The politics of privatization in Russia: From mass privatization to the Yukos affair

Privatization constitutes one of the most successful achievements in Post-Soviet Russian reform. However, apparent great successes notwithstanding, the privatization program tainted with distortions of its original ideas, political compromises and collusions between political leaders and business elites produced tremendous criticisms and distrust as well. Given those negative aspects of privatization, some people raised the necessity of review of the privatization programs conducted during the 1990s. But despite such criticisms and negative evaluations of the privatization program, as was shown in the case of the Yukos affair, the Russian government never denied the principle of private ownership nor reexamined the privatization results. To explain such a trend in Russian privatization, this paper adopts the concept of policy learning, in which reconceptualization of policy agendas-adopting private property as an essential element of the market economy, for example-take place.