A foretaste of Russia's Roaring Nineties....
The Russian bourgeois, made up of get-rich-quick merchants, feel they have no real long term future. That is the reason why they are sending their fortunes abroad and buying up property in London, Paris and Bonn. State assets are systematically stripped and the wealth salted abroad in foreign banks. In the period 1992-93, the flight of capital from Russia amounted to a staggering $10-12 billion annually. The interior ministry estimated more recently that as much as $50 billion--almost a quarter of Russia's gross domestic product--was smuggled away to Western banks and tax havens in 1994. It has also been estimated that the total value of London property bought in 1994 by rich Russians exceeded the total UK aid programme to Russia. For Masha Saltykova, "the people who are making money are not interested in the stability of society. They're only interested in grabbing their share of the pie and running away". (Quoted in The Observer, 9/7/95.)
Because of the collapse of the productive forces and increased demand for Western goods, Russia now imports more than half its consumer goods. As a result of this situation, Russia is highly vulnerable to imported inflation--a direct result of the collapse of the rouble. A large part of these imports are luxury goods for the nascent bourgeois. Nearly all the cars on the streets of Moscow are foreign. By contrast, most of the earnings from exports are sent abroad to bank accounts in Germany and Switzerland. The crisis of capitalism means that even "respectable" Swiss banks are not fussy about where their money comes from. The Financial Times (7/2/96) notes that:
"Switzerland's economic problems have made some of its companies and financial institutions more willing to accept 'dirty' money from international criminal organisations, including the Mafia, according to senior European police officials. The trend coincides with predictions of a rise in money leaving Russia in coming months because of mounting fears among newly rich entrepreneurs that the Communists will win presidential elections in June."
The slogan of the nascent bourgeois is: "Get rich and get out!" The sons and daughters of the elite are already voting with their feet, as an article in The Guardian (1/2/96) indicated, citing the fact that over 2,000 visas are processed every year by the US consulate in Moscow for Russian students, in addition to thousands more enrolled in private schools in Western Europe. The attitude of this "gilded youth" was summed up in the words of an economics student, "I hate my country":
"Like many members of the emerging privileged class who have come of age at a time when Russia has open borders, Ms. Mikhailova has had the chance to compare the hardships at home with the abundance abroad and has decided that a life of sacrifice is not for her. 'I don't believe anything good will ever be created in Russia.'
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