Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a Russian and former Soviet politician. The eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union, he was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991. He was also the country's head of state from 1988 until 1991, serving as the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1988 to 1989, chairman of the Supreme Soviet from 1989 to 1990, and president of the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1991. Ideologically, Gorbachev initially adhered to Marxism–Leninism although he had moved towards social democracy by the early 1990s.
State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises. The definition can also include the state dominance of corporatized government agencies or of public companies such as publicly listed corporations in which the state has controlling shares.
The modern history of Russia began with the Russian Republic of the Soviet Union gaining more political and economical autonomy amidst the imminent dissolution of the USSR during 1990–1991, proclaiming its sovreignty inside the Union in June 1990, and electing its first President Boris Yeltsin a year later. The Russian SFSR was the largest republic within the Soviet Union, but it had no significant independence before, being the only Soviet republic to not have its own branch of the Communist Party.
Bolshevism is a revolutionary socialist current of Soviet Marxist–Leninist political thought and political regime associated with the formation of a rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined party of social revolution, focused on overthrowing the existing capitalist state system, seizing power and establishing the "dictatorship of the proletariat".
Boris Abramovich Berezovsky, also known as Platon Elenin, was a Russian business oligarch, government official, engineer and mathematician and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Gennady Andreyevich Zyuganov is a Russian politician, who has been the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and served as Member of the State Duma since 1993. He is also the Chair of the Union of Communist Parties – Communist Party of the Soviet Union (UCP-CPSU) since 2001 and a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe since 1996.
The 2000 Russian presidential election was held on 26 March 2000. Incumbent prime minister and acting president Vladimir Putin, who had succeeded Boris Yeltsin after his resignation on 31 December 1999, was seeking a four-year term in his own right and won the elections in the first round.
The 1996 Russian presidential election took place in Russia on 16 June 1996, with a second round being held on 3 July. It resulted in a victory for the incumbent President of Russia Boris Yeltsin, who ran as an independent politician. Yeltsin defeated Communist challenger Gennady Zyuganov in the run-off, receiving 54.4% of the vote. The election was marred by allegations of voter fraud against Yeltsin and foreign interference from the United States government. His inauguration ceremony took place on 9 August.
Alexander Pavlovich Smolensky is a Russian business oligarch.
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Gusinsky is a Russian media tycoon. He founded the Media-Most holding company that included the NTV free-to-air channel, the newspaper Segodnya, the radio station Echo of Moscow, and a number of magazines.
Russian oligarchs are business oligarchs of the former Soviet republics who rapidly accumulated wealth in the 1990s via the Russian privatisation that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The failing Soviet state left the ownership of state assets contested, which allowed for informal deals with former USSR officials as a means to acquire state property. Historian Edward L. Keenan has compared these oligarchs to the system of powerful boyars that emerged in late-Medieval Muscovy.
Our Home – Russia was a Russian political party that existed from 1995 to the mid-2000s.
Alexander Vasilyevich Korzhakov is a Russian former KGB general who served as Boris Yeltsin's bodyguard, confidant, and adviser for eleven years. He was the head of the Presidential Security Service (PSB) from 1991 to 1996, State Duma deputy from 2007 to 2011, and retired Lieutenant-general. Korzhakov had been Yeltsin's bodyguard since 1985, and on 19 August 1991, he stood next to his boss on top of a tank during Yeltsin's historic speech.
Tatyana Borisovna Yumasheva is the younger daughter of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Naina Yeltsina. Since 2009, Yumasheva has been a citizen of Austria.
A diverse variety of informal political groups emerged during the presidency of Vladimir Putin. They include remnants of the Yeltsin family, Saint Petersburg lawyers and economists, and security-intelligence elements called the siloviki.
Semibankirschina, or seven bankers, was a group of seven powerful Russian business oligarchs who played an important role in the political and economical life of Russia between 1996 and 2000. In spite of internal conflicts, the group worked together in order to re-elect President Boris Yeltsin in 1996, and thereafter to successfully manipulate him and his political environment from behind the scenes.
Privatization in Russia describes the series of post-Soviet reforms that resulted in large-scale privatization of Russia's state-owned assets, particularly in the industrial, energy, and financial sectors. Most privatization took place in the early and mid-1990s under Boris Yeltsin, who assumed the presidency following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was a Russian and Soviet politician who served as the first president of Russia from 1991 to 1999. He was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1961 to 1990. He later stood as a political independent, during which time he was viewed as being ideologically aligned with liberalism and Russian nationalism.
Beginning in 1995, Boris Yeltsin's government began privatizing state-owned shares in companies through a loans for shares scheme. The scheme helped with "fundraising" for Yeltsin's 1996 reelection campaign and restructuring freshly-sold companies at the same time.
Timothy James Colton is an American political scientist and historian serving as the Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies at Harvard University. His academic work and interests are in Russian and post-Soviet politics. He is currently an editorial board member for World Politics and Post-Soviet Affairs. He has been a fellow of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences since 2011.
