The “Golden Doors” to Russian Business Elite:the Recruitment Process and the Structural Transformationof Large-scale Business in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

Yurii Agafonov — PhD Candidate, European University at St. Petersburg. Address: 3a, Gagarinskaya St., St. Petersburg, 191187, Russian Federation. E-mail: yagafonov@eu.spb.ru
Vladislav Lepele — Alumnus, European University at St. Petersburg. Address: 3a, Gagarinskaya St., St. Petersburg, 191187, Russian Federation. E-mail: vlepele@eu.spb.ru

This article investigates the recruitment process and the transformation of the Russian business elite from a biographical perspective. By summarizing the academic discussion on the role of the business elite in the economic and political processes in Russia and the approaches to its conceptualization, the study suggests defining the latter as a part of a broader stratum of entrepreneurship, i.e. as a more or less open social group. Based on such an extended definition of the business elite the authors reveal the current structure of large businesses in terms of biographies, and the sources and causes of their formation. Empirically the authors rely on a qualitative analysis of 293 biographies of the representatives of the Russian business elite listed in the Forbes’s top 100 (200 from 2011) ranking of the richest Russian entrepreneurs between 2005–2015. The analysis reveals that the core of the elite is made up of entrepreneurs who came to the business elite from the state and party nomenklatura, USSR foreign economic agencies and the extractive and manufacturing industries. Nevertheless, there is a significant share of businessmen who started their business from the scratch and joined the business elite in two waves during the 1990s and the early 2000s. A deeper analysis shows that the share of ‘newcomers’ is low, because many of such entrepreneurs joined the elite with the help of family ties and patronage. The authors conclude that the current structure of the Russian business elite can be characterized as semi-closed, although not entirely exclusive for there are representatives of a broader stratum of entrepreneurship. In addition, the analysis of changes in the structure of the Russian business elite reveals traces of the economic crises of 1998, during which the share of businessmen who entered the elite owing to their better competitive position in the new system was the highest. Contrary to the studies of political elites the current study reveals a relatively low share of entrants from the state security structures (‘siloviki’).