FROM OLIGARCHS TO OLIGARCHY

Abstract

Drawing heavily on theories about Russia's informal politics, American sanctions were designed to change Russian foreign policy by exploiting political conflict among oligarchs and the state elite; however, after nearly eight years of sanctions, Russian elites seem more united than ever. I propose that Russia's oligarchs—the ruthless self-interested economic elite in Russia's informal political system—might sometimes act as a cohesive oligarchy, particularly when their wealth is threatened from external rather than domestic sources, as has been the case under Western sanctions. Through an in-depth case study on the design and outcome of sanctions, this article seeks to develop a more dynamic theory of Russia's informal politics and explain the apparent cohesion among state and economic elites since 2014 as the result of a politics of wealth defense induced by Western sanctions.