Power Struggle

摘要

Another redistribution of russia's industrial wealth is under way. After the privatization debauchery of the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin sat by while insiders walked off with the country's best oil and metals companies, now comes the turn of Unified Energy System. UES, 52% owned by the state and perhaps 20% by foreign portfolio investors, is the largest electric utility in the world. Including the plants of its partly owned subsidiaries, it controls 156 gigawatts of generating capacity, nearly the capacity of Germany and Britain combined. Today this sprawling empire is being broken up. At the center of the three-year-long fray stands Anatoly Chubais, 47, the architect of Russia's flawed transition to a market economy in the 1990s. Articulate, energetic and pragmatic, Chubais used to be the golden boy of Russia's emerging market. But the days when Western investment banks rushed to invest in the projects he championed and Western politicians and newspapers parroted his opinions are long gone. In 1998, after the Russian monetary system collapsed, Chubais was fired as first deputy prime minister.