You have to admire the nerve of MMM company officials. On Friday they announced that, as good as their word, they were reopening their offices for business -- only now they would sell and buy back shares in their company at 1,000 rubles apiece instead of 125,000.


What about Lyonya Golubkov? For months this fictional creation of MMM advertisements has been exhorting Russians to invest, promising fur coats, houses in Paris and the like on the basis of MMM's rising share prices. How many fur coats can you buy with 1,000 rubles, Lyonya?


Company officials, however, treated the announcement quite openly as part of the pyramid game they have been playing. Sure, millions of investors had had instant fortunes snatched away from beneath their noses -- but they could always start the gamble again from scratch. Maybe next time they would get lucky.


Some investors appear to be taking their losses in the same cavalier spirit and MMM's new 1,000-ruble shares were finding new buyers Friday. These people always knew they were playing a game. But hundreds of thousands of others have been genuinely deceived, and for them the bursting of the MMM bubble will come as a deeply unsettling shock.


It is not hard to attribute blame for this. The management of MMM and many of their investors have been driven by greed to a scam that -- from the start -- was designed to enrich them at the expense of millions of ordinary and gullible Russians.


The Finance Ministry, too, must take some of the blame. The government knew exactly what was going on and failed to take action. True, the laws enabling officials to put a stop to MMM were vague and this was new territory for them. But with only a modicum of determination, it could have been done.


The truth is that the MMM phenomenon probably was inevitable. In a wild west-style economy where the government is making up the rules as it goes along and the population is learning by fire its first lessons in market economics, how could it not have happened?


The MMM debacle could also prove a useful lesson. To the government, it should by now be clear that the securities market is in desperate need of regulation. To Russian investors, it should now be obvious that there are no miracles in store that will bestow instant and effortless wealth upon them.


Pyramid schemes are no more than modern day alchemy. They prey on people's greed and na•vet? and for good reason have been made illegal wherever they have emerged.


MMM should not be given a second chance to dupe investors. It should be closed down.