The Russian economy is booming again. It was just five years ago this month that its first frenzied post-communist expansion ended in a debt default that brought the world currency system to the brink of disaster. But its second, more orderly expansion has turned Russia into one of the few bright spots in the global picture for the past few years. The economy is expected to grow 7 percent this year alone -- stimulated by $30 per barrel oil.

Russia now rivals Saudi Arabia as the world's biggest petroleum producer. A third of all Muscovites earn the average European wage. Shopping centers are springing up on the outskirts of the city. (Don't ask about the provinces!)

Three and a half years after he was elected president, Vladimir Putin has brought a sense of stability to Russia, say Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, Washington Post bureau chiefs in Moscow, writing in the New Republic last month.

Now Putin is running for re-election next year -- promising to double GDP by 2010, campaigning against the richest of the oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, of Yukos Oil Co.

So did Russia's transition from a central plan to a market economy turn out all right after all?

Not according to Marshall Goldman, professor emeritus of economics at Wellesley College and long-time associate director of Harvard's Russian Research Center. Towards the end of his new book, The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry, Goldman provides the following useful typology of the various scams worked in "the wild and wooly East" since 1991, complete with illustrations.

• Asset stripping (Gazprom is the most blatant but by no means unique example);

• Share dilution of minority shareholders (Yukos, Sherbank, Norilsk Nickel);

• Abuse of bankruptcy procedures (Tyumen Oil, Kondpetroleum, Chernogorneft);

• Shell games with public bank deposits (Menatep, SBS/Agr);

• Mafia ejection of legal owners by force, threat or murder (Subway Sandwich franchise in St. Petersburg, Norex Petroleum in Siberia, Sawyer Research Products in Vladimir, the aluminum industry in -- Krasnoyarsk Aluminum Smelters);

• Official intimidation, ejection or threat of imprisonment by senior government officials (Far Eastern Shipping Co., Media-Most, TV-6);

• Arbitrary seizure of mobile telephone frequencies (MSS Saratov);

• Hiding assets from the IMF (the Russian Central Bank);

• Rigged bids (LUKoil, Severnaia Neft, Loans for Shares program).

Truly, that is a remarkable menu of juicy business stories -- more than enough to put the Enron and WorldCom scandals in perspective, and render potential investors in the Russian economy lingeringly cautious. (Russian securities have yet to be declared investment grade.) "Thus far the reform process in Russia can be considered at best only a partial success," writes Goldman.

Then again, what ambitious policy undertaking is ever a complete success -- especially on the scale of unwinding the failed experiment that was the Soviet Union? Seventy-five years is a long time to evolve forms of under-the-table behavior, where private enterprise on the up-and-up was completely forbidden. Long before Russia was exporting oil, she was sending crooks abroad -- to New York City, for example, where they quickly raised the forgery of cab medallions to a minor art form.

Goldman has a long history of well-deserved skepticism where Russian developments are concerned. In five books over twenty years, he has provided an unparalleled baseline narrative of the political and economic outlook in the collection of fifteen diverse republics that were the Soviet Union when he started -- and he has done it in real time, as it happened. Consider:

This difference of opinion about Russia's a transition will be a long time straightening out. There is no point in expecting the parties to the debate -- the policy economists on the one hand, the "Sovietologists" and their numerous allies on the other -- to do anything more than state their case. And this Goldman has done, clearly and simply. At 72, he is an irreplaceable grand old man. So who among the next generation will decide? The Europeans, with their several centers for generating knowledge for and about transition economies, will strive to narrow the debate. Then there is Russia's own fledgling Center for Economic and Financial Research. And a new generation of models of looting behavior eventually will be brought to bear to weigh competing claims -- they were developed originally to describe the US savings and loan scandal. (In "The Chastening," Paul Blustein reports that IMF bankers in Russia grew really alarmed when the heard Ukraine described by knowledgeable lenders as "the next moral hazard play.") Nor is the transition debate simply an argument about the past. Perhaps the most important wholesale transition left is Cuba. But the details of institutional engineering and mechanism design are at issue today in every country in the world.

In the meantime, there is Russia, five years out from having nearly crashed the global financial system. There may have been a better way to deal with the development of Texas, too. But Texas today is what we have today. Edna Ferber wrote the novel "Giant" in the 1950s to explain Texas culture to the world (it made a pretty good movie, too). And of course there was the 1980s television series "Dallas." Similarly, there is nothing quite like a first-rate novel to supply powerful images of present-day Russia, William Gibson's recent "Pattern Recognition" being a good case in point. But mostly we make do with journalism -- see the precis of the series of ten articles in the Financial Times during August (subscription required for full text) for a sterling example. Those Russian oligarchs are going to be a major presence on the scene -- and, often enough, a headache -- for a long time to come.

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