102-660: Konstantin Grigoryevich Kagalovsky ( Russian : Константин Григорьевич Кагаловский ; born 13 October 1957) is a Russian businessman. He is the former vice-president of the oil company Yukos and a key Yukos shareholder, former deputy chairman of Bank Menatep , and the former Russian representative to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Kagalovsky claims to be the owner of the Ukrainian TV channel TVi . In 1980, he graduated from
204-674: A constitutional referendum on whether to adopt Russian as a second official language. According to the Central Election Commission, 74.8% voted against, 24.9% voted for and the voter turnout was 71.1%. Starting in 2019, instruction in Russian will be gradually discontinued in private colleges and universities in Latvia, and in general instruction in Latvian public high schools. On 29 September 2022, Saeima passed in
306-519: A new education law which requires all schools to teach at least partially in Ukrainian, with provisions while allow indigenous languages and languages of national minorities to be used alongside the national language. The law faced criticism from officials in Russia and Hungary. The 2019 Law of Ukraine "On protecting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language" gives priority to
408-513: A 15-bedroom mansion, for £120 million. Mikhail Fridman restored Athlone House in London as a primary residence in 2016. Roman Abramovich bought the English football club Chelsea F.C. in 2003, spending record amounts on players' salaries. Alexander Mamut invested £100m to Waterstones bookstore chain after acquiring it in 2011 for £53m. According to its managing director James Daunt ,
510-464: A formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant, the maximal structure can be described as follows: (C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C) Russian oligarch Russian oligarchs (Russian: олигархи , romanized : oligarkhi ) are business oligarchs of the former Soviet republics who rapidly accumulated wealth in the 1990s via the Russian privatisation that followed
612-484: A language that "belongs to the European cultural space". The financing of Russian-language content by the state will cease, which the concept says create a "unified information space". However, one inevitable consequence would be the closure of public media broadcasts in Russian on LTV and Latvian Radio, as well as the closure of LSM's Russian-language service. In Lithuania , Russian has no official or legal status, but
714-588: A lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic , Turkic , Persian , Arabic , and Hebrew . According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California , Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency. Feudal divisions and conflicts created obstacles between
816-404: A lot of money on their own personal consumption." Lebedev has also described them as "a bunch of uncultured ignoramuses", saying "They don't read books. They don't have time. They don't go to [art] exhibitions. They think the only way to impress anyone is to buy a yacht." On 30 January 2018, the U.S. Treasury published a "list of oligarchs" as part of a document known as the " Putin list " which
918-407: A mathematician and former researcher, became the first well-known Russian business oligarch . Oligarchs became increasingly influential in Russian politics during Boris Yeltsin 's presidency (1991–1999); they helped finance his re-election in 1996 . Well-connected oligarchs like Roman Abramovich , Michail Khodorkovsky , Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Potanin acquired key assets at a fraction of
1020-622: A minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . 30% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 2% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Azerbaijan , Russian has no official status, but is a lingua franca of the country. 26% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 5% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Georgia , Russian has no official status, but it
1122-464: A note: "this list includes businessmen of Russian citizenship who acquired the major share of their wealth privately, while not holding a governmental position". In 2005, the number of billionaires dropped to 30, mostly because of the Yukos case, with Khodorkovsky dropping from No. 1 (US$ 15.2 billion) to No. 21 (US$ 2.0 billion). A 2013 report by Credit Suisse found that 35% of the wealth of Russia
SECTION 10
#17327971945921224-625: A period "when co-existence of regulated and quasi-market prices created huge opportunities for arbitrage ." The majority of oligarchs were promoted (at least initially) by the Soviet apparatchiks , with strong connections to Soviet power-structures and access to the funds of the Communist Party. Boris Berezovsky himself was Head of the Department of System Design at another Academy of Sciences research centre. His private company
1326-709: A position in the Duma under the party Yabloko , however Yabloko failed to overcome the five percent barrier which was required for parties to be considered. At the time, he was the second richest man to run for office in the Fourth Duma Session. In September 2004, he headed a UK-based investor consortium that attempted to buy shares in Yukos from its former head Mikhail Khodorkovsky in order to pay off its debts. The ruling Maktoum family of Dubai , United Arab Emirates offered to pay US$ 10 billion to pay off Yukos' tax debts in exchange for controlling stock in
1428-526: A qualitatively new entity can be said to emerge—the general language of the working class... capitalism has the tendency of creating the general urban language of a given society. In 2010, there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world: in Russia – 137.5 million, in the CIS and Baltic countries – 93.7 million, in Eastern Europe – 12.9 million, Western Europe – 7.3 million, Asia – 2.7 million, in
1530-651: A son. She has equivalent to bachelor's and master's degrees from Leningrad State University . She emigrated to the United States in 1979 and then received a master's degree in Near Eastern studies from Princeton . In 1986, she began working at Irving Bank Corp which, in 1988, was acquired by Bank of New York. She is very close to Semion Mogilevich who allegedly instructed Natasha Kagalovsky to wire transfer Cali cartel funds from Bank of New York accounts though Brazilian banks to offshore shell companies. He
1632-644: A system based on universal values but rather the will to introduce a system of private ownership, which, in the absence of law, opened the way for the criminal pursuit of money and power". The 1998 Russian financial crisis hit most oligarchs hard and those whose holdings were based mainly in banking lost much of their fortunes. The most influential oligarchs from the Yeltsin era include Roman Abramovich , Boris Berezovsky , Vladimir Gusinsky , Mikhail Khodorkovsky , Vladimir Potanin , Alexander Smolensky and Vladimir Vinogradov . They formed what became known as
1734-557: A system of crony capitalism with a system of state capitalism whereby the new oligarchs benefited from financing by state-owned banks and access to public procurement projects. An economic study distinguished 21 oligarchic groups as of 2003. Between 2000 and 2004, Putin apparently engaged in a power struggle with some oligarchs, reaching a "grand bargain" with them. This bargain allowed the oligarchs to maintain their powers, in exchange for their explicit support of – and alignment with – Putin's government. However, other analysts argue that
1836-539: Is Belarusian, among ethnic Belarusians this share is 28.5%; the highest share of those who speak Belarusian at home is among ethnic Poles — 46.0%. In Estonia , Russian is spoken by 29.6% of the population, according to a 2011 estimate from the World Factbook, and is officially considered a foreign language. School education in the Russian language is a very contentious point in Estonian politics, and in 2022,
1938-481: Is a co-official language per article 5 of the Constitution of Kyrgyzstan . The 2009 census states that 482,200 people speak Russian as a native language, or 8.99% of the population. Additionally, 1,854,700 residents of Kyrgyzstan aged 15 and above fluently speak Russian as a second language, or 49.6% of the population in the age group. In Tajikistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication under
2040-401: Is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian , and a moderate degree of it in all modern Slavic languages, at least at the conversational level. Russian is written using a Cyrillic alphabet. The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The following table gives their forms, along with IPA values for each letter's typical sound: Older letters of
2142-610: Is a post-posed definite article -to , -ta , -te similar to that existing in Bulgarian and Macedonian. In the Southern Russian dialects , instances of unstressed /e/ and /a/ following palatalized consonants and preceding a stressed syllable are not reduced to [ɪ] (as occurs in the Moscow dialect), being instead pronounced [a] in such positions (e.g. несл и is pronounced [nʲaˈslʲi] , not [nʲɪsˈlʲi] ) – this
SECTION 20
#17327971945922244-488: Is being used less frequently by Russian-speaking typists in favor of the extension of Unicode character encoding , which fully incorporates the Russian alphabet. Free programs are available offering this Unicode extension, which allow users to type Russian characters, even on Western 'QWERTY' keyboards. The Russian language was first introduced to computing after the M-1 , and MESM models were produced in 1951. According to
2346-624: Is called yakanye ( яканье ). Consonants include a fricative /ɣ/ , a semivowel /w⁓u̯/ and /x⁓xv⁓xw/ , whereas the Standard and Northern dialects have the consonants /ɡ/ , /v/ , and final /l/ and /f/ , respectively. The morphology features a palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs (this is unpalatalized in the Standard and Northern dialects). During the Proto-Slavic (Common Slavic) times all Slavs spoke one mutually intelligible language or group of dialects. There
2448-573: Is more spoken than English. Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada, such as New York City , Philadelphia , Boston , Los Angeles , Nashville , San Francisco , Seattle , Spokane , Toronto , Calgary , Baltimore , Miami , Portland , Chicago , Denver , and Cleveland . In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially
2550-564: Is odd") – чу́дно ( chúdno – "this is marvellous"), молоде́ц ( molodéts – "well done!") – мо́лодец ( mólodets – "fine young man"), узна́ю ( uznáyu – "I shall learn it") – узнаю́ ( uznayú – "I recognize it"), отреза́ть ( otrezát – "to be cutting") – отре́зать ( otrézat – "to have cut"); to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names, like афе́ра ( aféra , "scandal, affair"), гу́ру ( gúru , "guru"), Гарси́я ( García ), Оле́ша ( Olésha ), Фе́рми ( Fermi ), and to show which
2652-582: Is of Jewish descent. Russian language Russian is an East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family . It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and is the native language of the Russians . It was the de facto and de jure official language of the former Soviet Union . Russian has remained an official language of
2754-402: Is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . Russian is the language of 9% of the population according to the World Factbook. Ethnologue cites Russian as the country's de facto working language. In China , Russian has no official status, but it is spoken by the small Russian communities in the northeastern Heilongjiang and
2856-569: Is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. Also, Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian. Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Western and Central European languages such as Greek, Latin , Polish , Dutch , German, French, Italian, and English, and to
2958-585: Is spoken by 14.2% of the population according to an undated estimate from the World Factbook. In 2005, Russian was the most widely taught foreign language in Mongolia, and was compulsory in Year 7 onward as a second foreign language in 2006. Around 1.5 million Israelis spoke Russian as of 2017. The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian and there are Russian newspapers, television stations, schools, and social media outlets based in
3060-518: Is the stressed word in a sentence, for example Ты́ съел печенье? ( Tý syel pechenye? – "Was it you who ate the cookie?") – Ты съе́л печенье? ( Ty syél pechenye? – "Did you eat the cookie?) – Ты съел пече́нье? ( Ty syel pechénye? "Was it the cookie you ate?"). Stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books for children or Russian learners. The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex, with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to four consecutive sounds. Using
3162-522: The Semibankirschina (or "seven-banker outfit", compare Seven Boyars ), a group of businessmen with a great influence on Boris Yeltsin and his political environment. Together they controlled from 50% to 70% of all Russian finances between 1996 and 2000. Historian Edward L. Keenan has compared these oligarchs to the system of powerful boyars that emerged in late-medieval Muscovy . The Guardian reported in 2008 that " 'oligarchs' from
Konstantin Kagalovsky - Misplaced Pages Continue
3264-470: The 2011 Lithuanian census , Russian was the native language for 7.2% of the population. In Moldova , Russian was considered to be the language of interethnic communication under a Soviet-era law. On 21 January 2021, the Constitutional Court of Moldova declared the law unconstitutional and deprived Russian of the status of the language of interethnic communication. 50% of the population
3366-1000: The Apollo–Soyuz mission, which first flew in 1975. In March 2013, Russian was found to be the second-most used language on websites after English. Russian was the language of 5.9% of all websites, slightly ahead of German and far behind English (54.7%). Russian was used not only on 89.8% of .ru sites, but also on 88.7% of sites with the former Soviet Union domain .su . Websites in former Soviet Union member states also used high levels of Russian: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan and 81.8% in Tajikistan. However, Russian
3468-413: The Constitution of Tajikistan and is permitted in official documentation. 28% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 7% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. The World Factbook notes that Russian is widely used in government and business. In Turkmenistan , Russian lost its status as the official lingua franca in 1996. Among 12% of the population who grew up in
3570-516: The Internet . Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script ; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without—the so-called "soft" and "hard" sounds. Almost every consonant has a hard or soft counterpart, and the distinction is a prominent feature of the language, which is usually shown in writing not by a change of
3672-685: The Moscow Finance Institute with a PhD in economics. In the late 1980s, he was a member of a group of young free-market economists, and was a close associate of Anatoly Chubais , who has been both praised and criticised for his involvement in the mass privatization of state assets after the fall of the Soviet Union . Beginning in 1980, Kagalovsky worked in research institutes of the USSR State Planning Committee (Gosplan) ( Russian : Госплан СССР ) and
3774-690: The Russian Federation , Belarus , Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , and Tajikistan , and is still commonly used as a lingua franca in Ukraine , Moldova , the Caucasus , Central Asia , and to a lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel . Russian has over 258 million total speakers worldwide. It is the most spoken native language in Europe , the most spoken Slavic language , as well as
3876-607: The USSR Academy of Sciences ( Russian : Академия наук СССР ). In 1989, he founded and led the International Center for Research on Economic Reforms ( Russian : Международный центр исследований экономических реформ ). In 1991 in a dacha outside Moscow, Kagalovsky, Andrey Vavilov , and three others developed an economic platform for Russia. In November 1991, he became Russia's representative on international financial matters and between October 1992 and 1995, he
3978-584: The Ukrainian language in more than 30 spheres of public life: in particular in public administration , media, education, science, culture, advertising, services . The law does not regulate private communication. A poll conducted in March 2022 by RATING in the territory controlled by Ukraine found that 83% of the respondents believe that Ukrainian should be the only state language of Ukraine. This opinion dominates in all macro-regions, age and language groups. On
4080-658: The United States Census , in 2007 Russian was the primary language spoken in the homes of over 850,000 individuals living in the United States. Russian is one of the official languages (or has similar status and interpretation must be provided into Russian) of the following: The Russian language is also one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station – NASA astronauts who serve alongside Russian cosmonauts usually take Russian language courses. This practice goes back to
4182-547: The dissolution of the Soviet Union . The failing Soviet state left the ownership of state assets contested, which allowed for informal deals with former USSR officials (mostly in Russia and Ukraine ) as a means to acquire state property. The Russian oligarchs emerged as business entrepreneurs under Mikhail Gorbachev ( General Secretary , 1985–1991) during his period of market liberalization. Boris Berezovsky ,
Konstantin Kagalovsky - Misplaced Pages Continue
4284-519: The 20th century, Russian was a mandatory language taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. According to the Eurobarometer 2005 survey, fluency in Russian remains fairly high (20–40%) in some countries, in particular former Warsaw Pact countries. In Armenia , Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as
4386-471: The Belarusian society the Russian language prevails, so according to the 2019 census 6,718,557 people (71.4% of the total population) stated that they speak Russian at home, for ethnic Belarusians this share is 61.4%, for Russians — 97.2%, for Ukrainians — 89.0%, for Poles — 52.4%, and for Jews — 96.6%; 2,447,764 people (26.0% of the total population) stated that the language they usually speak at home
4488-532: The Great and developed from the Moscow ( Middle or Central Russian ) dialect substratum under the influence of some of the previous century's Russian chancery language. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution , the spoken form of the Russian language was that of the nobility and the urban bourgeoisie. Russian peasants, the great majority of the population, continued to speak in their own dialects. However,
4590-590: The Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an optional acute accent ( знак ударения ) may, and sometimes should, be used to mark stress . For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context does not make it obvious: замо́к ( zamók – "lock") – за́мок ( zámok – "castle"), сто́ящий ( stóyashchy – "worthwhile") – стоя́щий ( stoyáshchy – "standing"), чудно́ ( chudnó – "this
4692-462: The KGB. Examples are the director of the institute where Putin obtained a degree in 1996, Vladimir Litvinenko , and Putin's childhood friend and judo -teacher Arkady Rotenberg . Gennady Timchenko was close friends with Russian leader Vladimir Putin since the early 1980s. In 1991, Putin gave Timchenko an oil export license. These oligarchs worked in close cooperaton with the government, displacing
4794-526: The Middle East and North Africa – 1.3 million, Sub-Saharan Africa – 0.1 million, Latin America – 0.2 million, U.S., Canada , Australia, and New Zealand – 4.1 million speakers. Therefore, the Russian language is the seventh-largest in the world by the number of speakers , after English, Mandarin, Hindi -Urdu, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Portuguese. Russian is one of the six official languages of
4896-807: The Russian alphabet include ⟨ ѣ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ е ⟩ ( /je/ or /ʲe/ ); ⟨ і ⟩ and ⟨ ѵ ⟩ , which both merged to ⟨ и ⟩ ( /i/ ); ⟨ ѳ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ф ⟩ ( /f/ ); ⟨ ѫ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ у ⟩ ( /u/ ); ⟨ ѭ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ю ⟩ ( /ju/ or /ʲu/ ); and ⟨ ѧ ⟩ and ⟨ ѩ ⟩ , which later were graphically reshaped into ⟨ я ⟩ and merged phonetically to /ja/ or /ʲa/ . While these older letters have been abandoned at one time or another, they may be used in this and related articles. The yers ⟨ ъ ⟩ and ⟨ ь ⟩ originally indicated
4998-471: The Russian government and the invasion of Ukraine. On March 21, 2022, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project launched Russian Asset Tracker to showcase the profiles and assets of several Russian oligarchs. Several dozen business people with family connections to top politicians include President Putin’s younger daughter Katerina Tikhonova , who through her investment fund has been
5100-455: The Russian government as an adviser to the prime minister and a deputy minister of fuel and power while still running his business. Vladimir Vinogradov was the chief economist of Promstroybank , one of the six banks existing in the Soviet Union, previously serving as the secretary of Atommash plant Komsomol organisation. Economist Yegor Gaidar worked in a Soviet Academy of Sciences think tank modelled after RAND . Gaidar later became
5202-458: The Russian principalities before and especially during Mongol rule. This strengthened dialectal differences, and for a while, prevented the emergence of a standardized national language. The formation of the unified and centralized Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the gradual re-emergence of a common political, economic, and cultural space created the need for a common standard language. The initial impulse for standardization came from
SECTION 50
#17327971945925304-405: The Soviet era can speak Russian, other generations of citizens that do not have any knowledge of Russian. Primary and secondary education by Russian is almost non-existent. In Uzbekistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication. It has some official roles, being permitted in official documentation and is the lingua franca of the country and the language of the elite. Russian
5406-467: The United Nations. Education in Russian is still a popular choice for both Russian as a second language (RSL) and native speakers in Russia, and in many former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics. In Belarus , Russian is a second state language alongside Belarusian per the Constitution of Belarus . 77% of
5508-466: The addition of Japan, took unprecedented steps to sanction Putin and the oligarchs directly. In response to the sanctions , the targeted oligarchs started to hide wealth in an attempt to prevent the Western nations from freezing their assets. These sanctions intend to directly impact the Russian ruling class as a response for their perceived contribution and acquiescence to the war with Ukraine. Although
5610-715: The bid from Alfa-Bank's consortium due to legal issues. Subsequently, from June 1998 to June 2002, he was a member of the Board of Directors of Yukos. In 1999 he became the vice-president of Yukos. In 1996, Kagalovsky and Alfred Koch were in Barbados together. In 1999, he, his wife Natasha Kagalovsky, an executive at the Bank of New York , and Bruce Rappaport , a major shareholder of Bank of New York were accused of money laundering, however they denied any wrongdoing, and charges were never filed. In September 2003, he unsuccessfully ran for
5712-403: The broader sense of expanding the use of Russian alongside or in favour of other languages. The current standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language ( современный русский литературный язык – "sovremenny russky literaturny yazyk"). It arose at the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state under the rule of Peter
5814-465: The company. However, the Kremlin refused this proposal. Today, he lives in exile in London. He and fellow Russian oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky launched a TV station TVi in Ukraine in 2008. They split due to a business dispute, and currently, Kagalovsky controls and continues to fund TVi on his own. On 24 April 2013 Oleksandr Altman was officially registered as TVi's owner but according to Kagalovsky
5916-417: The consonant but rather by changing the following vowel. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels . Stress , which is often unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically , though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress – such as to distinguish between homographic words (e.g. замо́к [ zamók , 'lock'] and за́мок [ zámok , 'castle']), or to indicate
6018-572: The country. There is an Israeli TV channel mainly broadcasting in Russian with Israel Plus . See also Russian language in Israel . Russian is also spoken as a second language by a small number of people in Afghanistan . In Vietnam , Russian has been added in the elementary curriculum along with Chinese and Japanese and were named as "first foreign languages" for Vietnamese students to learn, on equal footing with English. The Russian language
6120-552: The documents showing that he sold the station were forged. He is known to be an associate of many Russian oligarchs , including Roman Abramovich , Eugene Shvidler , Mikhail Khodorkovsky , and the late Boris Berezovsky . He lives in London and owns properties at New York City 's Time Warner Center , Moscow, Rome and on the French Riviera . He is married to ex- Bank of New York executive Natasha ( née Gurfinkel) Kagalovsky (b. 1954, Leningrad , USSR ) with whom he has
6222-575: The economics editor of the Kommunist journal, the official theoretical organ of the CC of the CPSU . He also held various positions, including Prime Minister in the Russian government during 1991–1992. Together with Anatoly Chubais , the two "Young Reformers" were chiefly responsible for privatization in the early 1990s. According to David Satter , "what drove the process was not the determination to create
SECTION 60
#17327971945926324-664: The era of former president Boris Yeltsin have been purged by the Kremlin". With the ascent of Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin the influence of the Yeltsin oligarchs dissipated, as some were imprisoned, such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky (pictured here) and Mikhael Mirilashvili , while others emigrated, sold off their assets or died under suspicious circumstances, such as Vladimir Vinogradov and Boris Berezovsky . A number of Yeltsin oligarchs first came under fire for alleged tax evasion . Vladimir Gusinsky of MediaMost and Boris Berezovsky both avoided legal proceedings by leaving Russia, and
6426-413: The factory and the industrial plant their local peasant dialects with their phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary, and the very process of recruiting workers from peasants and the mobility of the worker population generate another process: the liquidation of peasant inheritance by way of leveling the particulars of local dialects. On the ruins of peasant multilingual, in the context of developing heavy industry,
6528-456: The final reading amendments that state that all schools and kindergartens in the country are to transition to education in Latvian . From 2025, all children will be taught in Latvian only. On 28 September 2023, Latvian deputies approved The National Security Concept, according to which from 1 January 2026, all content created by Latvian public media (including LSM ) should be only in Latvian or
6630-774: The flow of foreign capital into the United Kingdom, for example through the foreign investor visa routes , introduced during John Major 's premiership in 1994, one-fifth of whose recipients since 2008 are Russian citizens. A significant number of Russian oligarchs have bought homes in upmarket sections of London in the United Kingdom, which has been dubbed "Moscow on Thames" or "Londongrad". Some, such as Eugene Shvidler , Alexander Knaster , Konstantin Kagalovsky , David Wilkowske and Abram Reznikov, are expatriates , having taken permanent residency in London. Roman Abramovich bought 16 Kensington Palace Gardens in London,
6732-631: The generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s). Only about 25% of them are ethnic Russians, however. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union , the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterward, the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat, with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians immigrating along with some more Russian Jews and Central Asians. According to
6834-448: The globe". In 2022, many Russian oligarchs and their close family members were targeted and sanctioned by countries around the world as a rebuke of Russia's war in Ukraine . During Mikhail Gorbachev 's perestroika ( c. 1985 –1991), many businessmen in Russia imported goods such as personal computers and jeans into the country and sold them for a hefty profit. Once Boris Yeltsin became President of Russia in July 1991,
6936-480: The government bureaucracy for the lack of a reliable tool of communication in administrative, legal, and judicial affairs became an obvious practical problem. The earliest attempts at standardizing Russian were made based on the so-called Moscow official or chancery language, during the 15th to 17th centuries. Since then, the trend of language policy in Russia has been standardization in both the restricted sense of reducing dialectical barriers between ethnic Russians, and
7038-409: The government. In opposition to Menatap's bid for Yukos, Alfa-Bank of the Alfa Group tried to get financial support from Marvin Davis 's Martin Oil but failed because Kagalovsky flew to Los Angeles and talked Davis out of it. Then, Alfa-Bank formed a consortium with Rossiysky Kredit and Vladimir Vinogradov 's Inkombank, however, Anatoly Chubais supported Menatap and Kagalovsky so Chubais blocked
7140-409: The most geographically widespread language of Eurasia . It is the world's seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers , and the world's ninth-most spoken language by total number of speakers . Russian is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station , one of the six official languages of the United Nations , as well as the fourth most widely used language on
7242-420: The most prominent, Mikhail Khodorkovsky of Yukos oil , was arrested in October 2003 and sentenced to 9 years. This was subsequently extended to 14 years, and after Putin pardoned him, he was released on 20 December 2013. A second wave of oligarchs emerged in the 2000s, friends and former colleagues of President Putin either from his years in the St Petersburg municipal administration or his Dresden tenure in
7344-524: The northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region . Russian was also the main foreign language taught in school in China between 1949 and 1964. In Kazakhstan , Russian is not a state language, but according to article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan its usage enjoys equal status to that of the Kazakh language in state and local administration. The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of
7446-527: The oligarchic structure has remained intact under Putin, with Putin devoting much of his time to mediating power-disputes between rival oligarchs. The ten most-prominent oligarchs of the early Putin era included Roman Abramovich , Oleg Deripaska , Mikhail Prokhorov , Alisher Usmanov , Viktor Vekselberg , Leonid Mikhelson , Arkady Rotenberg , Gennady Timchenko , Andrey Guryev and Vitaly Malkin . In 2004, five years after Putin's ascend to power, Forbes listed 36 billionaires of Russian citizenship, with
7548-407: The oligarchs emerged as well-connected entrepreneurs who started from nearly nothing and became rich through participation in the market via connections to the corrupt, but elected, government of Russia during the state's transition to a market-based economy . The so-called voucher privatization program of 1992–1994 enabled a handful of young men to become billionaires, specifically by arbitraging
7650-600: The oligarchs' wealth relates closely to the meltdown in Russia's stock market, as by 2008 the RTS Index had lost 71% of its value due to the capital flight after the Russo-Georgian War of August 2008. Billionaires in Russia were particularly hard-hit by lenders seeking repayment on balloon loans to shore up their own balance sheets. Many oligarchs took out generous loans from Russian banks, bought shares, and then took out more loans from western banks against
7752-515: The other hand, before the war, almost a quarter of Ukrainians were in favour of granting Russian the status of the state language, while after the beginning of Russia's invasion the support for the idea dropped to just 7%. In peacetime, the idea of raising the status of Russian was traditionally supported by residents of the south and east . But even in these regions, only a third of the respondents were in favour, and after Russia's full-scale invasion , their number dropped by almost half. According to
7854-461: The other three languages in the East Slavic branch. In many places in eastern and southern Ukraine and throughout Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixtures such as Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect , although it vanished during the 15th or 16th century,
7956-446: The parliament approved a bill to close up all Russian language schools and kindergartens by the school year. The transition to only Estonian language schools and kindergartens will start in the 2024-2025 school year. In Latvia , Russian is officially considered a foreign language. 55% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 26% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 18 February 2012, Latvia held
8058-453: The peasants' speech was never systematically studied, as it was generally regarded by philologists as simply a source of folklore and an object of curiosity. This was acknowledged by the noted Russian dialectologist Nikolai Karinsky , who toward the end of his life wrote: "Scholars of Russian dialects mostly studied phonetics and morphology. Some scholars and collectors compiled local dictionaries. We have almost no studies of lexical material or
8160-459: The population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian, and understand the spoken language. In October 2023, Kazakhstan drafted a media law aimed at increasing the use of the Kazakh language over Russian, the law stipulates that the share of the state language on television and radio should increase from 50% to 70%, at a rate of 5% per year, starting in 2025. In Kyrgyzstan , Russian
8262-418: The population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 67% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2019 Belarusian census , out of 9,413,446 inhabitants of the country, 5,094,928 (54.1% of the total population) named Belarusian as their native language, with 61.2% of ethnic Belarusians and 54.5% of ethnic Poles declaring Belarusian as their native language. In everyday life in
8364-479: The pronunciation of ultra-short or reduced /ŭ/ , /ĭ/ . Because of many technical restrictions in computing and also because of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards abroad, Russian is often transliterated using the Latin alphabet. For example, мороз ('frost') is transliterated moroz , and мышь ('mouse'), mysh or myš' . Once commonly used by the majority of those living outside Russia, transliteration
8466-472: The proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names. Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family . It is a descendant of Old East Slavic , a language used in Kievan Rus' , which was a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid-13th centuries. From the point of view of spoken language , its closest relatives are Ukrainian , Belarusian , and Rusyn ,
8568-589: The recipient of numerous large contracts from state-owned energy companies. Her former husband Kirill Shamalov runs the largest Russian petrochemicals company Sibur as well as his own investment fund. The son-in-law of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov runs an investment fund with assets exceeding $ 6 billion. Andrey Ryumin, the son-in-law of Viktor Medvedchuk , President Putin’s former closest ally in Ukraine, runs another investment fund with large agricultural holdings which have become recipients of state subsidies for import substitution (Rouhandeh 2022). Petr Fradkov ,
8670-491: The respondents), while according to the 2002 census – 142.6 million people (99.2% of the respondents). In Ukraine , Russian is a significant minority language. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 14,400,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 29 million active speakers. 65% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 38% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 5 September 2017, Ukraine's Parliament passed
8772-442: The sanctions miss some of the richest oligarchs, the impact on the war is unknown due to Putin's power over those that were sanctioned. Since the invasion began, nine of the Russian oligarchs' yachts have turned their navigation transponders off as they sail to ports where they are less likely to be searched and seized. On March 2, 2022, the United States announced a special task force dubbed " Task Force KleptoCapture ". This team
8874-636: The son of a former Prime Minister and head of the Russian foreign intelligence service, Sergei Sergeevich Ivanov, the son of the former head of the presidential administration Sergei Ivanov , and Andrey Patrushev, the son of the current head of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev have all joined the ranks of the oligarchs. The list of oligarchs and business executives who have risen to prominence and who have been sanctioned after Russia's invasion of Ukraine includes: The British Government policy encouraged
8976-679: The survey carried out by RATING in August 2023 in the territory controlled by Ukraine and among the refugees, almost 60% of the polled usually speak Ukrainian at home, about 30% – Ukrainian and Russian, only 9% – Russian. Since March 2022, the use of Russian in everyday life has been noticeably decreasing. For 82% of respondents, Ukrainian is their mother tongue, and for 16%, Russian is their mother tongue. IDPs and refugees living abroad are more likely to use both languages for communication or speak Russian. Nevertheless, more than 70% of IDPs and refugees consider Ukrainian to be their native language. In
9078-459: The syntax of Russian dialects." After 1917, Marxist linguists had no interest in the multiplicity of peasant dialects and regarded their language as a relic of the rapidly disappearing past that was not worthy of scholarly attention. Nakhimovsky quotes the Soviet academicians A.M Ivanov and L.P Yakubinsky, writing in 1930: The language of peasants has a motley diversity inherited from feudalism. On its way to becoming proletariat peasantry brings to
9180-786: The two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern , Central (or Middle), and Southern , with Moscow lying in the Central region. The Northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly, a phenomenon called okanye ( оканье ). Besides the absence of vowel reduction, some dialects have high or diphthongal /e⁓i̯ɛ/ in place of Proto-Slavic * ě and /o⁓u̯ɔ/ in stressed closed syllables (as in Ukrainian) instead of Standard Russian /e/ and /o/ , respectively. Another Northern dialectal morphological feature
9282-511: The use of the language has some presence in certain areas. A large part of the population, especially the older generations, can speak Russian as a foreign language. However, English has replaced Russian as lingua franca in Lithuania and around 80% of young people speak English as their first foreign language. In contrast to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania has a relatively small Russian-speaking minority (5.0% as of 2008). According to
9384-523: The value at the loans for shares scheme auctions conducted in the run-up to the election. Defenders of the out-of-favor oligarchs argue that the companies they acquired were not highly valued at the time because they still ran on Soviet principles, with non-existent stock control , huge payrolls, no financial reporting and scant regard for profit. Since 2014, hundreds of Russian oligarchs and their companies have been hit with US sanctions for their support of "the Russian government's malign activity around
9486-459: The value of these shares. One of the first to get hit by the global downturn was Oleg Deripaska , Russia's richest man at the time, who had a net worth of US$ 28 billion in March 2008. As Deripaska borrowed money from western banks using shares in his companies as collateral, the collapse in share price forced him to sell holdings to satisfy the margin calls . After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine , Canada, US, and European leaders with
9588-575: The vast difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities (such as natural gas and oil) and the prices prevailing on the world market. These oligarchs became unpopular with the Russian public and are often blamed for the turmoil that plagued the Russian Federation following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Economists Sergei Guriev and Andrei Rachinsky contrast older oligarchs with nomenklatura ties and younger-generation entrepreneurs such as Kakha Bendukidze who built their wealth from scratch because Gorbachev's reforms affected
9690-531: Was Russia's representative to the IMF . In November 1994, he became the deputy chairman of Bank Menatep , and was a close associate of formerly jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his colleague, Platon Lebedev . In November 1995, Menatep took part in a mortgage auction, which resulted in its takeover of the oil company Yukos obtaining a 45% stake for only $ 159 million, which was well below Yukos market value, after $ 120 million had been deposited with Menatap from
9792-523: Was compiled under the requirement of the CAATSA Act. According to the document itself, its criterion for inclusion was simply being a Russian national with a net worth of over $ 1 billion. The list was criticised for being indiscriminate, and including critics of Putin. According to the financial news-agency Bloomberg L.P. , Russia's wealthiest 25 individuals have collectively lost US$ 230 billion (£146 billion) since July 2008. The fall in
9894-625: Was established by the Institute as a joint venture . Mikhail Khodorkovsky started his business importing computers under auspices of the Komsomol -authorised Center for Scientific and Technical Creativity of the Youth in 1986, briefly serving as a deputy secretary of the Komsomol for a district in Moscow in 1987. His move into banking two years later was funded with the support of Komsomol alumni working in Moscow city government. Later, he served in
9996-405: Was first introduced in North America when Russian explorers voyaged into Alaska and claimed it for Russia during the 18th century. Although most Russian colonists left after the United States bought the land in 1867, a handful stayed and preserved the Russian language in this region to this day, although only a few elderly speakers of this unique dialect are left. In Nikolaevsk, Alaska , Russian
10098-421: Was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 19% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2014 Moldovan census , Russians accounted for 4.1% of Moldova's population, 9.4% of the population declared Russian as their native language, and 14.5% said they usually spoke Russian. According to the 2010 census in Russia , Russian language skills were indicated by 138 million people (99.4% of
10200-400: Was owned by the wealthiest 110 individuals. Daniel Treisman proposed using a term "silovarch" ( silovik and oligarch) for a new class of Russian oligarchs with backgrounds in Russian military and intelligence. Billionaire and former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev has criticized these new oligarchs, saying "I think material wealth for them is a highly emotional and spiritual thing. They spend
10302-453: Was put together to specifically target oligarchs. It is made up of officials from the FBI , Marshals Service , IRS , Postal Inspection Service , Homeland Security Investigations and Secret Service . The main goal of the task force is to impose the sanctions set against these individuals to freeze and seize the assets that the US government claimed were proceeds of their illegal involvement with
10404-402: Was the sixth-most used language on the top 1,000 sites, behind English, Chinese, French, German, and Japanese. Despite leveling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary and phonetics, a number of dialects still exist in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of Russian into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between
#591408