It's Not Easy Being An Oligarch

Author(s): Marshall Goldman
Editor(s): Matthias Neumann, Robert Orttung, Jeronim Perovic, Heiko Pleines, Hans-Henning Schröder
Series: Russian Analytical Digest (RAD)
Issue: 63
Pages: 7-9
Publisher(s): Center for Security Studies (CSS), ETH Zurich; Research Centre for East European Studies, University of Bremen
Publication Year: 2009

Perhaps it was inevitable, but it is hard to ignore the irony that a country that once held itself out as a new world in which extremes in wealth would be eliminated (if need be by imprisonment or even death) by 1998 had become a society in which the differences in wealth were once again extreme. Before long, Russia's major city, Moscow, had become the home of the world's second largest concentration of billionaires, second only to New York City. In 2004, Forbes Magazine, the major collector of such data, reported that Moscow actually had more billionaires than New York City. How did this once communist country, where officially as late as 1987 there were only minor disparities in income between the richest and poorest, become so top heavy with the very wealthy? And how

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