Russia Has ‘Oligarchs,’ the US Has ‘Businessmen’ | Hacker News Reader

Russia Has ‘Oligarchs,’ the US Has ‘Businessmen’

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110 pointsericdanielski35 comments

Anybody actually interested in Russian history, social organization and politics should follow Dima Vorobiev on Quora. He worked for Soviet propaganda under Yeltsin and Gorbachev, I cannot recommend them highly enough.

Here is an older answer where he talks about Russian 'tributary taxation': https://www.quora.com/Will-Russia-abandon-the-tributary-taxa...

The Revolutions Podcast - https://www.revolutionspodcast.com/ - is in the middle of a Russian history unit currently. I find them pretty well researched.

On one hand, yes, the USA has oligarchic components to its government, and we must not ignore them. They are mostly the ones guaranteed by the First Amendment to exist, like lobbying and public advertising. We joke that legislators are bought and paid for. Corporations can pay into and steer PACs. And, from a certain point of view, the Electoral College or any other sort of indirect election is oligarchic. In fact, the pattern of having a political council chosen by an oligos of democratically-elected representatives is quite common around the world.

On the other hand, "Russian oligarchy" [0] refers specifically to a grand looting of wealth during the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the effects of that transfer of wealth and establishment of corporate power structures are still reverberating throughout Russia. To this day, folks study the unique combination of oligarchy and corporatism in Russia [1].

On the gripping hand, there are functional oligarchies emerging from direct corporate selection of legislators, rather than from indirect effects such as PACs and lobbying, as in the USA. For example, Hong Kong only elects half of its parliament democratically, and half oligarchically [2]. On one hand, three of the latter are labor representatives; however, I count six seats going to the bankers, including the "oligarch"/"businessman" of the article ("insurance", "accounting", "finance", "financial services", and "chamber of commerce" twice, once for HK and once for China!) For another and quite different example, Ireland also only elects one house democratically. The other house consists of the prime minister's hand-picked elders, as well as several oligarchic councils [3]. Unlike any other system I know of, specific universities' graduates are constitutionally appointed to choose several seats.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_oligarch

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Russian_corporatis...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legislative_Council_of_Hong_Ko...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seanad_%C3%89ireann

But directly equating Russian oligarchs to American businessmen makes for a better headline, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But in all seriousness, I'm glad that someone was here in the comments section to break down the nuances of this rather contentious analogy. So TY

> equating Russian oligarchs to American businessmen

Do you understand that many Russian oligarchs actually were American Businessmen?

Eg; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Browder

Ya, sounds like a real Russian Oligarch all right:

“ Eighteen months after Browder was deported, on June 4, 2007, Hermitage Capital's offices in Moscow were raided by twenty-five officers of Russia's Interior Ministry. Twenty-five more officers raided the Moscow office of Browder's American law firm, Firestone Duncan, seizing the corporate registration documents for Hermitage's investment holding companies. Browder assigned Sergei Magnitsky, head of the tax practice at Firestone Duncan, to investigate the purpose of the raid. He discovered that while those documents were in the custody of the police, they had been used to fraudulently reregister Hermitage's holding companies to the name of an ex-convict.[6]”

Won't UK's House of "Lords" deserve a mention here?

Sure, monarchy is a form of oligarchy, isn't it?

Yep, Russians have spies, US have intelligence!

There’s the same distinction in Russian: friendly spies are called “razvedchiki” (reconnaissance agents) whereas adversaries are called “shpiony” (spies).

When was the last time you heard the US media refer to anyone in the three letter agencies as "spies".

I have heard it and Eugene is just pointing out that in Russia they make the same distinction. So it’s nog a novel thing that the US makes that distinction.

Today.

https://news.google.com/search?q=Spy

Russian oligarchs tend to be former senior officers in the KGB who obtained state assets at substantial discounts by mysterious means when the USSR broke up.

Sure lots of Western billionaires are corrupt but there is nothing directly comparable. There’s no conspiracy of renaming going on.

I personally have begun referring to astronomically wealthy US 'Businessmen' as oligarchs, too. It seems more fitting.

I recently learned about the term "Russell cognate", meaning two words that have the same meaning but vastly different connotations, via some podcast with Eric Weinstein.

This thread is probably going down in flames, but I appreciate this article because I never realized that "oligarch" was one of those words.

We don't have oligarchs here, we have permanently unembarrassed millionaires.

U.S. has rule-of-law. Russia has rule-by-force. Comparing Russian and US elites like this smells like rank Russian propaganda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

The defining trait of an "oligarch" (in the current usage of the word, not the ancient Greek) is someone who got the power and money through a combination of crime and state power, which are usually not even separated.

No, it's not just a difference between "a rich guy from Russia" vs "a rich guy from USA". The rich guy in Russia most likely had his competitors killed, literally, and the police turned a blind eye. Denying this is ignoring how the post-communist countries work.

And yes, sometimes people get killed in USA, too. But compared with that, in Russia they get killed for trivial stuff. As an example, imagine that Russia would have its equivalents of Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds. What would happen is that the Russian-Gates would bribe the police to put a bullet in Russian-Linus's head, most likely on a busy street in daylight, to send a message to other wannabe troublemakers. This is how business is done in the post-communist countries.

You can complain about oligarchy in USA, and you can make a few good points, but there is still the difference that in USA you can get where Bill Gates is without paying to have your competitors killed. So it is not the same. Therefore it makes sense to use different words.

>The defining trait of an "oligarch" (in the current usage of the word, not the ancient Greek) is someone who got the power and money through a combination of crime and state power, which are usually not even separated.

The "current usage" of the word is used politically for against regular businessmen as well if we don't like their country. And similarly, is omitted, when we do like it.

While you have a point it's unfair to use the word post soviet countries, since the ones who always looked for the west, such as Poland and Estonia, things definetly don't work like that. Plus loads of others that you can't lump in with Russia Ukraine and Central Asia.

> The rich guy in Russia most likely had his competitors killed, literally, and the police turned a blind eye. Denying this is ignoring how the post-communist countries work.

And the rich guy in the U.S. is a contractor for U.S. government that kills, torture, rape and is protected by the U.S. military when doing its "business" abroad, which basically is selling weapons to dictators and bringing gold back home.

Or laid off thousands of people, because billions aren't enough to live, and some of them got a gun and killed a bunch of innocent people.

Or it's just an old school colonialist

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/28/amazon-c...

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-complete-history-of-monsan...

Even killing competitors KGB style looks good, when US pharmaceuticals companies are literally exploiting US citizens (and probably killing more than a few of them) for profit!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/24/opioids-cris...

Really, what's the difference?

Probably I'm being downvoted because I forgot the good old Apple, that builds its iPhones at Foxconn, where workers commit suicide due to work conditions.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-l...

I'm sorry I forgot Steve Jobs, a brilliant "businessman", a man so "talented" that even his daughter despise him, for good reasons.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/03/steve-jobs-daugh...

I don't really get what I got out of this article...

tl;dr; US news outlets use the term 'oligarch' more when talking about Russia, Ukraine and other Eastern Block countries.

> I don't really get what I got out of this article...

How the vocabulary is used to frame the article. Use the 'good' term for our guys, and the 'bad' term for theirs.

The Chelsea soccer club quote is a beautiful example.

Nothing. Sure the rich business people are bad also in some way, yet it doesn't compare to the actual oligarchs. There is no way to start a competing business with an oligarch's among other things.

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