Abstract
This article explores the dominant morality to which wealthy Russians adhered in their vision of how society should be organized and the role they see for themselves. The interviews with, and observations of, eighty Russian multi-millionaires and billionaires, their spouses, and their children, on which the article is based, were conducted from 2008 to 2017, a time when Russia’s rich were most settled in their positions. The interview analysis highlights the role of Soviet history and shows how it is integrated into, and harmonizes with, contemporary upper-class Russians’ notions of meritocracy. The author argues that drawing on international sociological research considerably advances our understanding of how Russian elites ideologically construe and morally legitimize the concentration of money and power in their own hands and how they model themselves as “good” in their actions and “deserving” of their fortunes. Conversely, the article suggests that these new findings on Russian elites (in particular, their references to their superior genes and their unwavering preference for private capital as a means to develop society—if necessary, to the detriment of democracy) offer great insights into, and have the potential to complement, established scholarship on Western elites (who emphasize hard work but tend to gloss over biology).
Keywords
Introduction
Post-Soviet Russia has been a testing ground for capitalist moralities to take hold of people’s hearts and minds. Upper-class Russians have developed narratives of success that follow both historical and contemporary patterns from elites around the globe. My research shows that what Max Weber 1 wrote a century ago is very much true for the uber-wealthy in Russia today: the holders of power and wealth want to believe that they are “good” and that they “deserve” their fortunes, thanks to their superior qualities. As for many elites around the world, for them too, it is abundantly clear that whether one travels in economy class or by private jet is down to talent, intelligence, entrepreneurial skills, and hard work.
Yet the identities upper-class Russians have elaborated for themselves are in many respects culturally and historically distinct. Almost all of them emphasize the legacy of their Soviet intelligentsia upbringing, to which they believe they owe an inner strength, a work ethic, and discipline. They have established a notion of moral hierarchy, meritocracy, and public virtue that, in their own eyes, legitimizes the extreme wealth inequality in Russia, of which they themselves have been drivers.
Like the hyper-rich anywhere, wealthy Russians are notoriously elusive, and access to them is difficult to gain. 2 This should not stop us from attempts at empirical investigation; however, it might mean that we have to ignore certain conventions, both conceptual and methodological. Doing so has been required in my own research.
Conceptually, I break with the research foci usually employed in studies on Russia’s elites, which, historically, are anchored in Kremlinology. Most of this literature deals with the relationship and power struggles between big business players and the Kremlin. 3 Kremlinology has rarely been cross-fertilized with alternative perspectives. As a result, there is something of a blind spot in research on Russia’s elites when it comes to their everyday ideologies and social practices, the historical narratives they rely on, and the cultural symbolics they use to explain their privileges. This article strives to fill this gap. It is informed by sociological and anthropological research from across the globe that scrutinizes elites through the prism of moral economy 4 as well as social reproduction and legitimacy (in a Bourdieusian sense 5 ). For my venture, this has meant deliberately putting aside the frameworks applied by Kremlinologists so as not to obscure a fresh look at the topic.
Methodologically, I adopted an eclectic approach when attempting to grasp what might be going on in the minds of Russia’s super-rich, mixing different interview techniques and enriching them with ethnographically inspired approaches. Between 2008 and 2017, I researched wealthy entrepreneurs, their spouses, and their adult children from the richest 0.1 percent of the Russian population of just under 144 million. 6 The eighty interviews I conducted were accompanied by observations, mostly in social or semi-formal settings. To gain access to Russia’s super-rich, I initially relied mainly on intermediaries, as well as writing to potential interviewees on social media or calling whenever I was given a private mobile phone number, which in the late aughts was still commonly done in a laissez-faire manner. By the mid-2010s, things had changed considerably. Almost all the interviews were arranged through formal channels, such as a company’s press department or a philanthropic foundation.
Except for a small number of politicians and media moguls, most of the people I interviewed and observed were in business. Their business activities included natural resources, finance and banking, new technologies, arms, heavy industry, aviation, consumer product manufacturing, retail, legal services, and property development. About a third of my eighty interviewees were “super-rich” (according to Forbes magazine, someone with a net worth of more than $500 million 7 ) or “hyper-rich,” that is, billionaires. 8 Most of the rest were “ultra-high-net-worth” individuals (with investable assets of more than $50 million 9 ). The qualitative interviews lasted from half an hour to four hours. In accordance with what was agreed with the interviewees, some appear with their real names, while others are anonymized.
The article unravels rich Russians’ narratives regarding merit and success. It begins with a brief outline of the discrepancies between the core bodies of scholarship that my study draws upon, including a critique of habitual adherence to familiar concepts and perspectives. The subsequent three sections seek to illustrate the potential of exploring new disciplinary terrains. By following the life of the multi-billionaire Pyotr Aven, the first section traces the neoliberal thinking that many oligarchs signed up to during the 1990s. The next two sections dissect my interviewees’ narratives of elitist ideologies, how they make sense of their privilege against the background of social inequality, what they rely on in their construction of deservedness, and in what respects their identity-building is modeled along global elite practices.
Sociological Elite Research versus Kremlinology
In many countries around the world, inheritance has become the main source of wealth and class position. Therefore, as Savage argues, the rich do not really have a leg to stand on when trying to claim that their privileges are earned through merit. 10 Meanwhile, the capitalist system lives on, producing ever greater inequalities. 11 This paradox is partly down to the bizarre conundrum that great riches in the hands of a few are widely seen as fair and deserved, especially in societies where there is considerable and rising wealth inequality. 12
The sustainability of meritocratic beliefs relies on claims to “good” wealth. Notions of “good” wealth are relational and depend on demarcation from “bad” wealth. 13 Replicating popular understandings, the economist Freund applies the label “bad rich” to those whose fortunes she classifies as unearned and those who have used parasitic methods to gain their wealth and do not reinvest their money to develop infrastructure and technology, but “unpatriotically” take it offshore. 14 In line with this, we are encouraged to believe that market economies could function smoothly if it were not for the “bad” rich, especially those who engage in corruption, nepotism, and fraud. 15
Unlike Freund, the sociologist Sherman investigated the topic from a critical sociological perspective. The wealthy New York City families she researched were eager to set themselves apart from the “unworthy” rich, whom they imagined to be morally deficient, greedy, profligate, lazy, and self-indulgent, whereas they saw themselves as hard-working, socially responsible, and, hence, deserving. 16 In Hecht’s study of top income earners in the City of London, her participants justified their wealth in accordance with yet another factor: the more revenue one generates, the more deserving one’s personal worth. 17 Such moral-economic reasoning is in line with dominant neoliberal thinking that presents private profit as beneficial to the public good. 18
Elites all over the world understand perfectly well that generosity can render unequal power relations and inequality more acceptable and that it is a promising entry ticket to the ranks of established upper classes. 19 Critics have pointed to philanthropy’s detrimental effects on democracy. 20 Treasuries increasingly grant philanthropists preferential treatment in the form of tax exemptions in return for charitable giving to causes of the donors’ own choosing. As a result, philanthropists not only see their tax bills vastly reduced, but they also gain influence on social policy, without ever having been authorized to do so through any democratic procedure.
The agendas many superwealthy philanthropists pursue are often at odds with the priorities of the public and the most pressing needs in society. If things go wrong, private philanthropists are not accountable to anybody but themselves. 21 Things do go wrong all the time. One reason is that many of the wealthy are convinced that they could do a much better job than their government or international organizations. In fact, the purportedly most revered experts assembled in private foundations have yet to deliver social-policy assessments on a level that matches basic quality standards expected from governments. Not even the most generously funded large-scale charity foundations are up to scratch with regards to foreseeing the long-term implications of their philanthropic interventions. This includes organizations as large and powerful as the Gates Foundation, as shown by investigations such as those by McGoey or Reich. 22 However, none of the negative consequences resulting from the allowances granted to wealthy private donors have ever impeded the lucrative benefits accrued by the super-rich through philanthropy, something Russia’s rich have long figured out for themselves. 23
Social science research that deals with the issues touched upon above has been taking off in recent years, with many of the scholars in the field working comparatively. Russia, however, has never been of much interest to them. Meanwhile, Russianists with a background in sociology and anthropology who focus on questions of privilege and prestige have limited themselves to the middle classes, leaving the scrutiny of big money players to Kremlinologists (predominantly political scientists and economists), who have traditionally held a monopoly on the research of power politics and related topics.
After the turn of the century, Kremlinologists investigated the reversal of the balance of power under Putin. 24 Before long, a consensus that oligarchs were done and dusted was established. The term was only to be used in relation to the few individuals who had captured the Russian state in the 1990s. The U.S. political scientist and oligarch expert Winters has challenged the idea that oligarchs can be defined as such only if in direct control of state power. 25 Oligarchs deploy their resources to defend their wealth and secure their material interests. They much prefer to have professionals and lobbyists do the job for them, taking over government rule only as a very last resort when they see their wealth under threat, never for the sake of running the state.
Analyses of money and power in Russia that Kremlinologists operate with would have greatly benefited from engaging with ideas such as those put forward by Winters. That Putin initially went out to rein in the oligarchs and continued to do so with an element of capriciousness came at great cost for a few. For the oligarchs at large, however, Putin’s clout worked in their favor. While commentators in the West were obsessing about Russia returning to the Soviet past, the Kremlin was, in fact, carrying out hyper-neoliberal reforms. The 2000 privatizations were of a scale the neoliberal reformers of the 1990s would never have dreamt of. 26 For billionaires, Russia in the new millennium was the place to be. Those listed in Forbes in 2005 stood a 96 percent chance to still be there five years later, versus 76 percent in G7 countries and 88 percent in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries. 27 In the subsequent years, Russian oligarchs sailed through all major crises, emerging every time with even greater riches. Meanwhile, wealth inequality in the country reached global record levels. 28
When Russia’s war against Ukraine was looming in early 2022, nobody in geopolitics cared a jot that in Russian studies the term “oligarch” had been banned for twenty long years. The term returned overnight and came to be used indiscriminately, including in official European Union (EU) and U.S. sanctions documents, and Kremlinologists swiftly adjusted to this. It did not need to be this way. I argue that stepping outside the well-trodden tracks of traditional approaches could have placed Russian studies at the forefront of current debates around wealth and power, rather than meekly adapting to the latest fashions. In fact, a more broadly informed understanding of how Russia’s rich intersect with global finances could have been very useful for the articulation of effective sanction policies.
While Kremlinology is held back by some blinkeredness, global scholarship on elites is caught up in its own trap. The French economist Piketty has criticized how “everything is done to distinguish useful and deserving western ‘entrepreneurs’ from harmful and parasitic Russian, Chinese, Indian or African ‘oligarchs,’” although they have a lot in common. 29 Critical social science research has been pioneering in exposing the ideological motivation in distinguishing “good” from “bad” wealth. Nevertheless, shadows of the approaches Piketty has exposed persist even in sociological investigations into elites, insofar as comparative research projects typically run along the lines of grouping elites in emerging economies and the Global South or, alternatively, conceiving them as the (exotic or underdeveloped) “other.” I believe that the field can be enriched only if approaches of this kind are abandoned as the default option.
As notions of meritocracy are socially engineered, they are culturally specific and subject to change, 30 yet social history is a secondary consideration in most social science scholarship on elites. As the cultural anthropologist Matza 31 has pointed out for post-Soviet Russia, social history puts morality and capitalist ideology in the same frame. A sense of historical anchoring allows Russia’s rich and powerful to perceive themselves not only as products of neoliberal capitalism but also of their Soviet past. While this historical conjuncture is unique to Russia, there is more to such narratives: how upper-class Russians make sense of their biographies and what elements they select to cement their status in society give us clues to more general dynamics in elitist identity-building.
Rich Russians stand out from elites of other countries in terms of how freely they talk about their political views, regardless of what consequences their policy preferences would have for society, let alone how incompatible their vision is with any notion of democracy. In fact, many elites in the West harbor just such radical ideas, which they successfully implement in practice. They are, however, astutely aware that the policies they promote are not fit for public consumption. As Page et al. 32 have documented, U.S.-American billionaires are mindful of the chasm between their own political views and U.S. public opinion and, hence, act behind the scenes, keeping their funding and lobbying efforts very close to their chests.
Russia’s super-rich are unabashed in their articulation of what they believe they owe their success to, with a good number of them listing biological superiority as the foremost reason. In private, elites around the world think in the same vein. The social psychologist Kraus and his colleague 33 found that, in the United States, faith in one’s innate talent and high intelligence grows ever stronger the greater one’s wealth—so much so that those born into the most powerful dynasties see themselves as simply “the most capable.” Studying Mexican elites, the sociologist Ceron 34 observed that the country’s rich take it for granted that, thanks to their genetic disposition, they should excel at golf, whereas indigenous Mexicans will, by their very nature, never get anywhere close. Wealthy elites in the West and beyond, however, have by and large grasped the basics of decorum and tend to refrain from extolling their virtues in public. Instead, they emphasize all the hard work, long hours, and huge sacrifices they had to endure to make it to the top. As such, well-rehearsed declarations have been documented in numerous empirical accounts; they have come to dominate current debates in scholarship on elites, while others are neglected. 35 This is where rich Russians come in: their lack of inhibitions provides us with a shortcut to information that is otherwise difficult to obtain.
Russian elite trajectories today are highly interlinked with those in the West. The eagerness with which Russia’s elites have emulated their Western peers in lifestyles and habits came along with hopes and ambitions to be accepted as equals. With every reminder that this was unlikely to ever come true, anti-Westernism among the elites grew stronger. In interviews, Russia’s super-rich do not hold back when voicing their ambivalent sentiments—and they do so with vehemence. This is a gift from Russia—only fail to appreciate its worth. We habitually stop short from looking beyond the peculiar and exotic in all things Russian, something that has been exacerbated since the start of the war against Ukraine. The most cutting-edge research into elites is no exception to this. In fact, the field could benefit greatly from pondering the unadulterated manner in which rich Russians share their thoughts, especially when it comes to things that Western elites keep well-hidden from those studying them.
A Russian Neoliberal in the Mold of Pinochet to Putin
Pyotr Aven, born in 1955, is the chair of Russia’s biggest private bank, Alfa-Bank. In 2021, his net worth was $5.3 billion. He was among the first to be added to Western sanctions lists shortly after the onset of Russia’s war against Ukraine, although his economic views have always been very much in line with global neoliberal doctrines
36
; Aven strongly believes in the supremacy of private capital in all spheres of life. When, in 2017, I met him in his London office, he appeared to be under time constraints and hence somewhat distracted. Repeating what he must have told a good number of journalists previously, he explained to me that upward mobility in the private sector is down to both talent and meritocratic practice:
Entrepreneurialism is a talent. It requires a very specific set of skills. Fast thinking, courage, willpower, and more . . . . Every society has a certain percentage of naturally born entrepreneurs. Whether they can develop and apply their skills depends on the environment they grow up and live in.
Aven went on to talk about his own career trajectory. Despite not having possessed entrepreneurial skills himself, he, nevertheless, managed to apply his academic abilities to his business activities. Actually, he felt he was rather more suited to becoming a scientist; his father had been a professor of computer science, which came close to the Soviet equivalent of nobility. After finishing a PhD in economics, Aven initially pursued an academic career. In the 1980s, he shared an office with Yegor Gaidar, the later head of the reform movement, who was the scion of a dynasty of famous writers and journalists.
Both Aven’s and Gaidar’s intelligentsia backgrounds point to a crucial element of Russian elite legitimization. Unlike in countries where a significant proportion of billionaires benefited from having been born into wealth, 37 in the Soviet Union such backgrounds disappeared for seventy years. Instead, many wealthy Russians of today were, if not born into the Soviet intelligentsia (primarily intellectuals, professors, teachers, writers, journalists, and people engaged in the cultural sector), then at least into the technical intelligentsia (among them engineers, economists, managers, and medics). 38 This allowed them to acquire cultural and social capital through the Soviet education system, their parents’ libraries, and their influential networks. 39 The combination of prestigious backgrounds, personal ambitions, and the social contacts they established at the elite universities they attended was instrumental in rapidly catapulting them to exorbitant riches.
In addition to the head starts they enjoyed through birth and upbringing, references to intelligentsia backgrounds bestow on the rich an aura of inherited culture and intellectual heft. 40 In the Soviet period, the intelligentsia were the moral standard bearers who also enjoyed certain material privileges. In the 1990s, their efforts went partly into civilizing the new money elites. 41 Given the prestige the intelligentsia still enjoys in Russian society, 42 reviving Soviet intelligentsia values today allows the rich to apply a righteousness to their status that is supposedly anchored in the past.
In the late Soviet era, much of the intelligentsia’s economic persuasion leaned to the right. It was in this spirit that they closely followed the free-market expansion in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s. They admired General Augusto Pinochet for his radical anti-Communism and the resolute implementation of the world’s “purest” neoliberal experiment. 43 After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, they took inspiration from there. In 1992, Gaidar became acting prime minister, from which position he appointed Aven minister of foreign economic relations and designed the economic shock therapy that was endorsed and encouraged by Russia’s Western advisors, mostly U.S. economists. 44 Like the Chilean reformers, 45 Aven and Co. firmly believed that rapid privatization would create a zealous entrepreneurial class, which would make everything fall into place. What followed was a temporary oligarchic takeover of the state. 46
Although the dream of an entrepreneurial class that would spearhead a healthy free-market economy and boost growth did not materialize, Aven and his fellow reformers have never wavered from their early beliefs. When I asked one of them, Alfred Kokh, at a public event for Russian speakers in London what he would do differently if he had the chance to relive the 1990s, he initially did not reply. After some contemplation, he said that he would change just one thing: he would base the privatization program around a pension reform, as Pinochet had done. Aven has also not abandoned the idea that the Chilean model may have worked well in Russia. In the early 2000s, he encouraged Putin to embrace Reaganomics combined with Pinochet-type dictatorial control to push through further radical economic reforms. 47
Up until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, high-society circles in the West greatly admired Aven for his beautiful collection of fine art, pieces of which he regularly loaned to prestigious museums. Nobody ever batted an eyelid regarding his overt flirtation with dictatorial measures. 48 There is a logic in this. Neoliberals commit to democracy only as long as it is feasible to do so; if not, then dictatorial measures are considered fair game. 49
Neoliberal doctrine routinely holds faulty governance responsible for the flaws of capitalism and outsources crisis management to the state while at the same time expecting the very same state to implement policies and regulations that guarantee the stable growth of private capital. 50 Aven sees the government as liable to facilitate the growth of the private sector so that it can eventually supplant the state—without, however, tasking private capital with the duty of addressing social grievances. The sociologist Krozer found that the top 1 percent of Mexicans are concerned about inequality but do not see themselves as part of the structure that produces it. 51 Aven goes a step further, arguing that the problem of social inequality “is a question of social policy; social mobility must work,” and it is for the state to ensure this. 52 Everything else, from medicine to culture, would eventually be financed by private capital, Aven said.
Wrapping private interests in a rhetoric of public virtue 53 conflates the market economy’s benefits with the common good. 54 Aven reasons along these lines: Where capitalism thrives, philanthropy will grow. This would eventually help change “people’s attitudes towards private property,” he said. Aven and his peers see reputation management in the form of philanthropy as crucial in Russia, where “the relationship to the rich is complex.” Aven’s fellow shareholder, Oleg Sysuev, told me in the mid-2010s that “[t]here is still the widespread belief that big money is stolen.” Indeed, according to a 2014 survey, nearly 60 percent of Russians were convinced that big private wealth in 1990s Russia had been accumulated by dishonest means. 55 Aven was anxious to stress that his name was too closely associated with the traumas of that decade to ever contemplate a return to politics. This might have changed with Russia’s descent into authoritarianism. There is no longer any need to consider public opinion with regard to who holds the levers of power in the regime. Aven’s loyalty to the Kremlin from day one of the war is likely to pay both financial and political dividends. 56
Individual and Collective Superiority
Yekaterina, an entrepreneur and billionaire’s wife, was impatient with me when I asked her what qualities and skills she thought her parents had passed on to her. “Listen, Elisabeth, I got genes from my parents. Of course, these genes allowed me to develop myself and all the qualities that led to success.” Yekaterina’s father was one of ten children born into a peasant family deep in rural Russia. Despite this modest background, he became a professor and “a great scientist,” a career path that was facilitated by the post-war educational reforms Khrushchev implemented. Yekaterina’s mother, who moved from Ukraine to Moscow to study, went into science research, wherein she continued to work throughout her professional life. “You can see, Elisabeth, they hadn’t had their paths laid out for them,” she said: “My parents are relatively simple people. All they achieved, they achieved because of their own capabilities.”
Although Western elites harbor similar sentiments to Yekaterina’s, they are unlikely to express themselves as freely as she did. As the sociologist Littler points out, in order to flourish, exceptional talent requires specific personality traits over and above just biological supremacy, including entrepreneurialism, initiative, and discipline. 57 Yekaterina also thinks that genes are not enough; it takes hard work for talent to thrive. As she explained, “They [her parents] possessed natural and biological resources which they managed to make the most of. Both of them had a thirst for education, culture, and a certain lifestyle. And I inherited this. That’s actually really wonderful.” In other respects, Yekaterina adhered to the rules of modesty that a descendant from a Soviet intelligentsia family is expected to uphold. It was only when her husband Gennady joined us that I learned that she had graduated with a Red Diploma in physics “from a very prestigious university.” “There were only about two females to a hundred male students,” he added proudly. One of the couple’s children is exceptionally talented (“Our son is much better than I am,” Gennady said), something that he put down to the good genes he bequeathed to his offspring.
Secular ways of naturalizing the social and the historical have a strong tradition in Russia. Like Aven, Yekaterina and Gennady grew up in the 1960s Soviet Union, a time when (in contradiction to Marx’s idea of consciousness being determined by being) biological thinking rose to the fore. This was partly in response to Stalin’s ban on genetics as a discipline. Once this ban was lifted, biological interpretations of history and human behavior were enthusiastically embraced, especially by the most conservative-leaning parts of the Soviet intelligentsia. 58 Their concerns were worlds apart from the debates raging in the West. During those years, academics, public intellectuals, and social activists passionately questioned repressive hierarchies in society. Feminists were most radical in their critique of traditional gender roles, which they exposed as man-made. Aven’s, Yekaterina’s, and Gennady’s generation had missed out on any such debates, and so has every generation since.
Most parents regard it as their duty to spur the entrepreneurial talent that, they believe, runs in their families’ blood, among other things by fast-tracking their children’s careers. Here again, confidence in a superior bloodline goes hand in hand with intelligentsia identities. Daughters are seen as best suited for careers in philanthropy, fashion, and the arts. Generous support in the form of financial boosts and the leveraging of powerful contacts has long done wonders for oligarch wives to shine as artists, curators, and designers. It works equally well for their daughters.
Things are trickier for their brothers. They are expected to make it in “male” professions, with some of them being chosen as potential heirs to their fathers’ business empires. Such ambitions present fathers with a dilemma. Many feel uneasy about making their sons privy to Russia’s shady business practices. They might feel even more uncomfortable at the thought of exposing their sons to a world that, in their own words, is on the rough end of things. The myths they created around their rise to the top will inevitably fall apart once sons realize that their fathers’ accomplishment relied on dispositions other than great sacrifice, hard work, and innovative thinking. For many, this is reason enough to opt for alternative pathways, such as kickstarting their sons’ start-ups or installing them in senior management positions, either in their own companies or those of business partners. While this will put an end to any dream of leaving behind a family business dynasty, safer gender-appropriate success stories suffice as evidence of that innate strength that runs in the family.
Individual quests for superiority are complemented by a sense of collective eminence. I met Yury Pripachkin in his office in Moscow in early summer 2009. The telecommunications entrepreneur and business partner of the Fabergé egg-owning oligarch Viktor Vekselberg was in a jolly mood that sunny day and was pleased to have an audience for his ideas about what it is that distinguishes Russian business. According to him, Western entrepreneurs are held back by a socialist mentality. Referring to the bailout of banks in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, he sneered at Western businessmen and bankers. While they “expect the state to help them out of any crisis situation,” Russian entrepreneurs are more hands-on and “have done everything by themselves,” Pripachkin said. He followed this up with a statement that was often to be heard around that time: Russia developed capitalism within just a couple of decades, while it had taken the West more than two hundred years to achieve the same.
Pripachkin’s rise to riches came later in life and has been more modest than that of Aven and Gennady. The two were already jetting around the world when, in the early 1990s, radical cuts in military spending caught up with Pripachkin and he lost his job as an army commander. Pripachkin’s reasoning is closer to that of the businessmen who, years later, grew rich in the provinces. One of them is Stanislav, a former biology teacher turned financier and art collector. In accordance with Pripachkin, Stanislav said that, unlike the West, Russia was able to free itself from the burden of social welfare: “The socialism we had here, you’ve got now in your countries.” Stanislav strongly disapproves of social benefits because they “turn people into parasites who think the state owes them.” Instead, “everybody should work for their bread and butter,” he said. He nevertheless grants Communists “the right to exist.” Their duty is to ensure that there are social policies in place. When push comes to shove, they are duty-bound to act as a “counterbalance to capitalists and fascists.” “Why am I telling you that?” he asked me rhetorically: “As someone socialized into socialist society, I reason in social categories.”
Such a moral stance—one that regards success and failure as dependent on individual qualities, simultaneously retaining public welfare and social provision—stems from a rejection of Soviet ideology, while it is also a product of it. 59 Rich Russians’ Soviet socialization has generated a range of conflicting moralities and eclectic worldviews. In a rebellion against his grandfather’s communist convictions, Stanislav became a neoliberal—but one whose neoliberalism is mostly about a free-market economy in Russia. He has no time for the Milton Friedman–type doctrines that Aven and his fellow reformers signed up to. Instead, Stanislav’s primary focus is on the rise of Russia as a distinct civilization, the pre-eminence of which relies on its “uncompromising preservation of conservative values,” as he called it.
Stanislav does not want to see the state retreat, not even in areas where neoliberals are typically most adamant to keep state authorities at bay. Should his children be unable or unwilling to look after his art collection, it should be placed in the hands of the state, he said. Stanislav makes little distinction in his use of “the state” and “the public”: “Big collections should belong to the people, be managed by public bodies, and be accessible to the public,” he insists. Stanislav denies wealthy people the right to reduce precious art collections to something that serves nothing but their private satisfaction. “It is no longer my own pleasure in art that matters; it’s the enrichment of civilization, world civilization,” he said. Contradictory as Stanislav’s elaborations sound, there is some far-sightedness in his thinking. After all, the names of great patrons of the arts and Maecenase’s have left their mark on history precisely because they set up significant collections and museums, rather than having their children sell off their treasures or have them disappear to their various private homes.
Private Philanthropy
Philanthropic giving by Russia’s rich has taken off since the turn of the century, with many oligarchs institutionalizing their activities through corporate and private foundations. 60 The 2008 global financial crisis did not slow down this trend, and the wealthy’s philanthropic spending rose even more in the 2010s. 61 Paradoxically, these rapid developments have not led to a more diverse range of beneficiaries and causes. The wealthy’s obsession with care for nobody but children is shared by most ordinary Russians. Up to the late 2010s, 90 percent of charitable donations in Russia went to children. While this figure has slightly decreased in recent years (many women shifted their focus onto animal care), 62 children-related causes remain top priority. One reason for this is Russia’s long tradition of almsgiving to the weak and helpless, and here children tick all boxes. 63 For others, the main motivation is to invest in exceptionally gifted children, as they are seen as the future of a strong and powerful Russia. Anatoly, a wealthy businessman and art dealer, represents the latter group. He has a “strictly biological outlook,” as he said, which is why he supports only “the very best.”
The near-Darwinist attitudes that emerged in the post-war Soviet Union were exacerbated in the cut-throat 1990s. 64 Russia’s rich are unlikely to let go of them any time soon, given how much credit they give to genetic excellence as a driver of success. Such a cold rationale, however, sits uneasily with other values they might cherish, be it the paternalistic kindliness prescribed by Russian Orthodox Christianity, the strong sense of duty Judaism inculcates, or the social morale they remember from Soviet times.
To avoid a clash of conflicting moralities, some complement their support for the best of the best with care for the less advantaged. An example of this is Vadim Moshkovich, Russia’s largest sugar and pork producer. Born in 1967, Moshkovich rose to riches in the 2010s, largely thanks to the ideal conditions the sector enjoyed following sanction-related import restrictions on agricultural goods. His wealth had peaked in 2021 when it was estimated at $2.4 billion. A year later his name was added to the U.K. sanction list. When I met Moshkovich in his Moscow office in 2016, his company employed fifteen thousand people. There are times when he experiences moral distress, he told me: “When we increase productivity, this means mass redundancies,” he said; “We need to sack people all the time.” Moshkovich tries to make up for the hardship resulting from his profit-making by building houses for his employees and, whenever possible, giving them a pay raise. In addition to that, he finances local schools in the areas where his agricultural businesses are located. Most of his time and energy, however, goes to the flagship school he built for highly gifted children. By the time of the interview, he had spent $50 million of his private money on this school project. Another $150 million went into an endowment fund to keep things running in the long term. Moshkovich’s motivation stems from his deep gratitude to the elite school he attended (one that specializes in mathematics), to which he believes he owes his success. 65
Not everybody has signed up to the idea of supporting the best. Born in 1968, Alexander Svetakov moved up the economic hierarchy in the 1990s. His net wealth was estimated at $2 billion in 2021, down from $3.3 billion in 2016. Svetakov set up a school for physically disabled children. He looked startled when I asked him what type of people paid him respect for his efforts. There were no such people, he replied. His school merely raised eyebrows among fellow elites. “Our society likes the strong and healthy. It doesn’t like the weak and infirm,” he said.
Just before the opening of the school, an important politician came up to me and said, “Why do you need that? Let’s do a school for gifted children. Have a quota of five percent disabled ones and show them off. But why on earth a whole school for disabled children?”
Unlike Svetakov’s elitist peers, ordinary Russians warmly welcome support for children in need, disabled ones included. Irina Sedykh is married to the metallurgy tycoon Anatoly Sedykh, the main shareholder of Russia’s second-largest pipe producer and biggest manufacturer of train wheels. She runs her husband’s charity foundation, a section of which focuses on disabled children. Her main aim is to contribute to the development of civil society in Russia by instilling in ordinary people the need to care for others. To this end, she encourages the public to become involved in her charitable activities. Sedykh was very positive about things when I met her in 2015 in her Moscow office. The charity had run out of ideas of what to do with the large number of people wanting to volunteer.
Long before the Sedykhs adopted this approach, the charity Liniya Zhizni (Life Line), which was co-founded by Aven, had pioneered the use of voluntarism. The charity’s super-rich shareholders had made it their mission to fundraise among the Russian population and have them cover the cost of surgery for severely ill children. One of the shareholders, Oleg Sysuev, explained the rationale behind having people of modest means come up with the money for the charity’s activities: people’s involvement would enlighten and educate them. Ordinary people should develop a need to do charity as “an everyday thing,” he said. Eventually, this should create “the social institution of charity” in Russia. 66
Oligarch-led voluntarism is not a Russian invention, but is a relatively little discussed aspect of philanthro-capitalism, alongside social entrepreneurialism, for-profit philanthropy, and social-venture investment. The core aim is to eventually supplant state provision of social care by creating a controlled form of “activism” that is instigated and administered from above. That this was first pioneered by a charity Aven is part of makes sense, given his devotion to neoliberal doctrines. That philanthro-capitalist approaches exist in parallel with charity practices widely considered ineffective and outdated, such as the fixation on children, underlines the contradictory state of rich Russians’ moral economy.
Western mainstream assessments of oligarch philanthropy typically depart from the idea that philanthropy is “good” if independent from the Kremlin and unhampered by any regime coercion. Although there is merit to studying Kremlin interference in oligarch philanthropy, 67 the overall picture is much more complex. That the rich are free to do their own thing as long as they demonstrate obedience when required challenges the view of everything being down to vertical one-way pressure exerted by the regime. Once we break with such mainstream thinking, things become more interesting. Kremlin interventions in the form of “nudging” the super-rich to tend to causes that are more in line with public priorities are crucial for the preservation of social cohesion. Except for war profiteers, social stability is a core precondition for Russia’s big business to prosper. Economic sanctions require particularly well-coordinated efforts between the Kremlin and big business.
If we want to get to grips with what to do in times of war, we need a better grasp of how oligarchs tick and how they interact with the regime. Putin’s attack on a few selected oligarchs in the early 2000s was anything but a clampdown on a free market economy. On the contrary, it marked the beginning of a hyper-capitalism that allowed for runaway private-capital accumulation. There are numerous cases other than Chile that illustrate the harmony between dictatorial measures and radical free-market reforms. Irrespective of whether in a liberal democracy such as that of the USA or an authoritarian state like Russia’s, where neoliberal doctrine gets the upper hand, wealth inequality tends to soar, social provision gets dismantled, and private philanthropy is glorified. Significant donations enable US oligarchs to steer policy making and sketch the political landscape. With the operation of large-scale foundations and high-profile philanthropic projects, oligarchs meet Kremlin expectations and boost their status. Neither nor has much to do with a perception of philanthropy as an indicator of “civilized wealth.”
Conclusion
This article has taken an approach to elite, wealth, and inequality studies that is informed by sociological and anthropological research from around the globe. In doing so, it breaks with the prism through which Russian elites have traditionally been analyzed, namely through a focus on the top echelons of power, with major business players being scrutinized in terms of their relationship to the Kremlin. In contrast to this approach, I have drawn on international sociological scholarship on elites to take a fresh look at the moral economy of Russia’s upper class.
Almost all of the eighty people I interviewed were born in the Soviet period. Many of them came of age at a time when the Soviet planned economy was about to crumble. Some of them acquired their riches in the turbulent 1990s and others during the golden era of the oil boom in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Their narratives are far from homogeneous. Several, often contradictory, ideas about how to be rich have developed in parallel. Which views they have adopted for themselves largely depends on how they were socialized and to which stratum of Soviet society they belonged; when and how they embarked on the path to enrichment; what business they have been in; and to what extent they have been exposed to, or used to be integrated into, global capitalism.
What they all share, however, are their assertions of being “good” and their keenness to be sharply dissociated from their “bad” fellow rich. Such wealth legitimation is reminiscent of what elites from around the world routinely claim for themselves. Piketty considers this moral distinction between “good” and “bad” wealth as hugely problematic: it disguises the structural dimensions that generate stark wealth inequalities by presenting them as natural. 68 Equally in line with global elites is my interviewees’ conviction that entrepreneurial success is down to personality traits, above all talent and effort; this was most pronounced in Yekaterina and Gennady’s narratives and, to a lesser extent, in that of Aven. Explanations of this kind, as to why it was they who were successful, are highly effective because they deny the existence of other dynamics that might also have been at work, such as luck, shady practices, and social privilege.
Specific to Russia’s rich is their historical and symbolic reliance on intelligentsia backgrounds. Historically, their upbringing in intelligentsia families gave them a tangible head-start (in terms of culture, education, and social networks). Symbolically, it allows them to retrospectively anchor their current status in the past and to claim a birthright for their social standing, alongside signaling a moral worth in the form of “inner” strength and decency.
There is a crucial element in this identity-building: The past they refer to preceded the capitalism that allowed them to rise to the top of the economic hierarchy. Within their own lifetimes, rich Russians’ identities shifted from a firm sense of belonging to the Soviet intelligentsia to becoming the drivers of neoliberal capitalism. Neoliberal ideologies, however, lacked the historical and symbolic gravitas required for sustainable identity-building. In response, rich Russians incorporated elements of their Soviet past into their twenty-first-century identities. This makes the Russian case particularly interesting: while meritocracy is usually analyzed as something existing in the present, the moral economy of upper-class Russians heavily draws on ideologies that were instilled in them at a time when capitalism did not yet exist in their lives.
This might explain why the most class-conscious of them have become highly inventive when it comes to philanthropic activities, including engaging ordinary folk in charitable activities. While such efforts are in line with a globally shared neoliberal understanding of civil society, it also espouses the idea that Russia is at the forefront of a unique civilization. In this way, they are incorporating a sense of patriotism as promoted by the Kremlin, which revolves around the idea of collective supremacy over the West.
The integration of Soviet elements into their new, neoliberal roles has fostered a reasoning that brings the capitalism that has enabled their success into harmony with their collective and individual Soviet legacy, as well as with the conservative-biological interpretation of history and human behavior that they acquired in their youth. Biology is a very convenient justification for social inequality. What is allegedly given by nature is difficult to question. While many of their Western peers privately share similar convictions, they have long understood that it would be unwise to express them in public. Meanwhile, rich Russians have no qualms to freely and ostentatiously share their beliefs with outsiders, among them people like me.
They do the same when it comes to their anti-democratic reasoning. Aven and his peers could not have been more honest and straightforward about their eagerness to develop capitalism in the interest of private capital, even if this meant sacrificing democracy along the way; we can see this in their appeal to install a Pinochet-type dictatorship in Russia. The social scientists Kantola and Kuusela detected similar sentiments among the Finnish business elites they interviewed, particularly those high up in the tech industry, who were convinced that they would easily do a better job than any democratically elected government. 69 Again, however, elites in the West tend to be far more cautious, nuanced, and subtle in their public presentation, no matter how much they may harbor similar ideas. 70
These last two points—rich Russians’ adherence to biological supremacy and openly expressed preferences for private capital over democracy—are the central findings of my analysis. Research on non-Western elites is routinely seen as a potential starting point for comparative investigations with other emerging elites. While I do not question the value of this approach, I argue that the specific data I have presented in this article suggest that this is not the only way to go forward; findings of this kind take us right into the heart of Western capitalism. Drawing on them in comparative research with elites in the most developed countries could be equally worthwhile. Western elites’ guardedness and caution have resulted in empirical accounts that center around only some of the components of their meritocratic beliefs, emphasizing their hard work, willpower, and discipline. The other side of the coin—inherent traits such as intelligence and talent—has received much less scholarly attention. Rich Russians’ palette of blunt and raw claims not only to meritocracy but also to biology provides us with valuable indicators of reasoning that might well be present among elites in the developed world, except that there they are more difficult to detect.
