EDITORIAL PAGE (January 06, 1992)

The new Russian government has decided that mining is not one of the industries it plans to privatize in 1992, according to a report from the Reuters news agency.

Science Minister Boris Saltykov told a news conference that mineral resources, banks, railways, civil aviation and defence industry plants producing weapons — in short, all the really important sectors — will not be privatized in 1992.

Other industries that might be privatized with special government permission make up a peculiarly incompatible list including medicines, alcohol, children’s food and tobacco.

Industries of a third group, presumably consisting of everything not on the first two, are sectors that may be privatized in 1992 as part of Soviet President Yeltsin’s reform program. Selling off these industries, says Saltykov, is expected to bring in $62 billion in 1992 based on the current official exchange rates and more than triple that in 1993.

We wish them good luck, but somehow those selling prices seem to be highly optimistic. As demonstrated by our own governments’ efforts to unload — or rather, to sell to the public — Air Canada, PetroCanada, Cameco, Potash Corp. and others, it is hard to imagine what could possibly be worth that kind of money. From the little we have learned about conditions in Russia, there won’t be too many entrepreneurs willing to make a leveraged buyout for the Russian equivalent of a Macy’s in Moscow or sell shares to the public in a chain of Siberian grocery stores.