Трансформация отношений собственности в России на рубеже 1980–1990-х гг.: предпосылки, содержание, последствия

Abstract

The transformation of property relations became one of the most significant components of radical changes in Russia at the end of the twentieth century. Its main form was the privatization of state property, which has no analogues in terms of historical scale and content. In this article, the transformation of property relations in Russia at the turn of the 1980s–1990s is reviewed within the problem of “socialist public property” and its evolution in the late Soviet period. Necessity to update the historical approach to the study of the transformation of property relations in Russia is associated with the need for acquiring a deeper understanding of this process’ historical background. The article also provides the solution for the problem of characterizing the content of denationalization and privatization processes at the turn of the 1980s–1990s and its consequences in terms of an individual’s changing place in the system of property relations. We draw the conclusion that problems of the Soviet society, such as: a) contradiction between “government” and “public” property categories; b) inequality in terms of the disposal and usage of property objects between members of the partyeconomic nomenclature and most population, as well as between different groups of the nomenclature; c) exclusion of the majority of citizens from, formally, “national” but, in practice, state property, subsequently had a significant impact on processes of changing property relations. It predetermined an active struggle between different administration levels and so-called “spontaneous” privatization already in the late 1980s. Mass privatization of the 1990s itself was, in general, a natural result of the process of public property “governmentalization”, and it was aimed at consolidating the party-economic elite’s de facto control over production and subsequent redistribution of power in society. Large groups of working people, who lost their formal status of “quasi-owners” in relation to former objects of socialist property, continued to remain only hired workers. This, in particular, caused the absence of serious social cataclysms during rapid privatization processes of the early 1990s. As the information basis, a wide range of regulatory and legal acts of authorities and administrations of various levels, state statistics data, archival documents, periodical materials, results of public opinion polls, and data from literary sources were used.