Anatoly Chubais, the architect of the 1990s controversial shares-for-loans privatisation that created a class of super-rich oligarchs in Russia, yesterday dismissed a call from Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a jailed oil tycoon, to repent and beg forgiveness from the Russian people. In two public appeals conveyed through his lawyers, Mr Khodorkovsky turned against old liberals such as Mr Chubais, urging them to face up to their mistakes and redeem themselves for the system of inequality and corrupt capitalism they had created. But in an interview with the FT, Mr Chubais said: "I wish Khodorkovsky rep-ented for his own sins and left my sins to me." Mr Chubais was one of the masterminds behind a privatisation scheme, which put the vast majority of the country's natural resources into the hands of a few politically connected oligarchs, in return for the loans they extended to the government and support they had lent to former president Boris Yeltsin when he struggled to beat the communist candidate in the 1996 presidential elections. "I am not saying that everything we did was right. But I am saying that this was the only possible way of creating private property, and avoiding a complete collapse of the Russian economy," Mr Chubais said. He does not deny that privatisation resulted in social inequality and the creation of oligarchic capitalism, which had slowed down Russia's transition to a fully-fledged market democracy. But he insists this was the price worth paying for creating private property and fending off the communist threat. "We have created oligarchs as a phenomenon in Russia, and they have done a lot of harm - corrupting political and judicial processes. But they have also created blue-chip companies which Russia is famous for today. They had restructured Soviet plants and made them work again. They are cutting costs and opening up to investors." He argues that Russia's recent economic success is the best justification for the policies in the 1990s. "Talking about Russia's cumulative economic growth of 38 per cent over the past five years, we must realise that what is growing is the private sector which we created during the unpopular privatisations. The economy is working and it is working according to our blueprints." In spite of Russia's economic progress in the past few years, Mr Chubais, who heads the state-backed electricity monopoly Unified Energy Systems (UES), remains one of the most hated politicians in Russia. "We did not have people's support for the painful reforms and we were doomed to become unpopular. The feeling of unfairness of the privatisation runs very deep," he admits. But he argues a redistribution of property could be catastrophic for Russia. "Somehow it always ends in the hands of a bureaucrat, rather than people."