[T]his was CPSU money safeguarded by the , but when Yeltsin outlawed the CPSU, who did the money belong to? ...[T]o whoever knew what the bank account number was, and this started the scramble for offshore accounts. Kroll International was hired... by Gaidar and Yeltsin. They couldn't find the money.
American political scientist (1949–2018)
(December 2, 1949 – April 11, 2018) the daughter of a school teacher and a jazz musician, was an American political scientist and writer. She was a professor in the Department of Political Science at in , and the director of .
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Seeing the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe after 1989, and the loss of the ruling status of communist parties... the [CPSU] authorized the ... to move money out of the Soviet Union, realizing that if the CPSU lost its ruling status... [i.e.,] access to the state budget without limit, they would need money to live in a . Something that the Polish, East German and Hungarian parties hadn't thought about.
Gleb Pavlovsky... an extremely important member of the PR team around Putin in 2000, and who has fallen out with the ... stated (and I agree...) that "Putin was part of a very extensive, but politically invisible layer of people, who after the end of the 1980s, were looking for a revanche in connection with the collapse of the Soviet Union."
The pattern we see now of the redistribution of to the inner core, has been in place since the beginning, and even before . This is not a system in which robber barons create the industrial basis of a robust emerging capitalist economy. This is a system in which barons are robbed by value-detracting state raiding elites whose sole position is determined by their relationship to the current president. Value-detraction is an extremely important part of this picture.
110 billionaires control 35% of the... wealth of this very wealthy country. ...[T]he median wealth in Russia ...(50% are richer, 50% are poorer) ...is ...$871. It is the lowest median wealth figure of any country. A country that is a net exporter of energy has a lower median wealth than India. It... scores below Nigeria in its ability to control corruption, and... its willingness to control corruption.
[T]hese sanctions represented a public admission by the United States government of what it had known for over a decade... Putin has built a system based on massive predation not seen in Russia since the Tzars. Transparency International estimates $300 billion are paid every year in corruption. , according to official Russian Central Bank figures since 2005 have been $335 billion, and ... stated that Russia now has the highest income inequality of any country in the world.
Putin will not go gentle into the night. ...[L]ess flexible and more bombastic in his public appearances ...those in his inner circle suggest that after the 2011–12 election demonstrations, there is ...fear. Gleb Pavlovskiy, his PR guru... believes that Putin will never leave power and ...hampered by the idea that Russians will always decide ...by violence. Pavlovskiy ...heard Putin say, "We ...know that as soon as we move aside, you will destroy us. ...you'll put us to the wall and execute us. And we don’t want to go to the wall."
Some... gambling companies were controlled by ex-KGB, and as such ...pushed hard to get the to submit to their authority. ...Several reputed members of the Tambov and Malyshev gangs became acquainted with Putin at this time. ...Reputed crime bosses who might not have easily received visas to Western countries now arrived as members of official cultural delegations and did their business abroad under ...protection of ...delegations.