The Season of the Big Grab

One morning this summer, not a single commuter train was able to leave St. Petersburg toward the southwest as the night before someone had taken the electrical contact wire. The thieves were arrested and confessed that they were planning to sell the copper abroad in neighboring Estonia. The thieves called themselves businessmen.


Other "businessmen" from the town of Salda, in the Urals, tried to smuggle out of their enterprise as trash 20 tons of pure titanium to send across the border. In Western Europe the price of titanium is $12, 000 a ton; the Russians propose to sell it for $2, 000.


"The thieving man" -- this phrase could define a personality type that emerged from 70 years of the Soviet system. Property in the former U. S. S. R was exclusively the state's, under the command of the nomenklatura. Although propaganda strongly pushed the idea that the owners of the country were the people, the Soviet people understood perfectly well that they possessed nothing except their scant personal possessions, while the rest belonged to no one. This is why simple people saw nothing wrong with making this ownerless property theirs. Builders stole construction material, farmers potatoes and grain, doctors medicine, weavers cloth, and so on.


At dairy, meat and tobacco factories, the pay was low but there was never a shortage of labor. People sought to work there because they could take home the produce and sell it for a profit.


- The totalitarian Soviet regime used force to stop the theft of government property, but the problem was never solved even under Stalin. and back then, for a few sheaves of grain taken from the field they sent 12-year-olds to the Gulag.


The communist system came tumbling down, bringing liberation from many evils of the old regime. But freedom has also allowed the development of negative character traits of the Soviet individual. Among other things, through his striving to appropriate something for himself, theft has acquired enormous proportions. Today, embezzlement is the national disaster of Russia.


I read a Russian Interior Ministry report on this theme, and got the impression that everything gets stolen and nearly everybody does it. The scale depends on the person's responsibilities. A factory director can sell off resources and put millions of rubles in his pocket; a worker can steal something worth tens of thousands.


In the town of Orekhovo-Zuyevo, near Moscow, the local people have been robbing passing freight trains, opening the cars and containers and taking everything. It has become necessary to station police armed with automatic weapons every 50 meters along the tracks. But an armed guard cannot be stationed in every workplace.


I am highly skeptical about the fate of the $24 billion dollars that the International Monetary Fund has allotted to Russia. Most likely the money will scatter without trace into the vastness of Russia.


Mikhail Gurtovoi, chairman of the commission on financial-legal controls and the fight against corruption under Yegor Gaidar, said: "According to our information, a third of the Soviet debt accumulated under Gorbachev was simply stolen. For instance, hard currency was given for the building of a factory, but there is no factory and not even a trace of the millions of dollars that were allocated to it".


According to some calculations, up to 40 percent of the humanitarian aid sent to Russia last winter was stolen. A similar fate awaits a significant portion of the sum allotted by the developed countries to support economic reforms in Russia.


As the writer Yuri Chernichenko puts it, "It's the season of the big grab". and this season will last until such time as the majority of property in Russia is private.


Nikolai Andreyev is a political observer for Itvestia.