Re: 1:"Massive privatizations to politcos, mafiosos, and future oligarchs that privatized for a song the collective wealth of the Russian people. "
see Michael Hudson: "Reforming the Reformers"
Feb 27, 2004
"On Sunday, March 14, Russians will re-elect Vladimir Putin for a second term as president. In the Duma elections three months earlier, on December 7, his United Russia party won such overwhelming support that he will have the power to rewrite the constitution dictated by former Pres. Yeltsin under force of arms a decade ago.
In which direction will Mr. Putin go? Will he continue to support the oligarchs who designated him to succeed Pres. Yeltsin? Their privatizations in the mid-1990s have gutted Russian industry and led to collapsing living standards, public services, science and technology, emigration and population shrinkage. Will this prompt Mr. Putin to shift gears to enforce what he has called a "new social contract"? If so, what does this slogan mean in practical terms?
The right-wing Union of Right Forces (formerly Russia's third largest party, with 32 Duma seats) and its sister party Yabloko (fourth ranking, with 16 seats) failed to crack the 5% electoral barrier, and hence will not have any membership in the 450-member Duma under Mr. Putin's second term in office. Both these parties were funded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man (his fortune is estimated at $8 billion) and former head of Menatep Bank and Yukos Oil. (He also donated to other parties, including the Communists.) But on October 25 he was arrested in Siberia for tax evasion and fraud, escalating the June arrest of his lieutenant Platon Lebedev. Arrest warrants were issued for ten more Yukos officials and insider shareholders in January, including three who already had followed their money and moved abroad.
Khodorkovsky's arrest was the final straw prompting Kremlin chief-of-staff Alexander Voloshin to resign. This act signaled the opposition of Yeltsin's "Family" to Putin's prosecution of the man whose bank had been the paymaster for insiders in the 1996 loans-for-shares scandal.
The question now being asked is whether the oligarchs will sell off ownership of Russia's natural resources to the West as they bail out of Russia, or whether the nation will rescue itself from the insider privatizations by recapturing the revenue and wealth taken by the oligarchs."
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