There a band of people connected to the government (first it was party apparatchiks, then friends of Putin) plundered resources owned by the state. And almost all of them have to do with stuff being pulled out of the ground.
Rather, vetted for their impeccable ability to wax lyrical about "ideological purity." I'd suggest that these guys are personalities that learn how to survive in the current climate regardless what that climate happens to be.
Well said. And that's a great skill to have. (I often wish I had more of it.)
It helps when the president is your fellow KGB pal :) Proper affiliation and loyalty is all you need. It's common folk that really have to survive.
To the extent the KGB were selected for ideological purity, they were initially selected for adherence to the ideals of a Stalinist party machine that was mostly concerned with the protection of privilege.
It's totally unsurprising that they "turned hypercapitalist overnight" - you had a group that was built on accepting that using pretty much any means necessary to maintain power and privilege was perfectly ok.
Being super-rich in Russia is all about receiving privileges from the regime in exchange for loyalty. Ceasing your loyalty has consequences:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Cherkashin
He talks how KGB agents after the fall of the Soviet Union were in the best position to get into high power positions, plunder and pillage the best stuff available. They went from supposed devout communists to the most ruthless capitalists.
They (KGB agents) were really a different class of people. They had knowledge and understand of all the details, they were also selected to be the smartest, then trained on top of it.
At some point Cherkashin kind of mentions how he was fairly average and he was sent to the foreign language training academy and how it was at first very hard for him to pick up languages. But they just had very good teachers and eventually he mastered them.
So I guess I should correct it and say they picked what where thought to be "loyal" and "patriotic" people and then they trained them well. So if some got smarter it was often as a result of having to work with the best teachers.
My grandfather was a KGB colonel, in 90s he lost all his savings because of crazy inflation. I cant recall any of his friends i knew who became rich, most of them retired or had to leave and are getting miserable government pension and a letter of appreciation for good service once a year.
As I said the oligarchs are ex gov officials sons or cousins and thugs who spent time in soviet jail for black market trade. Hey, even ukrainian president did a few years in jail for stealing some merchandise, what would you expect.
Well ex-top soviet officials are sort of in the same category. It certainly wasn't regular citizens like factory workers.
I guess what I was trying to say KGB agents and ex-officials joining it was surprising since they were supposedly the biggest and more devout believers in the system.
If you read that book you'll that Cherkashin also sort of feels a bit nostalgic for those times and decries what has become of the country he served for so many years.
It's not that surprising, really. Positions in the KGB were highly prized, and the organization only took people with high intelligence and demonstrated competence. They really were the best and the brightest the USSR had to offer.
You watch too many Hollywood spy movies :)
> turned hyper-capitalist overnight
What happened in the 90s had little to do with capitalism, though some may argue it did :) It was mass theft of state property (with a fair amount of murder) out in the open among chaos and disarray.
First, there was the gang of "liberals", who heroically put an end to the Soviets and stole what they could on the ruins of the collapsed Empire. Then in 00s with Putin came the KGB gang, who took away the loot from the "liberals" and put private sector under control. They recently ousted the opposing military gang in a big embezzlement scandal. They're the ruling elite at the moment.
What is happening in the Western world (rise of inequality
due to skills being prized higher owing to technological
change) is very different to what happened in Russia.
I had no idea what to Google for more information but I found this outdated paper from 1998 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics http://economics.mit.edu/files/3809 We get supply-demand analysis like
the unprecedented increase in the supply of college
graduates during the 1970s may have been causal for both
technological developments and the changes in the
structures of wages in the past two decades
But yes, as comfortable middle class jobs are largely automated away, inequality increases. "Average is over" by Tyler Cowen is largely about this shift. It's not a particularly comfortable read, but I struggle to fault his analysis.
Is this really the source of inequality in the Western world? Technological change leading to different desired skills seems like something that's been around long before our current inequality troubles. In any event, I thought average wage in the US hasn't risen since the 70s, before the information age. I would guess it's more a combination of several factors, perhaps the college no-college gap, changes in the finance world, and political changes.