Putin Owns Everything: The Kleptocracy Where Oligarchs Are Only Nominees
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. ...