Brad wrote (referring to oligarchic looting in Russia in the 90s):
Or, as Cynthia Freeland put it:
"Every businessman seeks the most profitable opportunity. Russia's tragedy is that the best opportunity was ripping off the decaying state. Expecting the future oligarchs to forgo that Klondike--to piously retool an ancient Soviet factory or energetically hawk copper bracelets, when they could be taking over vast oil companies--would be like asking the cat to stop hunting mice.... The future oligarchs did what any red-blooded businessman would do. The real problem was that the state let them get away with it..."
CD: It was a no-brainer that this would happen in a situation with no functioning legal system and a budding capitalist class based on black-marketeers, not to mention an egomaniacal president who spends half his time drunk and the other half in the hospital. Actually, I have a stong hunch the Yeltsin is manic-depressive: bursts of frenetic activity marked by extreme recklessness alternating with periods of alcoholic inactivity when he wouldn't appear in public.
It also didn't help matters than, in Russian culture, business is perceived as a form of theft. This basically guarantees that people with moral principles will not engage in business, leaving it to the dregs. On one occasion, Gorbachev told Jim Bakker that, look, I cannot do what you are recommending that I do. You are asking me to be a criminal. So much for Summers' "the laws of economics are like the laws of physics -- they work the same everywhere!"
Brad again:
On another topic: I never knew Chubais. But I did know Boycko. I knew Maxim Boycko back in 1991, when he was sure above all else that Russia required an honest and fair privatization process: an egalitarian share distribution to create a large active class of people who would benefit from rapid capitalist growth, and so advocate it, and who believed that the property of the state had been distributed fairly. I knew Maxim Boycko in early 1994, when he believed that the privatization process needed to assign huge numbers of shares to "red directors" to recognize the realities of power and control on the ground, if anything was ever going to happen--and the important thing above all was for something to happen, for them to be some motion toward reform. But I haven't talked to Maxim Boycko since the end of 1995, and I don't understand how he shifted to believing that the government should give away the rest of Soviet industry for a song to the oligarchs. Was it a belief that it would otherwise it would soon be stolen anyway? Was it a belief that voucher privatization had entrenched incompetent managers, and that it would be preferable to continue privatization by creating strong plutocrats who would be powerful political allies for the government?
I genuinely do not know...
Me:
Probably politics. The government gave the oligarchs the keys to state coffers in exchangs for their help in defeating the KPRF. Totally illegal.
What was the motivation for the Treasury not endorsing either Gorbachev's or Yavlinsky's reform plans (BTW, Yavlinsky, though he gets quoted a lot in Western newspapers, is a political non-entity in Russia).
Chris Doss The Russia Journal