When the eXile launched in February 1997, Russia's oligarchy ruled over the economy, the president, and the mass media. They owned everything, and they flaunted it loudly.
At the time, it made us furious. Low pay and excess amounts of free powdered uranium only heightened the sense of outrage, that we now see was aimed not so much at the oligarchs as at the Western cabal that marketed them. If you opposed their mission in Russia, you were a revanchist, you "just didn't get it," or worse, you were a Communist. Thanks to a seamless, venal link between the interests of the Russian oligarchs, the Clinton Administra-tion, international lending institutions and finance, the neo-liberal punditry that propagandized on its behalf, and finally, at the bottom of this grotesque career-advancing chain, the hagfish of humanity -- the Western press corps -- the oligarchs not only got away with theft, they were considered heroes of Progress.
Only now, in the increasingly bland, dry, bureaucratic-fascism of the Putin era, do we realize how much we miss the Russian Oligarchy, some of the most colorful, most amoral characters ever assembled. What happened to them? While many praise Putin's successful bitch-slapping of the oligarch class, few actually stop to wonder where they are -- which is too bad, because this story has all the juicy, depressing humor of an E! biop on the cast of Diff'rent Strokes, only on a grander scale.
Russia's oligarchy was created in late 1995 in the so-called "loans-for-shares" scheme, in which a small group of well-connected and mostly-balding ex-Communist youth leaguers, brilliant goons and two-bit shysters were handed the Soviet Union's crown jewels in return for cash "loans" -- dirty cash which had largely been stolen the previous few years by the same newly-appointed oligarchs -- in auctions that were laughably rigged. The noble purpose of all of this theft and corruption was to help bankroll Boris Yeltsin's successful re-election campaign in 1996 -- and therefore, ensure the triumph of the forces of good over Communist evil. In March of that year, the most savage and successful of the bunch -- the so-called "Semibankirschina" or "Seven Bankers" (a misnomer, since by all accounts the number included anywhere from nine to about 15 key oligarchs) -- met with Yeltsin to officially throw their weight behind the Godfather who made them in the first place.
It his hard to imagine today that just six or seven years ago, perfectly reasonable, successful, well-educated Americans and Brits proudly appeared on television or argued in print that this gang of some of the most vicious thieves the world has ever known should be considered the modern-day equivalent of capitalist ubermenschen along the lines of Andrew Carnegie, with a hefty dose of American Protestant Horatio Algers self-made mythos thrown into the mix. They argued that the creation of the oligarchy was "necessary" for the transition from communism to capitalism, that there was "no other way to do it," even though the world abounds with all kinds of counter-examples, from the authoritarian gradualism of the Chinese to the more humane approach taken by the Hungarians and Poles. In fact the whole idea of "necessary stages" itself comes from bogus Marxian-Hegelian teleology, but try telling that to a Michael McFaul or a Charles Blitzer, and the next thing you know you're the Communist revanchist!
The fact is that thanks largely to the oligarchs, who by their own account controlled over half of Russia's economy, Russia saw its GDP plunge by some 60% in the 1990s, while its population suffered one of the most appalling declines, even by wartime genocide standards.
Today, the oligarchy -- the so-called Rockafellers of Russia -- are a just an embarrassing 90s-retro memory, like Love Parades and, well, 70s retro. But unlike those miserable fads, we miss them. The age of ferocious, colorful oligarchs is over, replaced by an era of dull, obsequious bureaucrats and affected patriotism. Gone are newscasts showing General Prosecutors on TV banging whores; instead, we get Putin meeting another official who explains how production at a milk factory was increased.
So what happened to them? In this issue, the eXile opens up the Where Are They Now? file on Russia's nearly-extinct oligarchy.
http://www.exile.ru/2004-October-15/feature_story.html
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