Does the Russian mafia deserve the Nobel prize for economics?
It is now conventional wisdom that mafyia extortion and official corruption of every sort are inflicting much damage on the Russian economy. In a widely cited estimate, crooked officials and plain gangsters are said to have sent as much as $100 billion into their foreign bank accounts since 1990, depriving the Russian economy of much more hard currency than the sum total of post-1990 Western aid. Countless newspaper articles have profiled the unappealing beneficiaries of the new economic order, from violent thugs with platinum-blonde molls and BMWs who do their showing off in restaurants, to sleek ex-officials in Armani suits with Vienna bank accounts, Manhattan apartments and good friends in the Kremlin, who show off in New York Times interviews. Far more numerous are the less obviously criminal and much less glamorous ‘bizness-men’ – thousands of them – who traffick in state-owned raw materials diverted for entirely private export, who help thieving state managers transfer public pro
