essation of new investment in the industry, combined with the prior low quality of Soviet-era investments. Recovery methods were inefficient, and the physical plant of fields and pipelines antiquated and poorly built, thus maintenance-intensive at the best of times ("Russian Oil Power," 2001). In the absence of suitable maintenance under chaotic post-Soviet conditions, production levels therefore fell off quickly.
Initial privatization of the Russian oil industry took place during the period 1992-1996, but was carried out in a disorganized and fragmented way ("Look, See," 1998). In some part this may be fairly attributed to the inherent problems of privatizing an industry that was not simply "nationalized" in the usual sense, but embedded within an overall command economy, and thus isolated even from the indirect market forces that may impinge on on a single nationalized industry in an otherwise significantly market-oriented economy. The fragmented nature of the sell-off, however, in which the industry was broken into some twenty sections, was specifica
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