ONE OF MY RUSSIAN FRIENDS works for a high-flying computer company in Vienna, Austria. He tells me that his countrymen are superb hackers. Watch out for you, he smiled, when I asked him about the suspected Russian hack of Democratic Party emails in the States.
We play basketball together a couple of times a week, and have been for years. Alexander has permanent Austrian residency, something he cherishes. He left Russia shortly after the Soviet Union disintegrated in the early 1990s, when he was in his early twenties. He remembers the push for "privatization" that opened the door for deposed communist leaders to carve up property and assets and emerge as ultra-rich capitalists.
For him and other less fortunate Russians, the future looked dark. "In the name of privatization, the government gave every Russian a stake in what the government, or actually people, once owned. We each got a voucher for 10,000 rubles." About $15 then.
The vouchers were not money but barter, to be collected, traded, and sold whenever possible. "It was funny, because people literally bought vouchers in one part of town and then sold them for 10 rubles more on the other side of town. That was our introduction to the market economy."
For Alexander and most Russians, privatization just drove up prices and consolidated property, money and power in the hands of the old communist apparatchik. Including, of course, ex-KGB head Vladimir Putin who runs the country today and whom Donald Trump calls a buddy.
"I used my voucher to buy a bottle of champagne, which is about all it was worth," Alexander told me. And then he left his homeland for good. --for a fuller take on what happened in Russia, check out Kremlin Capitalism: The Privatization of the Russian Economy, written by Joseph R. Blasi, Maya Kroumova, and Douglas Kruse.
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