Russian oligarch

Russian oligarchs (Russian: олигархи, romanized: oligarkhi) are business oligarchs from the former Soviet republics who rapidly accumulated wealth in the 1990s through the Russian privatisation that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The collapsing Soviet state left the ownership of state assets contested, which permitted informal deals with former Soviet officials as a means of acquiring state property. The Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs has been nicknamed the "oligarch trade union". The Russian oligarchs first emerged as entrepreneurs under Mikhail Gorbachev (General Secretary, 1985–1991), exploiting various loopholes during the economic liberalisation of his perestroika programme. Boris Berezovsky, a mathematician and former researcher, became the first wid...