Everyone knows what Yury Petrov, former chief of President Boris Yeltsin's administration, is doing these days. He is the head of the State Investment Corporation, or Gosinkor. However, not very many people know what Gosinkor does. One might expect that it is involved in investment, but no one has yet been able to find any indication of significant investment activity on the part of Gosinkor.


Gosinkor was practically created under Petrov. According to the decree that founded the corporation, it was supposed to take control of roughly $1 billion worth of state property and other assets. Those assets include office space in Moscow and state-owned dachas outside the capital that are to be used by Gosinkor itself. The rest, including cash assets, is to be used to insure various investments, including investments by foreigners.


Gosinkor, naturally enough, took over the offices and the dachas, but what else it has been doing remains unclear. Foreign investors have been in no hurry to insure their capital through this incomprehensible structure, and the government has been in no hurry to fulfill Yeltsin's decree by turning over assets to Gosinkor.


And so Petrov decided to switch to a completely different line of business -- which, if his plans bear fruit, would bring his corporation not a measly $1 billion, but tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars.


Petrov recently presented several unexpected proposals to Yeltsin. Judging by Petrov's letter to Yeltsin, Gosinkor has decided to take an active role in compensating people whose deposits at Sberbank were made worthless when prices were liberalized in 1992.


Various government and social organizations and political figures have been fighting over this issue for nearly three years now. Depositors think they were robbed by the liberalization of prices, which in the course of a few months decimated their life savings. The government agrees that depositors suffered and that some form of compensation must be found for those groups that are most vulnerable, including invalids and pensioners. However, the government insists that a universal compensation plan is out of the question. Moreover, the government does not have any legal obligation to protect Sberbank depositors from inflation.


Now Petrov's Gosinkor is proposing a nearly complete compensation program, which would cost the state 600 trillion rubles, or a little less than $200 billion. Petrov's plan is extremely simple: Gosinkor will create a state fund called Land and People, to which control of 600 trillion rubles of state property will be transferred. By managing these assets on a commercial basis, the fund would be able to begin paying compensation by the end of its first year of activity, and would be able to complete the process of compensation within five years.


In order to carry out this scheme, Petrov is requesting "just" 5 million hectares of state land, including 1.5 million hectares of urban and suburban property. In addition, the fund is requesting other real estate; buildings currently under construction; Russian property abroad; and explored, but so far undeveloped natural-resource deposits.


Gosinkor has even prepared a draft presidential decree creating the fund and is now awaiting Yeltsin's approval. Can it really be that all it takes to get control of $200 billion in Russia is a single, well-written letter to the president?