What exactly is an oligarch?
Russian oligarchs are rich people with close ties to Vladimir Putin. These individuals became wealthy after the fall of the Soviet Union. Moreover, an oligarchy means a government run by a small organization of people for fraudulent purposes.
When the USSR fell in 1991, it created a lot of chances for corruption at the highest levels of Russia’s government as it set out to turn the businesses that were state-owned private.
As a result, a small group of people who were part of a chain of influence managed to take control of the state’s factories, natural resources, and banks.
According to several resources, a lot of Russian billionaires dominate roughly 30% of the country’s wealth, much of it being kept overseas. In 2017, a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research approximated that Russian elites’ offshore assets were valued as much as the houses owned by the entire Russian population.
