And though Russia does officially have a free market, with mega-corporations floating their record-breaking IPOs on the global stock exchanges, most of the owners are friends of the President. Or else they are oligarchs who officially pledge that everything that belongs to them is also the President’s when he needs it: “All that I have belongs to the state,” says Oleg Deripaska, one of the country’s richest men. This isn’t a country in transition but some sort of postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends.
In Russia, capitialism is the bedfellow of authoritarianism.
