New Russian capitalism
If Putin doesn't have his finger in the pie, it isn't capitalism in Russia. As in China, independent civil society or economic activity just won't be tolerated.Huge Profits Spell Doom for a 400-Acre Market
For more than a decade, the Cherkizovsky outdoor market had been a warren of plywood shacks where horse meat and live turtles went on sale beside bales of counterfeit name-brand jeans from China in an explosion of raw commerce...
The market’s closing hints at the workings of power and wealth in today’s Russia, as the country lurches away from the coarser forms of capitalism that existed in the immediate post-Soviet period. That system is being replaced by a new form of state control over business under Mr. Putin, one based on codes of personal loyalty and fealty to ideals of a sterner, more dignified Russia than what existed in the 1990s.
The trouble in this case was that the market’s owner, Telman Ismailov, who had made billions of dollars as Cherkizovsky evolved from a mere flea market into an industrial-scale distribution hub for Chinese imports during the oil boom, had violated unwritten codes of business conduct that put him at odds with Mr. Putin, according to analysts and Russian news reports...
Government agencies quickly took up the theme of the market’s seedy side — which was hard to deny. The powerful director of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor’s office, Aleksander Bastrykin, called the market a “hell-hole” that had become a “a state within a state” on the edge of Moscow. “It has its own police, its own customs service, its own courts, its own prosecutor and stand-alone infrastructure, including brothels,” he said...
Labels: economics, politics, Russia
posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:04 AM
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