А это – совершенно бессмысленное задание. Надо было написать отчет о проделанной работе: целях, задачах, методах и результатах. Публикую только для того, чтобы вы могли убедиться в полной несуразности таких отчетов.

And it is a completely senseless task. We were supposed to write the report about the work done: its purposes, problems, methods and results. I publish it here only for you can be convinced of the full absurdity of such reports.

by Alexander Smotrov




My topic is privatization on Estonia. It can seem to be boring and unconnected to the EU enlargement, but privatization was one of the EU demands about the functioning market economy. And its influence on the life of common people is very wide especially if the case is about big companies such as the Estonian railways or power plants.

My article consists of three main parts: the introduction with the outline picture of the whole process of privatization and two “case studies”: the Narva power plants and the Estonian railways. I tried to tell about the milestones on the way of their privatization, public opinion about this and social impact of the process.

My angle is to show different points of view and different sides of the privatization to construct more or less full impression about the things described. I didn’t want either to boast privatization or to show only dirty sides of it. I wanted my article to be balanced.

My target group is the people who are not very much familiar with the topic and have no specific knowledge about economy or Estonia, readers of dailies in Russia or Denmark, for example. Before going into details they should read an overview of the case and understand what it is about. What are the main points, who are the players, what are the conditions and probable consequences? I think that the reader can find answers for these questions in my article.

My sources were quite different. I use a lot of articles published in Russian, Estonian and Western media about the case and its background. The most useful of them were: Estonia rail sale agreed by CNN’s Douglas Herbert (www.cnn.com September 5, 2001), a special issue of the Estonian Youth newspaper dealing with the privatization (www.netinfo.ee July 20, 2000). I also used the materials from Estonian Privatization Agency (www.eea.ee) and the European Commission 2000 Regular report on Estonia’s towards accession.

I had an interview with Karsten Stæhr, Ph.D., Lecturer in Economics at the Eurofaculty of Tartu University, who told me about the whole picture of the privatization in Estonia and with Aap Tänav, press-secretary of Estonian Transport Ministry, who expressed a point of view of the Ministry and gave me some valuable figures about the privatization of railways. And I visited twice Tartu railway station to see everything with my own eyes and take a lot of pictures. During one of those visits I had a nice talk with former railway worker.

My working process is expressed in my article, I hope. I failed to have an interview with the chairman of Tartu railway station, but except this everything was OK. My Russian helped me very much because one of the interviewees didn’t speak English.

My article will be followed by three info-boxes for the website: a table about the number of privatized enterprises during 10 years; the milestones of the privatization in Estonia; diagram with the share of stocks in the Baltic Rail Service.