Episode 1766
Russian oligarch
Fri, 2022-Mar-04 01:53 UTC
Length - 2:02
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Welcome to popular Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of a popular Wikipedia page every day.
With 247,708 views on Thursday, 3 March 2022 our article of the day is Russian oligarch.
Russian oligarchs are business oligarchs of the former Soviet republics who rapidly accumulated wealth during the era of Russian privatization in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The failing Soviet state left the ownership of state assets contested, which allowed for informal deals with former USSR officials (mostly in Russia and Ukraine) as a means to acquire state property. Historian Edward L. Keenan has drawn a comparison between the current Russian phenomenon of oligarchs and the system of powerful boyars which emerged in late-Medieval Muscovy. The first modern Russian oligarchs emerged as business-sector entrepreneurs under Mikhail Gorbachev (General Secretary 1985–1991) during his period of market liberalization. These younger generation entrepreneurs were able to build their initial wealth due to Gorbachev's reforms "when co-existence of regulated and quasi-market prices created huge opportunities for arbitrage." The term "oligarch" derives from the Ancient Greek oligarkhia meaning "the rule of the few".
Since 2018, several Russian oligarchs and their companies have been hit by US sanctions under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) for their support of "the Russian government's malign activity around the globe".
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:53 UTC on Friday, 4 March 2022.
For the full current version of the article, see Russian oligarch on Wikipedia.
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This has been Matthew Neural. Thank you for listening to popular Wiki of the Day.
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