![]() ![]() ![]() Authorities charged him with fraud and tax evasion. In 2003, masked agents stormed Khodorkovsky's private jet during a refueling stop and arrested him at gunpoint. Rest assured, Putin doesn't have to worry about puppets making fun of him anymore. A state-controlled energy company, Gazprom, ended up buying NTV in a hostile takeover. Gusinsky was jailed and then fled overseas. The government alleged Gusinsky stole $10 million in a privatization deal. In 2000, armed agents in camouflage and ski masks raided NTV's offices. When NTV newscasters - and puppets - began criticizing and making fun of the newly elected president, Putin slammed down his iron fist. Tolerated under Yeltsin, NTV ran programs - including a satirical puppet show - critical of the Kremlin. By 1993, he had enough money to start a newspaper and Russia's first private television station, NTV. In the early 1990s, he flipped buildings in Moscow's burgeoning real estate market and started a bank. When the Soviet Union began allowing entrepreneurship in the late 1980s, Gusinsky made a small fortune making and selling copper bracelets, which were apparently a big hit with Russian consumers. Back in the mid-1980s, Gusinsky was a cab driver with broken dreams of directing plays in Moscow's theater scene. He first aimed at Vladimir Gusinsky, the rare oligarch who built most of his wealth from scratch as opposed to merely taking over extractive industries that once belonged to the government. He only targeted individual oligarchs who threatened his power. If by oligarchs, he said, one meant those who "help fusion of power and capital - there will be no oligarchs of this kind as a class."īut, once in power, Putin didn't actually eliminate the oligarchy. Shortly before election day, Putin was asked by a radio station how he felt about the oligarchs. ![]() When Putin's 2000 presidential election campaign heated up, he began paying lip service to Russia's hatred of the oligarchs and the corrupt deals that enriched them. Two of them, Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, deployed their television stations and newspapers to turn Putin from an unknown figure into a household name.īut Putin was a shrewder politician than they initially realized. The oligarchs helped fuel Putin's meteoric rise. Without this victory, Yeltsin could have never appointed Putin as his prime minister, a position that proved to be Putin's launching pad for his presidential bid. They engineered President Boris Yeltsin's stunning comeback victory in the 1996 presidential elections. These oligarchs created and bankrolled what became Putin's political party, Unity, the predecessor to what is now called United Russia. Putin came to power thanks in no small part to the original class of oligarchs, who got ostentatiously rich through crooked privatization deals during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. " sit atop Russia's largest companies and are responsible for providing the resources necessary to support Putin's invasion of Ukraine." Putin Shows Who's Boss "These individuals have enriched themselves at the expense of the Russian people," the White House said in a recent statement announcing sanctions against over a dozen oligarchs connected to Putin. So let us get down to the point and be open and do what is necessary to do to make our relationship in this field civilized and transparent.'' ''So there is no point in blaming the reflection in the mirror. "I want to draw your attention to the fact that you built this state yourself, to a great degree, through the political or semi-political structures under your control,'' Putin reportedly said in the closed-door meeting. But now, their nation's newly elected president, Vladimir Putin, wanted to tell them, face to face, who was really in charge. Through shady deals, outright corruption, and even murder, these rapacious "oligarchs" - as Russians had come to derisively call them - had seized control of much of Russia's economy, and, increasingly, its fledgling democracy. In the previous decade, these men had risen seemingly out of nowhere, amassing spectacular fortunes as the country around them descended into chaos. In the summer of 2000, 21 of the richest men in Russia exited their bulletproof limousines and entered the Kremlin for a historic meeting. You can read Part One here and subscribe to the newsletter here. Note: This is Part Two of a two-part Planet Money newsletter series on the Russian oligarchs. ![]()
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