US president Joe Biden has called for ‘regime change’ in Russia, a statement that should recall previous US-led regime change crusades – in Chile, Iraq and Afghanistan, among many.
To put it mildly, these episodes have not been unmitigated successes. But the regime change initiative that deserves our scrutiny today was the United States’ most ambitious, and is the most relevant to Biden’s latest demand. This is because it concerned Russia and Ukraine themselves 30 years ago.
I witnessed what the USA, the UK and others did on the ground after the Cold War. In 1990, on behalf of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), I organised an international conference on labour policy in Moscow, which emerged as a report just as the Soviet Union was dissolving. I was then appointed director of a programme set up by the ILO to advise governments in the region on social and labour policies in what was euphemistically called the ‘transition’ from ‘communist’ to a ‘market’ economy.
