Russian oligarch

June 2, 2018 1:34 PM

Why are Russian billionaires called "oligarchs"? And why are Western billionaires NOT called "oligarchs"?

The term "oligarch" sounds particularly sinister, given the implication that they not just have a lot of money but also jointly rule the country.

But many billionaires in other countries also have vast wealth, political power through lobbying, or hold powerful political offices. Why aren't they called oligarchs? Isn't it rather biased of journalists to called one type of billionaire an oligarch but not another?

posted by lewedswiver to Writing & Language (6 answers total)

Best answer: Russian oligarchs refer to a specific group- a bunch of people who get very, very wealthy during the privatization of the Russian economy as Communism fell. They bought Russian state assets at their nominal prices, when they were worth orders of magnitude more, and ended up mind-blowingly wealthy as a result. That is, their wealth is bound up intimately with the government. They siphoned off those billions more or less directly from the Russian state. So when you have a small handful of billionaires personally controlling resources that used to be state-run, it does look like a replacement of communism with oligarchy.

Whereas American billionaires took advantage of government-built projects and government contracts, these guys just bought chunks of the government at a fire sale and ran it personally. If Trump sold the National Parks system to a buddy for $10, that would make an oligarch. If the government contracted to pay a company $100B for a fighter jet, as long as the fighter jet is delivered and the money isn't embezzled by one guy, that's not quite the same.

Also, if you call American billionaires oligarchs, you have to also say that the country is not actually a democracy, since you can't really be an oligarch without an oligocracy. Some people will say that's exactly what America is, but almost everybody will say that's what Russia is, so it's easy to call their oligarchs oligarchs.
posted by BungaDunga at 1:53 PM on June 2, 2018 [54 favorites]

Because the Russian ones made their billions through the privatization of state-owned companies. There's a significantly greater element of state complicity in the wealth of Russian oligarchs than their western counterparts.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:55 PM on June 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

NPR's "Morning Edition" (I think -- it was definitely NPR, at least) talked about this a bit. The answer they gave was pretty identical to what BungaDunga wrote, with the additional info that Putin is extremely chummy with these oligarchs and that they are used as agents of the state while having plausible deniability that they're simply private citizens.
posted by lazuli at 2:28 PM on June 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

As you know, bob, "arch" is the suffix for "leader" and "olig" is the prefix for "few". I've heard the term "oligarchy" used since the nineties to refer to countries other than Russia where there is a nominally democratic process but where a handful of wealthy families are pretty openly known to be the de facto rulers - so I've heard it used about various South American states, for instance. I am pretty sure I first heard the word in The Nation or some other left of center magazine.

I think there's a useful distinction lurking in there somewhere, but - as you seem to imply in your question - it seems to be an ideologically driven term, such that when we're ruled by the De Voses and the Mercers and the Waltons and so on, they're merely very rich, whereas other countries are ruled by oligarchies.

Being very rich doesn't make you an oligarch - you definitely need the anti-democratic "rule by a few" component. But it's pretty clear that we've got our own oligarchy - perhaps not as embedded as the ones elsewhere, but certainly giving it their best shot.
posted by Frowner at 2:50 PM on June 2, 2018 [6 favorites]

There are some answers here that give good historical perspective, but I'd like to offer the following as a complementary answer. Some words have collocative shades of meaning, and in some cases this is the main distinction between words that are otherwise synonyms. Thus cosmonaut = Soviet astronaut, and cyclones are called hurricanes or typhoons depending on which ocean they occur over, etc. I think it would be fair, at this point, to say that "Russian" is almost a fixed semantic feature of "oligarch", and there may or may not be a thoroughly logical reason for this.
posted by aws17576 at 4:09 PM on June 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

Best answer: The reason the term is used for Russians is that the sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya wrote a famous essay published in Izvestia under the headline Финансовая олигархия в России [The Financial Oligarchy in Russia] in January 1996; David E. Hoffman wrote in The Oligarchs: Wealth And Power In The New Russia (a book anyone interested in the topic should read):

It was a turning point that brought the tycoons' actions into focus. More than just wealth, they were amassing political clout. Kryshtanovskaya pioneered the idea that the tycoons were becoming an oligarchy—a small group [of] men who possessed both wealth and power.

posted by languagehat at 5:38 PM on June 2, 2018 [22 favorites]