Oligarchs

Someone should make a long, lurid documentary about the misfortunes of Russia’s ruling class — a multi-season soap opera in the manner of those endless imported melodramas, with each episode a fresh ministerial collapse, a fresh body in a parked car, a fresh general blown up days after his promotion. The bosses, it turns out, cry too. And lately they have a great deal to cry about. Over the past few years, and increasingly over the past months and even days, an extraordinary mortality has settled over the people who run the Russian state and feed off it. It is varied, it is relentless, and it is — let me be honest about my own reaction — not entirely unwelcome. What I want to argue here is that these are not random accidents. They are the visible symptoms of a real fracture inside the regime, and they tell us something true about what this regime is for. ...

We are used to thinking of Russia’s billionaires as rich men — owners in the ordinary sense, people who possess their yachts and palaces and fortunes the way a Western tycoon possesses his. The whole vocabulary of “oligarch” encourages this: an oligarch, on the Greek root, is one of the few who rule by virtue of what they own. I want to argue that in Putin’s Russia this picture is precisely wrong, and that getting it wrong leads us to misread everything else about the regime. The billionaires do not own their billions. They hold them. They are nominees — temporary, conditional caretakers of wealth that belongs, in any meaningful sense, to one man — and the moment that man asks for it back, they will scramble to return it. ...