Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

At its most shameless, in Russia under the rule of Boris Yeltsin and his friends, the post-transition economy passed into the hands of a small number of men who became quite extraordinarily rich—by the year 2004 thirty-six Russian billionaires (‘oligarchs’) had corralled an estimated $110 billion, one quarter of the country’s entire domestic product. The distinction between privatization, graft and simple theft all but disappeared: there was so much—oil, gas, minerals, precious metals, pipelines—to steal and no-one and nothing to prevent its theft. Public assets and institutions were pulled apart and re-allocated to one another by officials extracting and securing quite literally anything that moved or could be legally re-assigned to private parties. Russia was the worst case, but Ukraine came a close second. Kuchma and other politicians were elected with huge cash backing from ‘businessmen’ in the form of down payments on future income: in post-Soviet Ukraine, as these people well understood, power led to money, not the other way around. Public goods, state loans or subsidies passed directly from the hands of government to the pockets of a few clans, much of it then transiting on to private accounts overseas. The new ‘capitalists’ in these countries did not actually make anything; they merely laundered public assets for private benefit. Nepotism flourished, much as it had under Communism but for far greater private gain: when Ukraine’s Kryvorizhstal, one of the largest st...