Shock to the Systems: The State and the Oil Sector after Russia’s 1998 Financial Crisis.

This paper charts developments in the taxation of the Russian oil sector after Russia’s financial crisis in 1998. It argues that the key political issues created by the massive devaluation following the crisis were, first, division of its substantial benefits to the oil sector and, second, the question of how fuel supplies to domestic markets would be maintained in the face of low domestic purchasing power. These issues drove the politics of taxation, which involved much hard bargaining between the government and the oil sector. The paper argues that this empirical record supports a "political economic sociology" approach to transition, which derives from a detailed analysis of actors in market and institutional context and treats the distributive outcomes of capitalism as deriving from bargaining power in markets, not just state allocation. The empirical record does not support an alternate theoretical approach that sees tax developments in this period as the result of consensual and mutual confidence-building between the government and the oil sector. PRELIMINARY DRAFT ONLY. PLEASE WRITE THE AUTHOR FOR A CURRENT COPY. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]