The price of protection in a lawless land

The village clubhouse at Nikolina Gora, a well-heeled dacha village just outside Moscow, is usually a delightfully sedate place. Local residents Mstislav Rostropovich and Sergei Prokofiev used to give recitals for their neighbours on the clubhouse terrace. On Sunday afternoons lesser musicians still keep up the tradition and the strains of Mozart drift through the pines.

Hardly an appropriate venue, one would think, then, for a hostile takeover bid by corporate raiders — but at last month’s annual residents’ meeting tempers were running high as the village’s elected committee decided how to face just such a raid. Nikolina Gora’s troubles offer a nasty insight into the way business is done in Russia. As a cynical Russian proverb puts it, ‘right is on the side of he who has the most rights’.

The problem began three years ago, when the village committee realised that Nikolina Gora’s communal lands — on which the clubhouse, kindergarten, shop, fire station and war memorial stand — had not been properly privatised after the fall of the Soviet Union.