but it turned out his re-election was really something to worry about. the country was kind of a mess, the government was broke. yeltsin was broke in terms of the assets and money he needed to mount his re-election campaign. and by '96, by the time he was running for re-election, there was this ongoing process of the former soviet union selling off what had been government-owned enterprises. they were deep into the process of privatizing what had been a totally state-run economy. but in order to finance his re-election in 1996, which he was very worried about, yeltsin came up with a particularly terrible scheme. for turning this ongoing dodgy privatization process into something that would specifically result in him getting cash for his re-election effort. and the scheme was basically an auction scheme. through this auction scheme, banks would loan the yeltsin government money, cash, and as collateral for the loan, what the government put up was big stakes in big government-run businesses. and then when the government didn't pay back the loans -- the government didn't pay back the loans -- the bank got these big