In a move to shore up popular support
before the presidential election in 2012, Vladimir Putin called for a windfall
levy on the dishonest privatisations of the 1990s. “We need to close the
problems of the 1990s, of what, speaking honestly, was dishonest privatisation,”
he told tycoons meeting at a congress of Russia’s big business lobby. He went
on to say, “We need to establish the social legitimacy of private property
itself and social confidence in business.”[1] The implication is that just
acquisition is requisite to private property being recognized as legitimate,
societally.
The full essay is at "Russian Private Property."
