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By Root 1749 0

Jerry White was furiously trying to finish up an article on the debacle of Russian privatization. Jerry and his coauthors had served as legal advisers to the Russian government during the country’s mass privatization process in the late 1990s. The article described, from an insider’s hindsight perspective, how Russia’s pro-market reforms (which he and other Western advisers had helped devise) had gone horribly awry. Instead of dispersing ownership and creating functioning markets, these reforms had allowed a small group of greedy industrialists and bankers to plunder Russia, turning themselves almost overnight into the billionaire-owners of Russia’s crown jewels while the country spiraled into chaos and lawlessness. Although not yet published, the article had already created a stir. It was to be a major mea culpa, a candid exposé of the naïveté of Western advisers, in hopelessly over their heads.

I stopped by Jerry’s office one day after reading a near-final version of the article. Something about the ruthless, looting, self-dealing kleptocrats-turned-oligarchs described in his article had struck me, and I wanted to run it by him.

It seemed to me, I said to Jerry, that most of the key players in the privatization and eventual economic takeover of Russia were Jewish. Was it possible?

“Oh, no,” Jerry replied instantly, with a frown. “I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure?” I pressed him. “If you look at their names—”

“You can’t tell anything from names,” Jerry snapped impatiently, clearly not wanting to discuss the topic any further.

As it turns out, six out of seven of Russia’s wealthiest and (at least until recently) most powerful oligarchs are Jewish. This fact became public knowledge in the United States just a few months after my conversation with Jerry, when Chrystia Freeland in Sale of the Century offered a journalist’s firsthand account of how, without actually breaking the law, a handful of cold-blooded, extraordinarily savvy businessmen—all but one of them Jewish—used the privatization process to become the owners of vast amounts of Russia’s mineral wealth and the overwhelming victors in Russia’s “gladiator capitalism.”

1 Around the same time, John Lloyd wrote in a cover story for the New York Times magazine that “in a country where Jewishness is best kept quiet, nearly all [of Russia’s] oligarchs are Jewish.”

2 Yet Jerry, who was there in Russia, himself Jewish, and moreover writing an article meant to be provocative, wasn’t willing to touch the Jewish question.

Not all Jews, of course, react like Jerry. When I first mentioned to my husband, who is Jewish, that six out of seven of Russia’s wealthiest tycoons are Jewish, he raised an eyebrow. “Just six?” he asked calmly. “So who’s the seventh guy?”

The seventh oligarch—the only “full-blooded ethnic Russian” among them—is Vladimir Potanin. (“While the other oligarchs were still decorating their offices with leopard skins and mirrors, Potanin was buying graciously battered English antiques,” writes Freeland.)

3 The six Jewish businessmen most frequently called oligarchs are: Roman Abramovich, Pyotr Aven, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Friedman, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Together, these men came over the course of the 1990s to wield mind-boggling political and economic influence.

The height of their oligarchic influence was reached in 1996, when the Yeltsin government hung on the verge of political and financial collapse. Among other problems, Yeltsin had suffered a heart attack; his approval ratings hovered between 5 and 8 percent; the Russian treasury was strapped for cash; and in the parliamentary elections the Communists and Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s extreme nationalists had captured two-thirds of the seats of the lower house, paralyzing the government.

4

Already wealthy by that time, the oligarchs collectively put forth the so-called “loans-for-shares” deal—now notorious, but at the time grudgingly endorsed by Western advisers and Russian economists as well as England’s The Economist. Essentially, the oligarchs offered loans