Date: 2025-04-06 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00022083
RUSSIA
UNDERSTANDING PUTIN
The assessment of Vladimir Milov, a Russian with experience in the Russian Government
UNDERSTANDING PUTIN
The assessment of Vladimir Milov, a Russian with experience in the Russian Government
Original article: 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JCbNq6vxXY'
Burgess COMMENTARY
I am not an expert on Russia, but I might know more about the place than most because of some different small experiences over my 60+ year adult lifetime.
In my 20s I became friendly with a young Russian in London. We were both interested in technology and socialized quite a lot in London in the early 1960s. While we were from completely different cultural settings, we had a common interst in technology.
Not much later I was asked by my employer (Cooper Brothers & Co., Chartered Accountants in London) to contribute to research about the state of accountancy in various countries around the world. Coopers published a document periodically that was about accountancy everywhere around the world and I was assigned several countries. During this work I learned something about Soviet accountancy and especially the qccounting that was done by the Soviet Government. The takeaway was that it was extremely accurate and meticulous because the staff were scared stiff of making a mistake and being sents to labor camps (the Gulags) for punishment and retraining. The same approach to keeping records ... accounting and otherwise ... applied throughout the Soviet Union.
Many years later (in 1995) I did some work as a consultant in Kazakhstan related to Government Financial Reform after the collapse of the Soviet Union and saw first hand the was Soviet style government accounting worked. The detail records were very good, just as I had learned decades before. The thing that needed to be fixed was the manner in which this detail information was summarized for meaningful government scale reporting. Sadly this was not understood by the general community of international consultants who were hellbent on replicating something like the US system of gov ernment accounting, a system of accounting that I had learned about with my work at Cooper Brothers decades before that is noteworthy for its ubiquitous sloppiness and almost total ineffectiveness.
I was in Kazakhstan as part of a team put together by a unit of the accounting firm of KPMG in Washington DC. Not long into the project, I was asked to leave the team because 'someone' with the client (the Government of Kazkhstan) wanted me to go. At the time, I thought it was because I had perhaps expressed some concern over the professional competence of our team and that this was not appreciated back at the home office ... but I think it might have been something more sinister. My approach to Government Financial Reform in Kazakhstan ... and everywhere in the countries that comprices the Former Soviet Union ... would have made the emergence of the oilgarchs a whole lot more difficult, and this was pretty obvious to anyone with an ounce of evil intent. Rather than going with my recommendations all the rigorous detail that had existed in Soviet times was thrown out and replaced with one of the sloppiest systems ever created to the delighted of the financial crooks that rose rapidly to the top of everything.
I have not given this much thought until all the news about Russian oligarchs and their SuperYachts being sanctioned in the aftermath of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. I am annoyed at myself for not making more of a stink when KPMG had me leave my Kazakhstan assignment back in 1995.
Thinking back to KPMG (its Policy Economics Group, which changed its name to Barents Group the week before I joined the firm), I am recalling one of the technical staff in Washington who was from Russia. He and I were quite good friends and professional colleagues ... and he was perhaps the only person in the office who had both an understanding and an appreciation of what I was talking about in terms of building a reporting system that worked on top of an already functioning data recording system that was far better than anything to be seen in the USA by an order of magnitude. Ignorance is bliss ...'tis folly to be wise' !!!!!!!!
Peter Burgess