Tony Wood - Russia Without Putin - Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War

David Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia , New York 2011 [revised and updated edition], p. 358.

The full US list is accessible at www.treasury.gov; The EU list is at www.consilium.europa.eu, the UK’s at hmt-sanctions. s3.amazonaws.com, with Russians listed under ‘Ukraine (Sovereignty)’. On Gunvor, see ‘Secretive Russian Gunvor becomes number 3 oil trader’, Reuters, 31 October 2007; and on the Rotenbergs and Sochi, see ‘Putin Friend Bags at Least 21 Russian Olympic Contracts’, Bloomberg, 27 March 2013.

For a rather excitable version of this argument, see Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy .

‘KGB Inc’, Economist , 20 January 2005; Nick Paton Walsh, ‘Meet the chief exec of Kremlin Inc’, Guardian , 5 July 2005; Peter Finn, ‘Kremlin Inc. Widening Control Over Industry’, Washington Post , 19 November 2006; Michael Specter, ‘Kremlin, Inc.’, New Yorker , 29 January 2007; Catherine Belton and Neil Buckley, ‘Steeled to succeed – Ivanov sets out his tough vision for Russia’s future’, Financial Times , 19 April 2007.

Anders Åslund, ‘Russia’s New Oligarchy’, Washington Post , 12 December 2007.

‘The rise of state capitalism’, Economist , 21 January 2012; ‘Putin stands by state capitalism’, Financial Times , 30 January 2012; Vladimir Gelman, ‘Russia’s crony capitalism: the swing of the pendulum’, openDemocracy , 14 November 2011; Anders Åslund, ‘Russia’s Neo-Feudal Capitalism’, Project Syndicate , 27 April 2017.

Olga Kryshtanovskaia, Anatomiia Rossiiskoi elity , Moscow 2004, p. 302; Hoffman, The Oligarchs , p. 113.

Figures from Barnes, Owning Russia , p. 56, Table 3.1.

Clear accounts of this process are offered by Kryshtanovskaia, Anatomiia Rossiiskoi elity , pp. 307–18, and Steven Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions , Cambridge, MA 1998, ch. 7.

Quoted in Hoffman, The Oligarchs , pp. 185, 192–93, 203.

A lucid account of the privatization process is in Barnes, Owning Russia , ch. 4.

Barnes, Owning Russia , pp. 75–76, Tables 4.1 and 4.2.

Barnes, Owning Russia , p. 77.

Figures from Hoffman, The Oligarchs , p. 205.

For a detailed account of the struggles for ownership and control in the oil industry, see Gustafson’s Wheel of Fortune .

Aven quoted in Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy , Washington, DC 2001, p. 603; Khodorkovsky in Hoffman, The Oligarchs , p. 232.

Thomas Remington, The Politics of Inequality in Russia , Cambridge 2011, p. 107.

Serguey Braguinsky, ‘Postcommunist Oligarchs in Russia: Quantitative Analysis’, Journal of Law and Economics , vol. 52, May 2009, pp. 307–349. I thank the author for his generosity in sharing the data on which he based his analysis; the political conclusions I draw from it are entirely my own.

Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune , p. 294.

See Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune , p. 136 and Hoffman, The Oligarchs , p. 398.

Hoffman, The Oligarchs , pp. 315, 318, 319–20; Barnes, Owning Russia , pp. 112–13.

Quoted in Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms , p. 494.

Kryshtanovskaia, ‘Finansovaia oligarkhiia v Rossii’, Izvestiia , 10 January 1996.

Hoffman, The Oligarchs , p. 360.

David Woodruff, ‘The Expansion of State Ownership in Russia: Cause for Concern?’, Development and Transition , July 2007; Neil Buckley and Arkady Ostrovsky, ‘Back in Business – How Putin’s Allies Are Turning Russia into a Corporate State’, Financial Times , 19 June 2006.

Alena Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? , p. 69.

Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms , p. 599.

Barnes, Owning Russia , p. 170.

William Tompson, ‘Putin and the “Oligarchs”: A Two-Sided Commitment Problem’, in Alex Pravda, ed., Leading Russia: Putin in Perspective , Oxford 2005, p. 190.

Gustafson’s Wheel of Fortune , ch. 7, offers one of the most judicious accounts of the Yukos affair.

Woodruff, ‘Expansion of State Ownership in Russia’.

Tompson, ‘Putin and the “Oligarchs”’, p. 190.

See for instance ‘The Making of a Neo-KGB State’, Economist , 25 August 2007, and Lilia Shevtsova, ‘The Next Russian Revolution’, Current History , October 2012; both cited in David Rivera and Sharon Werning Rivera, ‘Is Russia a Militocracy?’, Post-Soviet Affairs , vol. 30, no. 1, 2014, p. 28.

Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, ‘Putin’s Militocracy’, Post-Soviet Affairs , vol. 19, no. 4, 2003, p. 293, Table 1; Kryshtanovskaya and White, ‘The Sovietisation of Russian Politics’, Post-Soviet Affairs , vol. 25, no. 4, 2009, p. 295, Table 2.

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB , New York 2011; Vladimir Sorokin, Day of the Oprichnik [2006], New York 2010.

Viktor Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf [2004], London 2008, pp. 218–20.

These objections are laid out meticulously by Rivera and Rivera, ‘Is Russia a Militocracy?’, to which I am indebted.

Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, ‘The Rise of the Russian Business Elite’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies , 38 (2005), pp. 302–303.

Barnes, Owning Russia , pp. 177–78 and Kryshtanovskaia, Anatomiia rossiiskoi elity , pp. 356–57.

Kryshtanovskaya and White, ‘Rise of the Russian Business Elite’, p. 305.

Kryshtanovskaya and White, ‘Rise of the Russian Business Elite’, pp. 300–301.

Viktor Cherkesov, ‘Nel’zia dopustit’, chtoby voiny prevratilis’ v torgovtsev’, Kommersant , 9 October 2007; on the ‘Tri Kita’ case, see Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? , pp. 182–188.

Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? , pp. 99–100.

Thanks to Sean Guillory for this point.