Vladimir Putin did not create the Russian oligarchy. The neofudal lords already emerged with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, thanks to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the concentration of the old public industry in a few private hands. What Putin did was build a political system based on oligarchs, the first of which (and without a doubt the richest man in the world) is himself. Interestingly, the United States is imitating the model. Putin can boast of having invented the future.
Let’s start to define what an “oligarch” in the Russian style consists of. It is not a capitalist to classical usage, because it does not need to invest huge amounts of money to develop new technologies, lower their products and deal with competition. Nothing of the sort. The oligarch (we turn to that term because it is for current use) is limited to possessing and selling large amounts of natural resources such as gas, oil, aluminum or nickel.
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