Russian oligarchs

Russian oligarchs (Russian: олигархи, romanized: oligarkhi) are business oligarchs from the former Soviet republics who rapidly accumulated wealth in the 1990s through the Russian privatisation that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The collapsing Soviet state left the ownership of state assets contested, which permitted informal deals with former Soviet officials as a means of acquiring state property. The Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs has been nicknamed the "oligarch trade union". The Russian oligarchs first emerged as entrepreneurs under Mikhail Gorbachev (General Secretary, 1985–1991), exploiting various loopholes during the economic liberalisation of his perestroika programme. Boris Berezovsky, a mathematician and former researcher, became the first widely recognised Russian business oligarch. The oligarchs became increasingly influential in Russian politics during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin (1991–1999), a period often referred to as the wild nineties; they helped finance his re-election in 1996. Well-connected oligarchs such as Roman Abramovich, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Potanin acquired key assets at a fraction of their value at the loans for shares scheme auctions conducted in the run-up to the election. Defenders of the oligarchs who later fell out of favour have argued that the companies they acquired were not highly valued at the time because they continued to operate on Soviet principles, with non-existent stock control, huge payrolls, no financial reporting and scant regard for profit. Since 2014, hundreds of Russian oligarchs and their companies have been subject to US sanctions for their support of "the Russian government's malign activity around the globe". In 2022, many Russian oligarchs and their close family members were targeted and sanctioned by countries around the world in response to Russia's war in Ukraine.