What Is an Oligarch?

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2022

⏱️ 49 minutes

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Summary

The use of the word ‘Oligarch’ has been increasingly rampant across international news outlets since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine just weeks ago. But what does it actually mean?

Jeffrey A. Winters, an American political scientist at Northwestern University who specialises in the study of oligarchy, notes that the common thread for oligarchs across history is that wealth defines them, empowers them and inherently exposes them to threats.

While Dan makes his voyage home, Matt Lewis, from the ‘Gone Medieval’ podcast, steps in for this timely episode. To try and make sense of this ancient, yet contemporary phenomenon, Jeffrey joins Matt for a discussion of what oligarchy is, historic and contemporary cases and the relationship between oligarchy and democracy.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. As I'm sure you're aware by now, Dan is still
0:05.2	away on his voyage home after the astonishing discovery of Shackleton's ship endurance
0:11.0	last week. I'm Matt Lewis and I've been allowed up from the Gone Medieval dungeon to try
0:15.7	and get a better understanding of a word or a concept that's in the news a lot at the
0:20.4	moment. There are many forms of government and getting your Arkeys right can be tricky.
0:26.2	You've got a monarchy, a constitutional monarchy like we have in the UK. Democracy is some people's
0:32.3	preferred method of government with elected representatives. Prutocracy is ruled by the
0:38.0	wealthy and you can even have anarchy the absence of any government at all. One word we're
0:43.6	hearing a lot amongst the horrifying news coming out of Ukraine is about Russia's oligarchy.
0:49.0	Russian oligarks seen as bolstering President Putin are being sanctioned to apply pressure
0:54.6	to him. The fall of the USSR in the early 1990s led to the rapid rise of the oligarchy in
1:01.2	Russia. But what is it? Where does the idea come from? And how is it distinguishable if
1:06.8	it is from other forms of government? Fortunately, we've got Jeffrey Winters, a political scientist
1:12.8	at Northwestern University, with us to cut through some of the lingo and complexity and
1:18.1	tell us what it all really means. Jeffrey is the author of oligarchy available from Cambridge
1:23.3	University Press from 2011 and is working on his next book, Domination Through Democracy.
1:30.3	Thank you very much for joining us today, Jeffrey. It's my pleasure, Matt. So we're going
1:39.3	to look at this big question of what is an oligarchy and I guess to start off with, can
1:43.8	you help us to understand what that word means? Where does it come from? Where do oligarchies
1:48.2	begin to emerge? Yeah, it's a very ancient word. It's a very ancient concept. It goes
1:55.6	back at least to ancient Athens and Rome. And a lot of people think that oligarch just
2:03.8	means rule by the few or oligarchy just means rule by the few. But if we look back to the
	...

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