ABSTRACT
After the fall of Communism, the territories of the old Soviet Union went through a period of extreme free-market “gangster capitalism”, in which radical privatisation arose triumphant, unaccompanied by any kind of accountability, or legislative and civil framework. Whilst some thought that this was a necessary transitional phase to a more functioning market economy, the immediate consequences were that although some people got very rich very quickly, overall life expectancy declined and the economy imploded. The phrase, derived from Nietzsche, “everything is permitted”, also a key theme in Dostoevsky’s great novel on the theme of patricide, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), became a popular way in Russia of describing those immediate post-Communist years.
