The government’s misleading laissez-faire attitude, which masqueraded as freedom, was, Nemtsov believed, simply failure to accept responsibility for an economy headed for implosion. Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, looking at the issue through the prism of his own experience as a member of the Soviet leadership, saw the triumph of the group he had found most intractable during the perestroika era. These were the heads of Soviet industry, who, in the central-planning system, held the posts of government ministers, but whom Alexander Nikolaevich called simply the Mafia.
Because there is so much overlap, in the state of things now in Russia, between the State and organized crime, this passage is an important signifier of the way things are headed.
