Our listeners asked us:
“What is chaos?”
We’re answering:
“We do not comment on economic policy.”“What is ‘Russian business’?”
We’re answering:
“To steal a crate of vodka, sell it, and drink the money away.”Many Russians blame Boris Yeltsin for “breaking everything,” but he
had plenty of eager assistants. In an eerie parallel to the Bolshevik
Revolution seventy years earlier, a wholesale looting of the country took
place as the pendulum swung to the opposite extreme. Entire industries
were commandeered and privatized, and vast territories were transformed
into virtual fiefdoms. While there was a halfhearted attempt to include
the public by issuing shares in these new private companies, most
Russians had no idea what they were and sold them immediately, often
for a pittance. On Yeltsin’s watch, the ignorance of many, combined with
the cleverness of a few, allowed for the biggest, fastest, and most
egregiously unjust reallocation of wealth and resources in the history of
the world. It was klepto-capitalism on a monumental scale, but it wasn’t
the first time. The Bolsheviks had done something similar under Lenin.
The scale of theft following the October Revolution of 1917 was
equally grand for its time, but the motives and methods were even more
ruthless. During the heady and violent period following the Revolution,
there was a mass pillaging of privately held lands and property. Anyone
who had employees or a surplus—of anything—was branded an “enemy
of the people.” Thievery, vandalism, and murder were performed by the
imported thugs who did much of Lenin’s heavy lifting, encouraged by
self-serving Party slogans like “Rob the Robbers!”*^2 Lenin may have
preached Marx, but his methods were decidedly Machiavellian: “It is
precisely now and only now,” he wrote, in a top secret memorandum to
the Politburo during a severe famine in 1922,^3