Suppliers engage in round-robin lending by which everyone owes money to someone and no one ever pays up. That too throws a lifeline to insolvent firms. Russian factories continue to churn out steel and other products that no one needs. One measure of the deformity is that Russia is littered with factories employing 10,000 or more workers. In the United States, such factories are a rarity.
Ordinary folk call it economic suicide.
Russia, of course, was not like Poland before or after communism. Russia's officials had no such confidence about absorbing the workers from its numerous, gigantic state-owned factories. Unlike communism in Poland, Soviet communism went back 70 years, obliterating private property and extinguishing memory of a time when ordinary people ran independent shops. There was also, Goldman points out, a vibrant civic culture in Poland in the early 1990s that equated the freedom of markets with freedom from the Soviets. There was no such unambiguous response in Russia.