Trump and the Oligarchs

Chris Zeitz
Point of Decision
Published in
3 min readMar 28, 2017

Last summer, a question regarding Donald Trump’s financial connections to Russian oligarchs seemed to trip up Paul Manafort.

Manafort, not exactly a newcomer to controversy or spin, seemed stunned. We know now that Manafort has extensive ties to Putin-linked oligarchs (See All The President’s Men: Manafort, newly updated). As outlined earlier in the month, Trump, Inc., has many ties with various oligarchs as well.

As a recent recap in Mother Jones points out, Trump began to look into business opportunities in Russia in the late 1980s. At that time, Trump was at the center of a quickly expanding, debt-fueled conglomerate that was about to collapse under its own leverage. The Soviets were slowly opening their economy and relaxing internal constraints as their empire confronted its own economic inconsistencies.

After a punishing restructuring period, Trump managed to crawl his way back onto the list of the most wealthy Americans as well as the gossip pages (See the New Yorker: Trump Solo for an account). The rapid privatization of the assets of the former Soviet empire resulted in huge opportunities for wealth privatization, to put it kindly, and corruption. By the mid 1990s, Boris Yeltsin had become incredibly unpopular and there was a real danger that the communist party would return to power and potentially renationalize what had been let loose just years before. Yeltsin was saved in the 1996 election by a huge financial intervention from the first generation of oligarchs. In late 1996, Trump also was back in Moscow talking about real estate development.

In early 1997, Trump scouted potential development sites with Zurab Tsereteli, a sculptor and friend of the Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov. Tsereteli and Luzhkov offered to make a large statue of Christopher Columbus as a gift to the city of New York, and Trump vouched for the artist’s work. Why talk about statues? Well, it is difficult to believe that Trump did not enter into serious discussions with Luzhkov’s people at one point or another during these trips to Moscow. Luzhkov was more of a product of the old Soviet system than his fellow oligarchs, but from 1992 until 2010 he was the powerful mayor of the capital with a reputation for building projects, and corruption, of course.

Nothing came of Trump’s hotel projects. The late 1990s were not kind to Russia as a financial crisis devastated the economy. Nor was the hotel industry a business for the faint of heart, several hotel developers and executives were gunned down in 1997 and 1998. Trump was also not the only Westerner trying to stake a claim to business in Russia. But, by the late 1990s it was clear that criminalized industrial and financial consortiums were running the country both politically and economically. The oligarchs would turn to a caretaker, or so they thought, to replace Yeltsin. The West would look on with optimism at a potential shift away from violent crime and financial mayhem. The price of oil would climb as the United States intervened in the Middle East. And, Vladimir Putin would change the structure but not the rules of the game formerly dominated by the oligarchs.

References (in addition to the stories linked in the text)

Gordon, Michael R. (1997, Jan. 25). “Russia’s New Court Sculptor: Only the Colossal,” The New York Times.

Hoffman, David E. (2011). The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia. Public Affairs: New York.

Lloyd, John (1998, Jan. 31). “Red Alert: Investigation,” The Times.

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Chris Zeitz
Point of Decision

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