Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

A Big Russian Bank Just Couldn't Stay Private

Otkritie Bank's fate is another sign of the relentless, and risky, nationalization of the Russian economy.

August 30, 2017 at 12:16 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

The Kremlin is going retro.
Photographer: Vasily Maximov/AFP/Getty Images

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The nationalization of Russia's biggest private bank sounds anachronistic: There's no global or regional financial crisis, and the latest World Bank report on the Russian economy described the country's financial sector as "largely stabilized," with about 10 percent non-performing loans, a lower level than in Portugal, Italy or Ireland.

But the fate of the Otkritie financial group is not really about traditional banking problems. It's about the state's oversized and still growing role in the Russian economy.