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for example, transformed himself from a middling manager of a state-owned enterprise into one of Russia’s wealthy “new businessmen.” “In the former Soviet Union,” recalls Tanya, “he was one of the more business-minded directors of a state-owned railroad line. As soon as individuals were permitted to set up private enterprises, Mr. Yurkovsky organized a company for transporting raw materials—using not just railroads, but also ships and planes. He made a massive fortune—and very quickly. He eventually moved to San Francisco, where he bought a huge house and a BMW for each member of his family.”

Like Tanya’s uncle, all the Jewish oligarchs were dabbling in quasi-clandestine private enterprise before glasnost. Mikhail Friedman—who was rejected by the “MIT of the Soviet Union” because of his Jewish origins and relegated instead to the less prestigious Institute of Steel and Alloys—started a ticket scalping agency while a student in the economically stagnant early eighties. Friedman paid Moscow university students to wait in line to buy theater tickets, which could then be bartered on the black market. Although ticket scalping existed long before Friedman came on the scene, he was the first to organize it into a well-disciplined business, employing 150 scholars—on full salary if they waited overnight, or half salary if they queued up in the early morning—and “managers” from every university department. Friedman, as a kind of controlling shareholder, would meet once a week with his managers to review their business plans.

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When private enterprises were legalized in 1987, Friedman and some college friends jumped at the opportunity. Friedman’s kooperativ—the predecessor of Russia’s now incredibly powerful Alpha Group—tried everything, from selling Siberian wool shawls to breeding white mice for laboratories. Friedman hit pay dirt with a window washing business. Within half a year his income was over ten thousand rubles a month, a pittance in dollar terms but forty times the combined salaries of his parents. After that, Friedman branched out to importing Western cigarettes and photocopy machines, then to exporting oil. By 1991 he was a dollar millionaire. A few years later, drawing on government connections formed during the glasnost era, Friedman set his sights on Russia’s mass privatization process. He quickly mastered the art of buying up large stakes in firms that would interest Western multinationals when shares in those firms were still selling at steep discounts. Western banks, including Credit Suisse First Boston, were astonished by how astutely Friedman’s Alpha Group anticipated where the profits lay in this first stage of privatization.

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Next, Friedman recruited Pyotr Aven, Yeltsin’s first trade minister, who later became an oligarch in his own right. Suddenly, Alpha had access to “the golden trough” of government contracts and oil export licenses. In 1996, Friedman and Aven were at the core of the clubby group that underwrote Yeltsin’s presidential campaign. Today the Alpha Group controls Russia’s largest private bank, 50 percent of Tyumen Oil Company (TNK), Russia’s fourth-largest oil company, as well as Crown Resources, an international commodities trading company with an annual turnover of some $5 billion.

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According to John Lloyd, there are allegations in Russian security agency dossiers that Friedman (“born in 1964 in the city of Lyov, former Ukrainian Republic, a Jew”) along with Aven (“born 1955 in Moscow, a Jew”) engaged in criminal activities to further Alpha’s business activities, even organizing drug shipments from Central Asia to Europe. When Lloyd asked Friedman about these accusations during an interview, Friedman shrugged and said, “That stuff’s always around.”

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The other Jewish oligarchs followed roughly similar paths. Vladimir Gusinsky’s boyhood dream was to be a physicist, but, like Friedman, he was rejected from his university of choice because of his Jewish background. In 1987 he abandoned his career as a provincial theater director for the turbulent new world