under different owners, and by the time the original owners are released, the company has been bought and sold and split up by new owners. These raids happened at every level, from the very top—where the Kremlin would arrest the owner of an oil company like Mikhail Kho-dorkovsky, then hand the company over to friends of the President—right down to local police chiefs taking over furniture stores. It was the right to do this that glued together the great “power vertical” that stretched from the President down to the lowliest traffic cop.
