In April, officials ‘confiscated’ 167,500 Motorola mobile phones on their way to Russian handset lovers. They’re still missing. Apparently some 50,000 were immediately ‘destroyed’ by police. The other 120,000 or so have gone walkabout. What happened?

So far the authorities have given various replies. First, that the mobiles emitted lethal doses of radiation and constituted a health hazard. Next, that they entered Russia illegally. Now it appears that Motorola has violated Russian patents. (An interesting development since Russia had no such patents when the models were built.)

Clearly, Motorola did not read the book I recommended the other day: Matthew Maly’s, ‘Understanding Russia‘.

Russia’s New Mobile Generation

Central to Maly’s argument is that Russia has no concept of rightful ownership. Basically, the authorities can pocket anything they take a shine to. He writes:

Russia has no concept of private property, it has no law in the Western sense (and could not have, no matter what the appearances). Instead, property is ’suspended in the air’ by the conflicting claims of possession that surround it from all sides. As a result, possession of any property can only be temporary and conditional.

The New York Times account predictably bleats about corruption in Russia. Well sorry, it’s the culture. You can’t go wandering around Russia making zillions, as Motorola has done, and not spread the proceeds around locally.

It’s all such a sore point because mobiles are Russia’s biggest growth sector - largely due to the fact that most basic telephones can’t be relied upon to work. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, the mobile market doubled every year from 1999 to 2004.

Competition is so crowded, in fact, that mobile users in St Petersburg share aerospace frequencies. (Though apparently they are switched out of texting while the odd Soyuz docks at the space station.)