Abel Polese, apolese@ed.ac.uk University of Edinbutgh/Ukrainian Academy of Sciences A post-Soviet syndrome: the state is public, the private sector is private...the public sector is? Abel Polese, University of Edinburgh/Ukrainian Academy of Sciences NB This is work in progress. I would suggest anyone willing to quote from the paper would contact the author first Introduction After that, the 7 February 1990, the Central Committee of the Communist Party agreed to give up its monopoly of power, the 15 republics forming the USSR held the first multi party elections that allowed a number of nationalist coalitions (most notably in the Baltic Countries, but limitedly also elsewhere) to challenge the very existence of the Soviet Union. This eventually led to the signature, the 8 December 1991 in Alma Ata, of the protocol dissolving the Soviet Union and, the very next day, declaring the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, composed by all but the Baltic Republics and Georgia. Because Russia took up the heritage of the Soviet Union, in terms of debts and representations, and because of a wide spread claim that USSR politics were harming national growth of the Soviet republics, it was generally believed that those latter, once released from the financial and political burden of the Soviet Union, would start a rapid transition to economic stability and growth to become a welfare state on the model of its western neighbors. Reality revealed different, as some had foreseen (de Soto 1989, 2000) and economic reforms were very slow to happen, despite a very strong commitment of international institutions like the World Bank, the FMI or governments like the US and the European Union, which signed partnership and cooperation agreement with almost all former USSR republics. The situation in the region is quite diverse, and the former Soviet republics have reacted differently to the fading up of internal markets. Whilst during Soviet times most of the 1