ABSTRACT
A word about corruption, since Russia appears to be a world-class leader in this underside of market-life. Larry Summers, US Deputy Treasury Secretary, a former World Bank official knowledgable about transition economies, estimates that 80% of Russian businesses make protection payments to criminal organizations. The agents of Russian political reform did not contemplate substituting one method of thought-control for another. Eventually Boris Yeltsin and his enlightened new team will read the riot act to the Big Seven, lightning rods for public hostility and political unrest. The new oligarchs are multi-millionaires - some say billionaires, at least on paper - who enjoy the celebrity status once reserved for commissars and cultural heroes. One answer must lie in the aversion to a model strongly committed to Communist Party-rule, an obstacle which the Russian reformers had to rid themselves of, economically as well as politically, to meet their new destiny.
