MOSCOW — The Russian government, which just a few years ago was salting away billions of dollars in oil revenue, is now confronting such a gaping budget deficit that ministers approved a wide-ranging plan Wednesday to sell-off state property, senior officials said.

It would be, by some estimates, the largest privatization program in Russia since the post-Communist sell-off of the 1990s. Still, the government plans to sell only minority stakes in the companies, retaining control while letting private investors share a larger part of the risks and profits.

Privatizations of some type been expected since the onset of the financial crisis, but the scale of the plan suggested that the crisis in public finance elsewhere in Europe is catching up with Russia, too. Until recently, the Russian government under former president and now prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, had been bulking up its share in the economy through nationalizations.

The program approved Wednesday involves 11 companies, including the national oil company, the national railroad, a fleet of merchant marine vessels, two state banks and a company managing hydroelectric dams, said Aleksei Uvarov, the director of the property department in the ministry of economy.

Some of the companies, in fact, grew or were created out of the nationalizations. But officials, and independent economists, say now is a good a time to let the pendulum swing the other way, and sell to private investors willing to buy.

“Commodity prices are high, so asset prices are high, and at the same time Russia needs cash,” Sergei M. Guriyev, the rector of New Economic School in Moscow, and a member of the board of Sberbank, said in a telephone interview. “So this is the right time to sell.”

There will be marked differences compared with the privatizations of the 1990s, he said. The prices will be higher because Russia now has an infrastructure of investment banks and stock exchanges to manage sales on market terms.

“It’s a big, big move in the right direction,” Mr. Guriyev said.

The plan was considered at a meeting Wednesday in Moscow, chaired by Mr. Putin, who afterward remarked that Russia would work to eliminate budget deficits by 2015. But he did not delve into the details of the privatization program that will include the state oil company, Rosneft.

After years of oil-driven surpluses, the Russian government had been squeaking by over the last two years by borrowing and by drawing down its savings. The deficit this year, for example, is expected to reach 5.9 percent of gross domestic product, according to the International Monetary Fund.

While manageable by the standards of other governments during the recession, it is a woeful reversal for Russia, and apparently led to the decision to sell the stakes. Oil money transformed Russia over the last decade, creating a boom town out of Moscow, lifting millions from poverty and establishing what had looked like rock-solid public finances.

Russia still holds $467 billion in gold and foreign currency reserves, saved during the oil boom. Spending this money on the budget, however, could cause the ruble to appreciate, hurting local industry — and would leave the cupboards bare for Russia if oil prices dip again.

A main culprit of the deficit is rising military spending, according to the Russian business newspaper , Vedomosti. Military outlays are expected to rise 13 percent in 2011, suggesting Russian officials had to chose between two sacred cows, the military and the government’s petroleum and industrial assets.

Education and debt service are also expanding items in the Russian budget.

Russia’s finance minister, Aleksei L. Kudrin, told reporters Wednesday that the sale of shares in state companies would raise $29 billion over three years. While the largest plan for privatizations since the 1990s, a far smaller portion of the industrial base will be handed over this time, at far higher prices, and only in the form of minority stakes.

Many of the valuable oil fields in Rosneft have already been privatized and nationalized once before. That alone might seem a good reason to give investors pause.

But the companies are profitable enough to generate interest all the same. Also, Mr. Putin’s successor, Dmitri A. Medvedev, has said he would like to see a lesser role for the government in the economy.

“I think there is a change of heart about state ownership,” Peter Westin, chief equity strategist at Aton, an investment bank in Moscow, said. Whether investors buy will come down to price, he said.

In recent years, a practice of raising the price on Russian initial public offerings has meant that half of newly issued shares in Russia lose value after they are floated, Mr. Westin said, another consideration for potential buyers.

About 10 percent of Rosneft is now traded on the London Stock Exchange, after an initial public offering that went ahead although Rosneft’s core assets had belonged to Yukos until that company was bankrupted in a contentious tax dispute. Another 24.1 percent of Rosneft could be made available to investors in the new round of privatizations, according to Russian media reports.

The shares in the state companies might be sold in initial or secondary offerings or to strategic investors.

From about 2003 until the onset of the economic crisis in 2008, more and more of the economy fell under state control. First oil and gas companies, then arms factories, airplane manufacturing plants, cars companies and other enterprises were seized by the state, under various pretexts.

State control is particularly prevalent among the larger companies that tend to be traded on stock exchanges. For example, about 60 percent of the market capitalization, or total value of the stocks, of companies traded in Moscow are controlled by the state.

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

Published: July 28, 2010

MOSCOW — The leaders of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan took their longest stride to date Monday in linking their economies, forming a customs union that they say will soon evolve into a more ambitious common market, with Russia at its hub.

The agreement, for now, eases trade between the three large former Soviet economies without fully abolishing all duties and tariffs.

The three leaders also stopped short of reaching a common position on membership in the World Trade Organization, something Russia as an individual country has been trying to negotiate since shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

The agreement, marked with much fanfare in the Kazakh capital of Astana, eliminates obstacles to trade and investment that went up after the Soviet Union fell. That alone, analysts said, could give a new fillip to the region’s economies by introducing them to greater competition, which should ultimately benefit consumers.

The signing was also a victory for Russia’s leaders, who have made the customs union a pet project for a variety of reasons, notably because Moscow stands to benefit as a natural hub for regional finance and trade.

The Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said at the signing ceremony that the three countries would try to open their economies fully by the beginning of 2012. The first step is harmonizing customs rules. Later, they will discuss the free movement of labor and capital.

“A lot of work remains before the formation of a common economic space,” Mr. Medvedev said, according to comments published on the Kremlin’s Web site. “But, considering that it really is a beneficial and interesting endeavor, I’m sure we can agree on everything.”

For Russia, the push for a free trade pact that began during the financial crisis marks a change of tack in its economic policies in the former Soviet space. Russia, which found itself in the favorable position of holding hard currency reserves even as Western lenders were pulling out of the region during the crisis, moved away from loans and direct subsidies of fuel and toward an emphasis on more sweeping economic integration.

“This is a very positive paradigm shift in how Russia deals with the near abroad,” Yaroslav Lissovolik, the chief economist at Deutsche Bank in Moscow, said in a telephone interview. “Previously, it was a one-way street where Russia was giving out economic favors in exchange for political favors.”

A free trade pact, in contrast, is an economic strategy to elevate the prospects of the entire region in which Russia is a natural center of gravity.

In the short term, Russian farmers could suffer from competition from Belarus, and Russian steelsmiths from competition from Kazakhstan. But in the longer term, the exposure to competition will help Russia diversify away from its dependence on natural resources while elevating the role of Moscow as a regional financial and business center.

Russian banks, Mr. Lissovolik said, were particularly interested in gaining access to Belarus’s large, unreformed, Soviet-style economy as it prepared to privatize major industries in need of funding because of the global downturn.

Russia also holds a powerful lure to bring other former Soviet states into the union, if it chooses: access to its domestic labor market. With its diminishing population but rising oil wealth, Russia is the world’s second-largest importer of labor after the United States, according to United Nations estimates.

Already on Monday, the leaders of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan — two countries heavily reliant on migrant labor remittances from Russia — said they were interested in joining the union.

The union’s success in drawing members besides Kazakhstan and Belarus will depend largely on how temptin the Russian-backed project appears to countries that may have to choose between this and other options. Ukraine, for example, is also pursuing trade agreements with the European Union that are incompatible with the Russian-backed free trade space.

Also, candidates will surely have in mind former failed efforts to create free trade areas on the territory of the former Soviet Union. The Commonwealth of Independent States, the Eurasian Economic Community and the union state of Russia and Belarus all made little headway toward creating a true common market in the region.

For now, Ukraine has said it will remain outside the union despite the election this year of president, Viktor F. Yanukovich, who is on friendlier terms with the Kremlin than his predecessor was. Ukraine, a W.T.O. member, could not join the union because Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan are still applicants to the global trade group.

Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin said last summer that Russia would abandon its unilateral membership bid and instead seek to join together with Belarus and Kazakhstan in the customs union — an apparent signal that Russia had other options if W.T.O. conditions were seen as too onerous.

Russia, though, has since backtracked and said it would pursue W.T.O. membership alone while coordinating with other members of the newly formed union. On Monday, Russia’s first deputy prime minister, Igor Shuvalov, said the three presidents would decide on their strategy and make it public within days.

The agreement Monday was to have been in effect by July 1. However, Belarus had held out amid a dispute over tariffs that Russia charges on crude oil exports delivered to Belarussian refineries — the cause of a brief oil pipeline shutdown last winter.

The signing went ahead, but the disagreement apparently was never resolved: A Belarussian official said the tariffs would be abolished immediately, while Mr. Shuvalov said the entire package of treaties forming a common economic space would have to be in place first.

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

Published: July 5, 2010