The New Bolshevism

Meet 42-year-old Suleiman Kerimov (pictured right).

With a net worth of over $17 billion, according to Forbes magazine he’s the richest member of the richest parliament in the world -- that belonging to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. After serving for eight years in the lower house, called the Duma, Kerimov moved on to the upper, known as the Council of the Federation. Kerimov has plenty of other “new Russians” (as Russians call their nouveaux riches) to keep him company. According to Forbes: “Twelve billionaires now hold seats in the country's parliament, with a total net worth of $41 billion, sitting alongside the less wealthy lawmakers, worth merely in the hundreds of millions. The scale of wealth in Russia's government is unparalleled anywhere else on Earth.”

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Anyone who sits in Russia’s parliament is immune from criminal prosecution as long as they hold their seats. Ironically, as Forbes points out: “Russian law prohibits legislators (or any government official) from running a business. So how come so many billionaire lawmakers make our list? Many get around the law by ‘assigning’ or ‘giving’ shares of their companies to friends and family members. At least on paper.”

It’s hard for anyone familiar with Russian history to avoid seeing the stark parallels between the monarchy that ruled Russia at the beginning of the 20th Century and the oligarchy that has taken control of modern Russia. As a country, Russia does not rank in the top 55 nations of the world in terms of per capita purchasing power parity and its average wage hovers around $4 per hour. The nation's income inequality score rivals that of sub-Saharan Africa (Russia's scores for good government and corruption are similar Africanesque). It does not rank in the top 100 nations of the world for average male adult lifespan (the average Russian man does not live to see his 60th year). And yet, Russia has spawned a huge class of billionaires by allowing a small oligarchy to consume the overwhelming share of the nation’s resources (mostly generated by selling fossil fuels) and now those oligarchs are taking over the national legislature as well.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the Communist Party is the largest opposition force in the current parliament, or that the Bolshevik Party is resurgent. The Moscow Times reports that last Saturday a contingent of over 50 party members pretended to be carrying out a wedding ceremony on Moscow’s famous Red Square, but when they got close enough to the Square’s most famous landmark, St. Basil’s Cathedral, they “stunned the police [who were guarding the monument] by burning signal flares, holding up placards demanding ‘freedom for political prisoners’ and chanting: ‘We need another Russia!’ before police attacked them.”