One of the most remarkable consequences of the crisis is that our oligarchs are exposing themselves. The very same ones who were supposedly "talented managers." So many words were said about how awful, inefficient, and disgusting everything was with nickel before nickel was handed over to Potanin. It was no better with aluminum before aluminum was handed over to Deripaska. Things were bad, very bad, with potash fertilizers until they were handed over to Rybolovlev. They fixed it. They revived it. They stopped the stealing. They became "EFFICIENT OWNERS." And then, bam — crisis. And prices dipped a little. The oligarchs' rhetoric remains just as heated and pompous in form, but in substance it has fundamentally changed. Now they want enormous holding companies with major state participation. The very same holding companies they used to call "unmanageable, corrupt monsters." Vladimir Potanin and Oleg Deripaska want to create a company based on Norilsk Nickel, Metalloinvest, Evraz Group, Mechel, and Uralkali. The state may receive a blocking stake in it. *Potanin confirmed that such a proposal exists. In his view, the deal could be of interest to all participants: the state in this project would "act as an anchor investor," while converting debt into equity would help solve the problems of state-owned banks and industrial enterprises. *In other words, they carved up what was left of Soviet industry. They shipped raw materials out for sale. With the proceeds they bought yachts, planes, newspapers, magazines, football clubs. They took out loans and carved those up too. Now raw material prices have fallen, and you can't produce anything especially competitive on Soviet-era equipment. So now let's reinvent ourselves. Let the state budget pay our debts, and we'll go on carving things up, only with sterner faces this time (because now we're no longer liberal free-marketeers, but "responsible statists"). Very nice, huh.
However inefficient the Soviet system may have been, compared with our "captains of the market," any people's commissar (Soviet government minister) would look like an MBA graduate.