ABSTRACT
The described factors and patterns of privatisation, definitely wider term than just stealing, are extraordinary in a sense that they have been caused by extraordinary circumstances. Once the latter go away, so do the former. In a liquid environment, potentially liquid assets can be liquidised in a matter of seconds. A garage-owning mechanic somewhere in the American midwest can sell his tool kit without waiting for any ‘shock therapy’ or privatisation. Once the normal asset structure of the Russian economy has been restored/obtained, the illegalities (and profits!) related to privatisation will go away. The Russian bureaucrat will still be corrupt – as he has always been since the time of the fictitious Chichikov, but not in the sense of robber-baronism of macroeconomic scale. The experience of Estonia, for instance, proves the point. The illegal metal-transit business once almost of global magnitude is forgotten today and the smuggling of goods over the Russian-Estonian border has attained a ‘normal’, unsensational character.
