World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [42]
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With Yeltsin’s victory, the loans-for-shares deal was finalized, catapulting the oligarchs from a small group of millionaires to a small group of billionaires. A few years later the oligarchs “guaranteed”
6 (to use Berezovsky’s term) that Vladimir Putin, like Yeltsin before him, would get elected in Russia’s 2000 presidential elections.
Russia has roughly 147 million inhabitants. The National Conference on Soviet Jewry estimates that Jews make up less than 1 percent of the population.
7 Given these demographics, how is it that six Jewish businessmen came to wield such astounding economic and political power?
Russian Jews in Historical Perspective
In general, it is much harder to talk about Jewish economic dominance than that of any other group. This is because of the numerous episodes in which exaggerated or even patently false claims of Jewish economic dominance led to vicious discrimination, ghettoization, and some of the worst atrocities in human history. As a result, whereas one can relatively freely explore and talk about the phenomenon of, say, a 3 percent Chinese minority controlling 70 percent of a country’s wealth, it is far more difficult to ascertain or even discuss the extent of Jewish economic influence in any given context.
Nevertheless, Jews have been in many ways the quintessential market-dominant minority. Jews do not appear to have been particularly economically successful during antiquity—but that’s about the last time in history that they weren’t, at least when left alone to pursue their livelihoods. During the Middle Ages, despite recurrent anti-Jewish restrictions and persecutions, Jews prospered visibly and disproportionately as merchants and middlemen and eventually as international traders, particularly between Christian Europe and the Muslim lands. Indeed, Jewish entrepreneurialism during this period played a crucial role in the economic development of Europe. The enormous wealth that Jews were forced to leave behind when expelled from Spain in 1492 helped finance the voyage of Columbus that led to the discovery of the Americas.
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Fast forwarding five hundred years, Jews occupied a commanding economic position in many Eastern European countries during the early twentieth century. Jews in interwar Romania, although just 4 percent of the population, controlled most of the private capital in the export, transportation, insurance, textile, chemical, housing, and publishing industries. Although their access to universities was restricted, they were also strongly represented in law, medicine, journalism, and banking. In Poland, as of 1921 over 60 percent of all commerce was conducted by Jews, who comprised just 11 percent of the population. Around the same time, Lithuania’s Jewish minority accounted for more than three-quarters of the country’s commercial activity. Meanwhile, in Hungary, Jews in 1910 represented nearly one-quarter of the population of Budapest—earning the capital the epithet “Judapest.” As of 1920, Jews constituted 23 percent of Hungary’s actors and musicians, 34 percent of the country’s authors, 51 percent of the attorneys, 60 percent of the doctors in private practice, and the overwhelming majority of those “self-employed” in business and finance.
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Discussing Jewish economic success in present-day Russia is especially fraught because of the virulent history of Russian anti-Semitism. For centuries, anti-Jewish policies in Russia—expulsions (dating to as early as 1727), harsh economic restrictions, coerced twenty-five-year