So you want to be an oligarch

Too late, I'm afraid. They lost their power 20 years ago, and now they may be losing their cash.

Question for my Russia-expert friends: Are there any great Godfather-style sagas about the rise and fall of a Russian oligarch? I guess there’s Alex Gibney’s documentary Citizen K (which I hear is excellent), but I’m not aware that any great Russian novels or dramatic films or streaming series have penetrated western consciousness. Maybe they’re out there and I just don’t know. There’s a BBC comedy series called Londongrad (2015) and a BBC drama called McMafia (2018-), the latter based on a nonfiction book by Misha Glenny, but I don’t know if these are any good. Recommendations welcome.

Maybe, like the cowboy and the Mafia don, this archetype won’t reach its moment of Stagecoach/Godfather cultural ripeness until the real thing is receding into history. “Big, fierce, extinct” the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was told when he asked a psychologist colleague how dinosaurs became objects of fascination for little boys. It may be the same with oligarchs.

While we await the Great Oligarch Novel or film or TV series, here is my recent New Republic column on what may be the autumn of the oligarch, a reckoning I can’t pretend not to enjoy, even as I doubt that squeezing him hard will chase Putin out of Ukraine or remove him from office.

Also this week, I wrote about former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers sounding the alarm that stagflation is just around the corner. That’s a little bit like shouting “fire!” in a crowded movie theater. There had goddamn well better be a fire. Stagflation only ever happened once, in the 1970s, and the word terrifies Democrats because it ushered in Ronald Reagan and a generation of Republican dominance. The GOP is much crazier now than it was in 1980, and even some prominent Republicans tremble at the thought of regaining power. But evidence that stagflation is coming back is on par, I write in my latest New Republic column, with evidence that Japan intends to re-bomb Pearl Harbor. Just to be clear, I don’t think that’s going to happen either.