Property Without Rights: Dimensions of Russian Privatisation
2001; Routledge; Volume: 53; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09668130020032271
ISSN1465-3427
Autores Tópico(s)Russia and Soviet political economy
ResumoIMAGINE IF YOU WILL that Adam Smith had returned to Moscow in the spring of 1992. Would he then have lectured about how 'the butcher, the brewer and the baker' by acting in their own narrow self-interest would have brought about an optimal and collectively rational outcome? Or would he perhaps have picked up his old copy of Thomas Hobbes and started reading up on the need for a strong state? These questions go to the very heart of what Russia's attempted 'systemic change' was really about. If we rephrase Smith into modern Russian reality, we may ask whether, by undertaking sweeping deregulation and a massive scaling down of the state, the Russian reformers were right in assuming that 'the banker, the gangster and the corrupt bureaucrat' by acting in their narrow self-interest would bring about an optimal and collectively rational outcome? We all know the answer to that question, at least in terms of what did follow in the wake of instant liberalisation and 'the fastest privatisation in human history'.l But perhaps it is not equally obvious in what ways an outwardly well-intended reform programme could degenerate into something so vastly destructive. Phrasing the question more specifically, what was it that made Russian privatisation turn into what some have called the 'crime of the century' and others have branded as the 'greatest robbery in world history'? Given the massive support, financial as well as political, which was offered for the programme by broad circles in the Western democracies, this transformation of good intentions into poor outcomes becomes even more puzzling. Or should it really have been at all surprising? In the following it will be argued that the transformation of a rules-based programme of privatisation into what Russians have called 'prikhvatizatsiya' (asset grabbing) represented a path dependent institutional response to the drastic change in rules that was implied by the collapse of the Soviet order. Simply put, we may say that key actors in the process were locked into pursuing individually rational but collectively disastrous strategies. Thinking in terms of multiple equilibria, this most certainly could have been avoided, but it would have required a different political agenda-and a different policy response from the West. We shall begin our statement of the case by looking at some of the arguments that were advanced in favour of setting out to privatise, and at some of the very specific Russian complications that would add to the difficulties of the privatisers. It is primarily by highlighting the latter that we can see how the entire programme for
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