Lev Navrozov explains Putin's business policy

"The Education of Lev Navrozov", ch. 42:

Private enterprise! Free enterprise! Surely thousands of dangers to possession-power lurk everywhere. Was not the bolshevik party under the tsar financed by private people who had made their money privately: the privately published writer Gorky or the private factory owner Morozov? Did not Parvus and Ganetsky, who passed on the Kaiser's money, both pose as private businessmen? It was private tradesmen who sold the bolsheviks printing presses, weapons, and whatever was sold privately for money (and a lot was!)

...

As for businessmen in democracies—why, quite a few of them have been vying with each other ever since 1921 to sell any pseudo-tsar-god a better and cheaper rope to hang them with, as great Lenin put it. Even if all businessmen knew that the rockets they will be building, say, in Siberia are trained on the cities in which their families live, enough of them would rush to the site to build these rockets in the hope that they would manage to evacuate their families before the firing. Not that businessmen are more treacherous or greedy or ignorant than any other randomly sampled group. Up to three-quarters of the population of a democracy may be willing (as in Germany in 1933) to sell democracy for any personal gain in status and wealth. But there is no way they can do it at a high profit (the pseudo-tsar-god pays notoriously little to rank-and-file spies because they are very many of them and hard currency is too valuable). Now, businessmen handle unique equipment, patents, weapons and what not. They can lobby their statesmen amid the complete indifference of the rest of the population.

Why should a pseudo-tsar-god have a rich, numerous, powerful subversive or treacherous group like that in his country?

True, free enterprise would create in his country "high living standards for the entire population". But does a pseudo-tsar-god need that? No. To each serf according to his rank. That is, according to his value to the pseudo-tsar-god and his devotion to him. Serfs who will enrich themselves on their own as privateers will be so much less devoted to him. They will also be freer, for independent property means so much more latitude. And freedom for them means danger to him. He must be the only source of all values of all serfs of all ranks and castes. From a writer's world fame to a death-slave's extra day of life.