https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_-bUIX1hDs
As Russia sent troops into Ukraine in February, countries around the world imposed severe sanctions on a group of influential Russian billionaires known as o

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/29/1088886554/how-putin-conquered-russias-oligarchy
How Putin Conquered Russia's Oligarchy. March 29, 20226:30 AM ET. Greg Rosalsky. Note: This is Part Two of a two-part Planet Money newsletter series on the Russian oligarchs. You can read Part One

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-putin-pushed-aside-the-oligarchs-and-made-russia-his-own/2020/07/09/acc3d91e-8332-11ea-878a-86477a724bdb_story.html
At the heart of her story is the long battle between the KGB and the country's oligarchs. From 1994 to 2000, when Putin came to power, Russia was an oligarchy. Today, the tables have turned

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/22/1087654279/how-shock-therapy-created-russian-oligarchs-and-paved-the-path-for-putin
In 1999, Boris Yeltsin and his oligarchic allies agreed that an obscure former KGB officer named Vladimir Putin was the man to become Yeltsin's prime minister, and soon Russia's next president.

https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/kgb
tomloel / Getty Images. The KGB was the primary security and intelligence agency for the Soviet Union from 1954 until the nation collapsed in 1991. The KGB served a multi-faceted role outside of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_oligarchs
A second wave of oligarchs emerged in the 2000s, friends and former colleagues of President Putin either from his years in the St Petersburg municipal administration or his Dresden tenure in the KGB. Examples are the director of the institute where Putin obtained a degree in 1996, Vladimir Litvinenko , [29] and Putin's childhood friend and judo

https://www.ft.com/content/3a987878-7f26-11ea-b0fb-13524ae1056b
The manager has, after all, just been doing his job. Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Turned on the West, by Catherine Belton, William Collins, RRP£25, 640 pages. Peter

https://theweek.com/politics/1012021/the-role-of-oligarchs-in-russia
Browder, a onetime investor inside Russia, claimed that Putin blackmailed the oligarchs for half of their wealth after jailing Khodorkovsky for fraud and tax evasion. Other observers have pointed

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-making-of-vladimir-putin/
PARIS — Speaking in what he called "the language of Goethe, Schiller and Kant," picked up during his time as a KGB officer in Dresden, Germany, President Vladimir Putin of Russia addressed

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/how-the-1980s-explains-vladimir-putin/273135/
As the Soviet system disintegrated, the Russian president was a young KGB agent serving in an isolated part of East Germany. Here's how the experience would shape him -- and his country.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Russian-oligarchs
Russian oligarchs, tycoons who reaped enormous fortunes in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.. When the centrally planned economy of the then-Soviet Union crashed, a group of quick-thinking men picked up the pieces and turned them into vast private wealth. They also became politically active in the 1990s as President Boris Yeltsin attempted to steer Russia toward capitalism and democracy.

https://www.npr.org/2005/10/06/4948068/the-kgb-in-the-third-world
In 1992, a former KGB archivist smuggled the Soviet Union's darkest secrets out of Russia. A new book based on highly classified documents chronicles the KGB's exploits in the Third World.

https://history.howstuffworks.com/world-history/kgb.htm
As Sipher explains it, the roots of the KGB and FSB go back to shortly after the creation of the Soviet Union. In December 1917, Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin created a secret police agency called the Cheka. "They called themselves the punishing sword of the revolution," he says. "Their whole goal was to keep the leadership in power."

https://www.wusf.org/2022-03-29/how-putin-conquered-russias-oligarchy
But then something crazy happened: one of Arkady's best friends became the president of Russia. That same year, Putin created a new state liquor monopoly, Rosspirtprom, by merging more than a hundred liquor factories. Rosspirtprom controlled around 30 percent of Russia's vodka market. Putin put Arkady in charge of it.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vladimir-Putin
Vladimir Putin (born October 7, 1952, Leningrad, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now St. Petersburg, Russia]) is a Russian intelligence officer and politician who has served as president (1999-2008 and 2012- ) of Russia and as the country's prime minister (1999 and 2008-12). One of the 21st century's most influential leaders, Putin has shaped his country's political landscape for decades with a

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/are-russian-oligarchs-rcna17717
A former KGB leader, a diamond mine executive and a deputy prime minister — these are just some of the roles held by Russian oligarchs targeted by the Biden administration in a round of

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60608282
The usual way that Russian oligarchs hide their "dark money" abroad is through shell companies. "These oligarchs hire the best lawyers, auditors, bankers, and lobbyists in the world to develop

https://theconversation.com/putins-russia-how-the-ex-kgb-strongman-has-gradually-turned-the-clock-back-to-soviet-repression-179127
To enforce this repression, Putin has his Rosgvardiya - the Russian national guard - which he created in a 2016 presidential decree in response to the 2011-2012 protests, the largest since the

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/opinion/how-the-kgb-started-the-war-that-changed-the-middle-east.html
With an old K.G.B. hand, Vladimir Putin, at the helm, Russia still sees Active Measures as a legitimate means of closing the gap between Russia and the West, and increasing Moscow's influence

https://www.history.com/news/kgb-soviet-russia-secret-police
Following Pasternak's death in 1960, they arrested his lover and muse, Olga Ivinskaya, sending her to the gulag. The KGB found other ways to muzzle internal critics. Writers and dissidents like

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/18/1087617018/how-much-influence-do-russian-oligarchs-really-have-on-putin
MA: After coming to power in 2000, Vladimir Putin set about creating a new generation of oligarchs, some of whom were pretty close friends of his from St. Petersburg.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-21/who-are-russia-s-oligarchs-and-can-they-sway-putin-quicktake
By the time Putin emerged as the all-but-assured successor to Yeltsin, the early oligarchs were widely despised by the Russian public, and Putin promised they would "cease to exist as a class

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/23/1088286644/who-are-russias-oligarchs-and-what-power-do-they-hold
Pedestrians walk past the yacht "Lady M", owned by Russian oligarch Alexei Mordashov, docked at Imperia's harbor. More than 1,000 Russians and their families have been hit with economic sanctions