Traces of the former boss of Rosnano were found in the Scottish city of Glasgow
Photo: Larisa KUDRYAVTSEVA/EG
A regiment of British scientists has arrived. A well-known economist and reformer, the father of Russian privatization, a mirror of domestic energy and nanotechnology, Anatoly Chubais, became a recruit. Last year, after the start of a special operation in Ukraine, he suddenly left Russia, and it is not very clear where he settled: as they say, today here, tomorrow there. From time to time, photos of him appeared on the Internet, whether at an ATM in Istanbul, with an empty cart in an Israeli supermarket, or on a walking path in Italy. There was a case, he was seriously ill, but, paraphrasing the poet, Borisych’s fate remained, thank God, he recovered.
And now – a new phenomenon for the people. Chubais’s article “Defaults in the Russian economy of the 1990s: an unforeseen institution” was published in the serious academic journal Voprosy ekonomiki. The author introduces himself as an independent UK researcher. More specifically, from Glasgow. Glasgow, sir! What difficulties brought the great reformer to Scotland is unknown. He maybe he wanted to go to football, shout with the fans at the Glasgow Rangers home game. They say it is an unforgettable sight. Or maybe he found a new job – the headquarters of a large energy company Scottish Power is located in this city, and in the energy sector the former head of the RAO UES of Russia has a large pier – perhaps the Scottish energy system will break in regional gears, like once Russian.
So what is the article about?
“Among the large-scale processes that caused the greatest damage to the economy and the population of Russia in the 1990s and significantly undermined the prestige of the reformers, defaults occupied a special place,” the summary reads. “For many years, the government, the presidential administration, and companies have sought to minimize their negative impact (the author of this article had to actively participate in this).”
In fact, defaults then reached catastrophic proportions. Companies paid each other by barter, and sometimes paid nothing. It was the era of total scam. They did not pay salaries, at best, they handed out umbrellas and pans. Workers roamed the trains and sold boards, games, and other consumer goods. I remember the train station in the city of Sukhinichi, where emaciated employees of the local toy factory pushed funny teddy bears and other cheap toys to passing train passengers. The cute Shar Pei is still kept somewhere in the closet as a memory of those times. Who knows, maybe my rubles helped someone to survive.
“Unfortunately, we have to admit that the developers of the concept of reforms, including the author of this article, could not predict the rise of this destructive institution, nor give its scientific explanation in a timely manner, nor quickly overcome it in practice. Chubais, who as deputy prime minister, headed the operational commission to eliminate the causes of the default crisis, wrote self-critically.
Chubais named two types of defaults. Vertical, when companies did not pay taxes to the state, and the state, in turn, did not pay money to state employees. And horizontal, when companies did not pay supplier partners. Among the reasons, the great reformer names the weakness of the State. He really he turned out to be the most defenseless. Entrepreneurs could at least, as a last resort, arrange for the defaulter to be transported into the woods or to an abandoned construction site.
It is noteworthy that the author of the article, immersed in macroeconomics, did not focus on non-payment of wages. Desperate, the workers sometimes also shed blood with their fists and sticks, they set fire to the houses of their employers. Because under the pretext of total defaults, the young capitalists sometimes restricted wages simply out of greed. The press then mentioned, for example, the story of a Far Eastern mine owner who, without paying the miners’ wages, went with his wife to Egypt. Returning, I had to answer to the peasants. I paid, but I survived.
Human dramas were left out of the study. They are not of much interest to the main privatizer. Indirectly, he himself admits that people in economic processes are consumables.
“The devaluation of the ruble in 1998, the anti-crisis project to overcome defaults in RAO UES and the actions of the Russian Ministry of Finance to eliminate non-monetary relations with the budget system in a short time helped to solve this problem. and complete the formation of a market economy in the country”, Chubais writes about How did they manage to overcome the crisis? How it was done in RAO UES is a separate topic. Already as the head of the RAO UES of Russia, Chubais canceled mutual compensation when paying for electricity and began to take a stricter approach to payment terms. So the image of the executioner with a knife switch was born. Only the fatal moment came not when the electricity was turned on, but when it was turned off. When due to debts they cut off power in hospitals, in military installations. And it was not always possible to switch to backup substations in operating rooms and maternity hospitals. That was electroshock therapy.
What’s the point of posting? In a belated regret? But somehow it turned out lame, not fully thought out. As well as all the economic transformations of Chubais and other young reformers.
