Who Are Russia’s Oligarchs and Can They Sway Putin?

Plenty of countries have super-rich business leaders with political influence. Russia took this to a different level. The wealthy, connected men who enabled and profited from the transformation of Russia’s economy and society under President Boris Yeltsin came to be known as oligarchs. (An oligarchy is government by a small group of people.) Though Russian billionaires these days are routinely called oligarchs, their role in society has changed under President Vladimir Putin, complicating efforts to target them as a way to punish Russia’s government for the invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s original oligarchs included some of its earliest entrepreneurs from when Mikhail Gorbachev loosened the strictures of Communist Party control in the late 1980s. They made fortunes in the 1990s as Russia, under Yeltsin, was transformed from the capital of the Soviet Union into a primitive state of capitalism. Yeltsin’s government expedited that process by privatizing state assets at deep discounts, putting massive wealth in the hands of a select few -- some of whom then struck a deal to use their fortunes and media assets to help Yeltsin defeat a resurgent Communist Party to win re-election in 1996. That deal came to be known as “loans for shares,” as the government placed its cash in the banks of oligarchs, took the money back as loans, and then defaulted on them. In essence, the oligarchs got state assets in exchange for state money. Significantly, these oligarchs also exerted sway on Yeltsin’s administration, influencing policy and in some cases serving in formal government positions.