"A Way Out of the Dead End"

Ahead of the 1996 presidential election, the richest of Russia’s rising businessmen—not yet known as oligarchs—got together to assert the power of capital over the political process. In an open letter published in two of Russia’s biggest papers, Nezavisimaya gazeta and Argumenty i fakty, thirteen of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs suggested that the only way out of impending political crisis was to compromise with capital. The letter was addressed to both President Yeltsin and his most serious competitor, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov—and heaped plenty of criticism on both. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, wrote the capitalists, “of which the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is the successor,” was responsible for all the failures of the late-Soviet era and the humiliations of collapse. At the same time, Yeltsin administration reforms had proven “difficult and often mistaken.”

Although the document later known as “The Letter of the Thirteen” took no clear side in the presidential contest, it stated that no Russian leader could possibly rule without the support of the new tycoons. “Dear Presidents! Without us, neither you, Mr. Yeltsin, nor you, Mr. Zyuganov, will have a controlling stake in power. The time has come to decide whether you’ve come to terms with our power.” The term “controlling stake” (kontrol’nyi paket, in the original, meaning 51% of a joint-stock company) directly transposed capitalist jargon onto the political sphere. Nevertheless, the letter’s central value was not capitalism, but so-called gosudarstvennost’, meaning “sovereignty” or “statehood.” The entrepreneurs called specifically for a strong state aligned with—if not outright run by—its business interests. The letter ended with a threat that brought state sovereignty and mobster capitalism into prescient alliance:

“We understand that there are groups in our country that wish to cultivate political tensions. There are conscientious, stubborn anti-statists. We do not want to undertake an exhausting and fruitless pedagogy! Those who would threaten Russian statehood [gosudarstvennost’], insisting on ideological revanchism, on social confrontation, must understand that responsible entrepreneurs have the necessary resources and the will to take action against both unprincipled and uncompromising politicians.

Russia must enter the twenty-first century a great, thriving nation. That is our obligation to our ancestors and to our descendants.”

An early declaration of the political power of new Russian capital, the “Letter of the Thirteen” documented the transformation of businessmen into oligarchs. Indeed, in the months that followed, Yeltsin came to terms with several of the letter’s signatories, who would help bankroll his reelection campaign and control the media narrative in exchange for future capital-friendly policies. After Yeltsin won re-election, seven of the letter’s most influential signatories, all bankers, became unofficial presidential advisors, inaugurating the period popularly known—on the model of “Semiboyarshchina” or “rule by seven boyars” (1610-12) during Russia’s Time of Troubles—as “Semibankirshchina” or “rule by seven bankers.” In 1998, the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), only recently repatriated to Russia after decades of exile, observed that these men collectively held some 70% of the nation’s wealth.

Despite the power the seven bankers enjoyed, the desires expressed in their April 1996 letter could only be fully realized after Yeltsin had ceded power to his chosen successor, Vladimir Putin. Although several of the letter’s signatories soon found themselves stripped of their holdings, exiled, in prison, or dead—all as a direct result of Putin’s rise to power—“the regime of Vladimir Putin,” as Dmitry Butrin put it in Kommersant Vlast’ ten years later, “is a precise incarnation of the ideological construction that the authors of the ‘Letter of the 13’ considered in April 1996.” What the signatories wanted, Butrin continued, “was the recognition of the primacy of state power and statehood in Russia.” Reading the letter in the Putin era produces “a clear nostalgia for the near future.”