ABSTRACT
The hostility of the Russian public toward the ‘New Russians’ and the market economy more generally became a commonplace of journalism and opinion surveys during the 1990s. In terms of metaphysical orientation, Peter the Great sought to drag Russia away from its backward theocratic ‘Eastern’ past to a modern secular ‘Western’ future. In the agricultural sphere, Gorbachev promoted a scheme which allowed small groups of family or friends to take responsibility for an area of land, farming it more or less as their own, freed from the collective farm bureaucracy. A key element in the imagery of pre-revolutionary entrepreneurs was their ability to rise from humble backgrounds and create something from nothing, but much of the New Russians’ activity appears predicated on simply getting one’s hands on the fruits of the privatization programme, and the Party-State nomenklatura, far from being undermined by the advent of the market, have flourished by virtue of their connections and access to capital.
