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Moscow Times
April 11, 2005
Russians Misplace Wrath for the Rich
By Lyuba Pronina
Staff Writer

Russia's billionaires have largely managed to stay out of the limelight, leaving others to deal with popular resentment over their wealth.

A poll published last week showed that most Russians still held the super-rich in low esteem, even though they often misdirected their bitterness at the wrong people.

Asked to identify Russia's richest man, only a third of Russians correctly identified oil baron and soccer club owner Roman Abramovich, according to a nationwide poll released by the VTsIOM polling agency. Forbes magazine placed Abramovich in the country's No. 1 slot, with an estimated fortune of $13.3 billion.

Twenty-seven percent of respondents said the country's richest man was Boris Berezovsky, the self-exiled tycoon residing in London, while another 25 percent identified Anatoly Chubais, the architect of the post-Soviet privatizations that left the country's wealth concentrated in the hands of a small number of businessmen. Neither man even appears on this year's Forbes list, which found Russia to have 27 billionaires, second only to the United States, with 341 billionaires.

Most of Russia's super-rich appear to have escaped the public eye, with other poll respondents wrongly naming famous -- but not famously rich -- personalities such as ageing pop diva Alla Pugachyova, ultranationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, former President Boris Yeltsin and Moscow socialite Ksenia Sobchak as the country's richest individual.

Twelve percent of respondents identified jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky as the wealthiest oligarch of the land, although in fact he dropped from No. 1 in 2004 to No. 12 this year, according to Forbes.

Russia's relatively large number of super-rich is hardly reason for pride, the VTsIOM poll disclosed, with almost 40 percent of respondents saying they felt "shame" for living in a country with so many billionaires. Seven percent said the fact made them proud, and only 15 percent said they would not mind being billionaires themselves.

The responses showed a clear split according to age. While 28 percent of Russians aged 18 to 24 said they would like to be among the super-rich, a mere 4 percent older than 60 expressed that wish. Thirty-one percent of Russians in that age group said they under no circumstances would like to see their children on the Forbes list.

The survey compiled the responses of 1,600 people living in 40 regions.

The poll results reflected a disappointment with President Vladimir Putin's government to deliver on promises of fair wealth distribution, said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank.

"Over the past four, five years of steady economic growth the president built up expectations. ... Now inflation is growing, the income gap is increasing ... and [people] see a continuous growth of billionaires every year. That would annoy a lot of people," Weafer said.

Still, the 39 percent of Russians who felt ashamed for the nation's billionaires are not directly critical of the president, Weafer said.

"It's not a huge number, not 60 percent, expressing disappointment rather than outright anger," Weafer said.

Boris Titov, head of the Delovaya Rossia business association, agreed.

"It is a big breakthrough -- there used to be more people averse to the rich. We are stepping onto the path of civilized countries, where people recognize that wealth is a result of hard labor and, if acquired honestly, worthy of respect," Titov said. "It also depends on how they behave. If they don't put themselves above society and help it along, attitudes toward them will change."

Alexander Lebedev, Russia's sixteenth-richest man according to Forbes, said the super-rich had only themselves to blame for the widespread resentment.

"If a person buys airplanes, yachts and football clubs abroad, who is going to like this?" said Lebedev, a State Duma deputy and majority owner of the National Reserve Corp.

"Some somehow spend it only on personal consumption, but others somehow try to make the residents of this country the beneficiaries of this."

Titov said change was under way.

"We are gradually overcoming the misunderstanding towards business that originated in the 1990s, and now we are seeing develop a new layer of businesses that work hard for the benefit of increasing production in Russia. It would be good to see them on the Forbes list one day," he said.

Staff Writer Catherine Belton contributed to this report.