1 in 6 Russian entrepreneurs are in jail, 1 in 3 prisoners are businessmen
<i>Then he bought two old Soviet dairy farms.</i><p>This sentence is the key to understanding why many Russians feel little or no sympathy for "victims" like him.<p>Soviet dairy farms once belonged to the Soviet people - in much the same way that, say, the Washington Monument, the US National Parks, or the US Army <i>belong</i> to the people of the United States.  How would you feel if the most hardened violent criminals came to power in the US, and arranged to have these properties turned over to private owners, to run for their benefit (or to pillage and destroy, as was the fate of most Soviet industry) ?<p>One can debate the practical merits of planned economies all day long but this does not change the fact that <i>privatization is theft.</i> The former owners of Soviet facilities - the Soviet people - were not adequately compensated for their loss.  It is highly doubtful that fair compensation for the privatization of public property is possible <i>even in principle.</i>  Do you dole out homeopathic-sized shares of stock? (Criminals buy them back for pennies-on-the-dollar from the masses in lean times - or at gunpoint...) What do you issue to the not-yet-born citizens who will no longer be heir to the means of production? (Answer in practice: zilch.)<p>Privatization is "what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine" writ large, plain and simple.<p>Russians who are not in some way aligned with the thieves' guild which has been running that country since the Soviet collapse by and large quietly recognize this fact.  This is why sympathy and political support for the so-called "entrepreneurs" is and will continue to be thin.