Word: moscow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...global downturn, which Lebedev says has cost him $1 billion, he was a predictable, if persistent, critic of former President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, routinely calling for an independent legislature, a free press and free elections, and a crackdown on corruption. Improving his image has been the Moscow tabloid he co-owns, Novaya Gazetta, which is known for publishing stories on the war in Chechnya, bribe-seeking officials and the nation's abysmal public services. Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist famous for her dispatches from Chechnya, was one of the paper's star reporters before being shot to death...
...collective $230 billion - Lebedev's campaign has acquired a new urgency. He has ridiculed the efforts of Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev to revive the economy, including bailouts for the oligarchs that he estimates at roughly $11 billion. He has announced plans for an English-language radio channel in Moscow; bought the London newspaper the Evening Standard; announced plans to launch a democratic political party with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev; and (briefly) run for mayor of Sochi, host of the 2014 Winter Olympics. (Read a TIME article on why Mikhail Gorbachev is an environmental hero...
Lebedev seems an unlikely person to make that case. A few weeks earlier, near the center of Moscow in a stately pink building where he sometimes works and sleeps, Lebedev gave me a condensed history of the Russian state since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 - the beginnings of post-Soviet capitalism, the rise of the oligarchs, the loans-for-shares scandal, his acquisition of National Reserve Bank, the rise of Putin, the fall of the oligarchs, his 28% stake in Aeroflot, the Khodorkovsky affair, the forthcoming launch of his restaurant in London, the end of democracy...
...lucrative state assets at knock-down prices. When he took power in 2000, Putin immediately set out to rein in the oligarchs, offering them a straightforward deal: Keep your money, but stay out of politics. Khodorkovsky, now confined in a prison five time zones east of Moscow, is testament to what happens to oligarchs who don't play by the rules. The former head of Yukos was on the verge of forming a partnership with Exxon-Mobil, and had called for a more open and democratic nation - both big no-nos in Putin's Russia - before he was arrested...
...wealth that can be taken from them at any minute, and the only way they know to secure their fortunes is to endear themselves to the state - to become cheerleaders for it. "Russia is ruled by the same people who own it," says Masha Lipman, a political analyst at Moscow's Carnegie Center. "It's not even a legitimate question to ask whether the 'oligarchs' ... work 'for the Kremlin,' for it is sometimes impossible to draw the line between the 'oligarchs' and the Kremlin...