Our elite are no afraid of the crisis, as it enables them to complete the process of sharing out the assets to their advantage. Stability is a good time with one exception: it’s impossible to share out really big money without being noticed by the general public. This is why any big sharing out is an alternative to stability, i.e. to the established state of things. And so a large-scaled withdrawal of assets requires serious ideological justification, like it was about YUKOS destruction or making the state corporations.        

The problem is that anyone, capable of most superficial analysis, can see anyway in whose interests such things get done. So people keep silence, but they do disbelieve. 

And the crisis is a horse of different color. Under this pretext one may clinch deals of any scale, justifying it with necessity of salvation of the domestic economy. And one may even not explain the nuances to the public, as it wouldn’t understand it anyway. Even the word “crisis” is tabooed for inner Russian situation, at least at the central TV channels. Though, it is not used in the lobby either. They use another term there – that’s “veselukha”.     

“Veselukha” is not a holiday. This is about atmosphere similar to that of post-revolutionary years at the meetings dedicated to dispossession of kulaks. The class enemies are already defeated, and their property is ready for sharing out. That’s a hard, though gratifying labor. There’s no need to plough and sow out, it’s possible to harvest right now.   

A special kind of mercy will be applied to the defeated enemies, which can be expressed with a formula: “you give up everything to us, and we shall pay the debts”. Many non-government companies are really facing the bad situation about the debts. Anyway, they will have to give up control over their businesses either to foreign creditors, or to domestic saviors. In the former case one would have to deal with accusations of negligence towards the people’s property, while in the latter case the Motherland would forget it in the sense it would allow living carelessly spending the remnants of the past property saved in offshores.     

The sources of Novaya Gazeta affirm that the credit of 950 billion rubles, allotted to the state-belonging banks in addition to the deposits (one and a half trillion) transferred to them, is needed not for saving the banking system, but for buying out the “oligarchic” assets within the framework of the market procedure and even with the market price, the more so because this price is very cheap at the moment. 

But due to fatal chapter of accidents, the businesses close to certain members of the ruling elite have also got to a serious situation. But then again, when you possess the Stabilization Fund and have surplus of the budget, that’s no catastrophe, that’s “veselukha” again. The security market analysts may try guessing why the state and the controlled by it companies are saving Svyazbank and KIT-Finance. In the meantime people analyzing not the security market but the political one say that in the former case we deal with the business belonging not to Leonid Reiman, but to some high ranking member of government, who also took decision about the Svyazbank. 

As for KIT-Finance, Russian Railroad Agency got to be one of its saviors accidentally, they say, unlike Alrosa that also bought 45% of the stock of the problem-dealing bank. Alrosa has been long and constantly fought for by the government, and the finance minister Alexei Kudrin was the main locomotive in the process. According to the players in the political market, he has lobbied more than other officials the allotment of necessary resources for saving KIT-Finance as if that were his own bank or the one belonging to his family members.       

The fear now is that the members of the elite are so possessed with “veselukha” and spend so much time on saving their own assets and sharing out the ones belonging to others, that it’s impossible to see where they would find time to get engaged in real measures for overcoming the crisis consequences.