small group of connected insiders \u2014 prices that could only exist because the \u201cmarket\u201d for these assets was controlled by the same people acquiring them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The loans-for-shares scheme:<\/strong> The Russian government, short of cash, borrowed from the oligarchs using state enterprises as collateral. When the government \u201cdefaulted\u201d on schedule, the oligarchs acquired the collateral. The default was the plan. The loans were the mechanism. The collateral was always the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The American parallel:<\/strong> The SGO article documented the American version: privatization as piracy, government assets transferred to private investors at below-market prices, private liabilities shifted back to government at no cost to the private liability holder. Same mechanism. Different scale. Fifty years instead of four. Obscured by the complexity of contractor networks, implementing partner NGOs, and the mandate economy rather than visible voucher auctions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Key primary sources:<\/strong> – Freeland, Sale of the Century<\/em> \u2014 voucher privatization documented in detail – Dawisha, Putin\u2019s Kleptocracy<\/em> \u2014 loans-for-shares documented – Hoffman, The Oligarchs<\/em> \u2014 individual asset acquisitions documented with prices<\/p>\n\n\n\n The numbers the \u201cstupid commies deserved it\u201d framing prevents the American audience from absorbing:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Life expectancy:<\/strong> Male life expectancy: 64 in 1990, 57 by 1994. Seven years in four. No war. No famine in the traditional sense. The largest peacetime male mortality catastrophe in recorded history outside of epidemic disease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Excess mortality:<\/strong> 3-6 million excess deaths above baseline in the 1990s \u2014 documented in peer-reviewed epidemiology. The Lancet\u2019s specific finding: the mortality spike correlated with privatization pace, not with communism\u2019s collapse per se. Countries that privatized more slowly had smaller mortality spikes. Belarus, which retained more state infrastructure, had a smaller catastrophe than Russia, which privatized fastest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ideological implication:<\/strong> If the mortality catastrophe correlated with privatization speed rather than communist ideology, then the ideology doesn\u2019t determine the outcome. The speed and method of asset transfer determines the outcome. Which means the American ideology provides no protection against an American version \u2014 what matters is whether the asset transfer is happening, not whether the country calls itself capitalist or communist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The documented conditions:<\/strong> – Hospital supplies exhausted. Doctors unpaid for months. – Tuberculosis resurging from near-elimination to epidemic levels. – Pensioners\u2019 lifetime savings worth nothing within months of hyperinflation. – Alcohol consumption increasing dramatically as male hopelessness became a mass phenomenon. – Villages documented by the Novosibirsk Institute: collective farm privatized, stripped, abandoned, community without employer, food distribution, functioning economy, or exit. – People reverting to subsistence agriculture not by choice but by necessity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The lawyer without electricity:<\/strong> CAF\u2019s account of the Russian lawyer growing food to avoid starvation \u2014 not a metaphor, not an outlier, a documented condition affecting millions of educated professionals whose skills had no market value in an economy being stripped of its productive base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Key primary sources:<\/strong> – The Lancet, \u201cMass privatisation and the post-communist mortality crisis,\u201d 2009 – Nicholas Eberstadt, AEI, Russia\u2019s Demographic Catastrophe<\/em> – UNICEF, Children at Risk in Central and Eastern Europe<\/em>, 1997 – Novosibirsk Institute of Social Research, village documentation<\/p>\n\n\n\n The comparison that hasn\u2019t been honestly assembled in one place:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Income Gini:<\/strong> Russia 2025: 0.419 \u2014 approaching record high United States: approximately 0.46 \u2014 measurably higher<\/p>\n\n\n\n The country that defined itself against the Soviet system for fifty years has measurably worse income distribution than post-Soviet Russia. Already remarkable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wealth Gini \u2014 the operative measure for oligarchic stripping:<\/strong> Russia: approximately 0.879 United States: approximately 0.852<\/p>\n\n\n\n Essentially identical. Both at the extreme end of the global distribution. Both among the most unequal countries on earth by wealth concentration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The top decile:<\/strong> Russia: wealthiest 10% earning 15.8 times more than poorest 10% United States: top 10% holding approximately 67% of all wealth, top 1% holding approximately 30%<\/p>\n\n\n\n The capital flight parallel:<\/strong> Russia: documented through Cyprus, Swiss banks, New York Fed member banks throughout the 1990s America: CalPERS president, April 1997 \u2014 \u201cthey are moving all the money out in the fall\u201d \u2014 $4 trillion missing from federal government, $21 trillion in undocumented adjustments now legally obscured by FASAB 56<\/p>\n\n\n\n The endpoint:<\/strong> Same wealth concentration. Same capital flight mechanism. Same small group of identifiable players using the same accounting firms and law firms. One population that knows it was stripped because it happened in four years. One population still debating whether it\u2019s happening at all because it has taken fifty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Key primary sources:<\/strong> – UBS Global Wealth Report 2025 – Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts – World Bank Gini data – Moscow Times, Russian Gini analysis, March 2026 – CAF, Financial Coup d\u2019\u00c9tat, 2001\/2009<\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u201cstupid commies deserved it\u201d framing dissected \u2014 not as strawman but as genuinely held belief requiring direct engagement:<\/p>\n\n\n\n What the framing assumes:<\/strong> That the Soviet collapse was a consequence of communist ideology, and therefore cannot happen in a capitalist country. The ideology is the protection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What the Lancet finding shows:<\/strong> The mortality catastrophe correlated with privatization pace, not ideology. Countries that retained more state infrastructure had smaller catastrophes regardless of their ideological label. The variable that predicted the outcome was the speed of asset transfer, not the political system\u2019s name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What CAF\u2019s same-players observation shows:<\/strong> The operators executing the Russian privatization were not Russian communists. They were Harvard economists, American accounting firms, American and European banks \u2014 the same actors who appeared in every other jurisdiction including America. They didn\u2019t bring capitalism to Russia. They brought the extraction methodology they had already been operating everywhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What the American data shows:<\/strong> Male life expectancy declining since 2014 \u2014 the first sustained peacetime decline in American history. Deaths of despair: drug overdose, suicide, alcohol-related liver disease. Demographic most affected: working-age men without college degrees in deindustrialized regions. The same demographic. The same hopelessness. A slower curve than Russia\u2019s 1990s catastrophe \u2014 but a curve in the same direction, driven by the same mechanism: productive economic base stripped faster than alternative opportunity develops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The immunity illusion is not wrong that America is different from Soviet Russia. It is wrong that the difference is the protection. The difference is the speed. And the speed difference is narrowing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Most Americans have never seen what Russia actually looks like today. The media image \u2014 Red Square, the Kremlin, Soviet-era apartment blocks, military hardware \u2014 is the architecture of a foreign policy narrative, not a documentary record of how ordinary Russians live. The Russia that emerged from the 1990s catastrophe has rebuilt its male life expectancy from 57 to 68, rebuilt its infrastructure, and produced a functioning urban society that looks, in its cafes and universities and middle-class neighborhoods, like any other European country. The population that went through hell in the 1990s has fully recovered \u2014 not because of anything the Western advisers who caused the catastrophe did, but despite them, and after they left. The same gap between media image and documented reality exists for Iran, whose capital contains upscale neighborhoods indistinguishable from comparable neighborhoods in the West, whose population produces world-class scientists and engineers, and whose lived experience of ordinary urban life bears no resemblance to the Jason Bourne location the American media uses to represent it. The selective framing is not accidental. A population that understands that Russians and Iranians are ordinary people living ordinary lives is a population much harder to mobilize for the sanctions, proxy wars, and military confrontations that serve the institutional interests documented throughout this series.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “What opened my eyes was working with a young Russian engineer at GE. He loved Putin. He owned his own house and paid 13% income tax. He had a beautiful wife and little girl. I learned that Russians and americans were identical in almost every way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We have truly been brainwashed.”<\/p>\nA comment by Biff McLaurine<\/a> on Substack.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n This section maps the documented Russian 1990s experience against documented current American trends, item by item, for an American audience inoculated against recognizing the parallel by the \u201cstupid commies deserved it\u201d framing. Each Russian item is paired with its American counterpart \u2014 not as prediction but as documented current reality. The section will expand as research and personal observation from twenty-five years of following on-the-ground Russia reporting is incorporated.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Salaries not paid \/ workers without reliable income<\/strong> Russia: government workers, teachers, doctors going months without salary. Collections of glass bottles to buy bread. America: 78% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck (LendingTree 2024). Gig economy converting salaried positions to contractor relationships \u2014 no benefits, no guaranteed hours, no sick pay. The condition is the same. The speed and visibility differ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Infrastructure collapse<\/strong> Russia: hospitals without supplies, roads deteriorating, heating systems failing in apartment blocks, tuberculosis resurging from near-elimination to epidemic. America: American Society of Civil Engineers C- infrastructure grade. Lead-contaminated water in Flint, Jackson Mississippi, and dozens of other cities. East Palestine train derailment. Baltimore bridge collapse. Each individually explainable. The aggregate is infrastructure operating below first-world standard in the same regions where the productive economic base was stripped first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Healthcare access collapsing<\/strong> Russia: universal healthcare becoming fee-for-service overnight, patients paying out of pocket for hospital stays that had previously been free. America: 25 million uninsured. Medical debt the leading cause of personal bankruptcy. Life expectancy declining since 2014 specifically in deindustrialized regions \u2014 the same geography where the productive base was stripped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Suicide and deaths of despair<\/strong> Russia: suicide rate peaking at 40 per 100,000, alcohol poisoning, homicide concentrated in working-age men. America: Case and Deaton\u2019s documented \u201cdeaths of despair\u201d \u2014 drug overdose, suicide, alcohol-related liver disease \u2014 concentrated in working-age men without college degrees in deindustrialized regions. The demographic is identical. The causes are identical. The curve is slower but bending the same direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prostitution and human trafficking<\/strong> Russia: engineers and teachers forced into sex work to feed children. HIV spreading explosively through sex work and intravenous drug use. America: documented explosion of transactional platforms \u2014 OnlyFans, sugar dating apps \u2014 as economic survival mechanisms for women who cannot make ends meet through conventional employment. Human trafficking statistics. The monetization of desperation through different channels, at different speeds, with better branding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Children going hungry<\/strong> Russia: children not eating for days. Stunted growth recorded permanently in bone density \u2014 children born during the transition measurably shorter than those born before or after. America: 1 in 5 American children food insecure per USDA. School lunch debt crisis. Documented correlation between food insecurity and academic performance, physical development, and long-term health outcomes in the same deindustrialized regions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The oligarch class emerging<\/strong> Russia: from zero billionaires to 86 with $500 billion combined wealth in under two decades, through documented asset stripping at pennies on the dollar. America: 66 billionaires in 1990 to over 700 today. Forbes 400 net worth from $290 billion to over $4.5 trillion \u2014 over the same fifty-year period during which the productivity-wage gap opened permanently and male life expectancy began its decline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The criminal class filling the institutional vacuum<\/strong> Russia: gangs controlling police, judges, prosecutors, jails. The \u201cWild Nineties\u201d \u2014 an unprecedented amount of money and power changing hands while the population lacked the education and understanding of what was going on. America: regulatory capture of every major oversight institution by the industries being regulated \u2014 documented across the SGO article. The revolving door between Goldman Sachs and the Treasury Department. The pharmaceutical industry writing its own FDA approval guidelines. The defense contractors funding the think tanks that recommend defense spending. In Russia it was criminal gangs. In America it is done with business cards, law firms, and 501(c)(3) organizations. The outcome is the same: the institution nominally protecting the public serves the extracting class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The summary paragraph:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Russian de-modernization checklist reads like grotesque exaggeration until mapped against documented American trends. Workers without reliable income. Infrastructure failing. Healthcare unaffordable. Men dying of despair \u2014 the same demographic, the same causes, the same deindustrialized geography as Russia\u2019s 1990s mortality crisis, on a slower curve. Children going hungry. Women monetizing their bodies as economic survival mechanisms. An oligarch class emerging from essentially nothing \u2014 66 billionaires in 1990, over 700 today. The institutional vacuum filled not by criminal gangs but by regulatory capture \u2014 same outcome, better dressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Russian de-modernization happened fast enough that the population could see it. The American version is happening slowly enough that each element remains individually explainable. The aggregate, mapped against the Russian checklist item by item, is not individually explainable. It is the same process, running on the timeline that a more sophisticated legal and financial system makes possible \u2014 and a population more thoroughly inoculated against recognizing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Key primary sources for expansion:<\/strong> – LendingTree, American Financial Distress Survey, 2024 – American Society of Civil Engineers, Infrastructure Report Card, 2021 – Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism<\/em>, Princeton University Press, 2020 – USDA Economic Research Service, Food Security in the US, 2024 – Forbes 400 historical data, 1990-2024 – Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts – SGO article companion \u2014 regulatory capture documentation<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Russian population survived the 1990s catastrophe for a reason that received almost no coverage in the Western press: they were prepared for it in ways that Americans are not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not prepared in the sense of having anticipated the specific collapse \u2014 nobody did. Prepared in the sense of having maintained, through decades of chronic shortage and systemic unreliability, the practical skills, social networks, and food production capacity that a population needs to survive when the formal economy stops functioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The dacha is the most documented example. When the heavily subsidized commercial agriculture collapsed with the demise of the USSR, dacha gardens survived and were the main reason why the Russian people did not experience a famine during the period. Studies found that 60% of the food consumed by residents of typical Russian cities during the collapse originated from dacha and kitchen gardens. Dachas accounted for 40% of Russia’s total food output even as late as 2011. Over 80% of urban families met their peak-season fresh produce needs from personal plots. One third of the Russian population owned a dacha. In the Moscow region alone, there were approximately one million such plots. Marketgrowthreports + 3<\/a>This was not survivalist preparation or deliberate resilience planning. It was a cultural practice maintained across generations \u2014 dacha gardening has been feeding the Russian people for a millennium \u2014 that happened to constitute exactly the distributed food production infrastructure needed when the centralized system collapsed. The distributed architecture of their farming system made it robust. The sharing of surplus food out of a sense of community abundance resulted in a resilient food network that is sustainable. Marketgrowthreports<\/a>Marketgrowthreports<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Beyond food, the Soviet population had maintained through necessity the practical skills and social networks that a formal market economy progressively makes unnecessary and then forgets: preserving food, repairing rather than replacing, multi-generational household networks physically proximate to each other, informal barter and exchange systems already functional because the official economy had always been unreliable. When the official economy collapsed, the informal infrastructure was already in place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The American equivalent of any of these is difficult to find at comparable scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The percentage of Americans who grow any meaningful portion of their own food is in the low single digits. The American food system is among the most centralized and supply-chain-dependent ever constructed \u2014 the average meal travels 1,500 miles from farm to plate, and the COVID-era empty shelves demonstrated what even a minor supply chain disruption does to a population with no local food production backup. The practical skills that the Soviet population maintained through chronic shortage \u2014 food preservation, mechanical repair, construction, production of anything without market inputs \u2014 have been progressively deskilled out of the American population over the same fifty years the productive economy was being financialized. The social capital that Russian communities drew on during the collapse \u2014 the neighborly networks, the mutual aid infrastructure, the community organization \u2014 has been in documented decline in America since Robert Putnam measured it in 2000, and the trend has accelerated since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2014 Russian lawyer, 1990s, as quoted by Catherine Austin Fitts<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nSeries Context<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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\n\n\n\nI. The Horrifying Epiphany<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nII. The Russian Patient \u2014 Before the Operation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n\n\n\nIII. The Same Players<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nIV. The Privatization Scam<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nV. The Human Cost<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nVI. The Wealth Mirror<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nVII. The Immunity Illusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n\n\n\nVII. The De-Modernization Checklist<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
VIII. The Resilience Gap<\/h3>\n\n\n\n