It’s not easy being an oligarch

RUSSIA IS KNOWN for its trapeze artists. Few have mastered the art as well as Vladimir Potanin, Russia’s richest businessman, a stocky 61-year-old with a fortune of about $23bn. Born into the Soviet , he survived the fall of communism and then played a role in designing Boris Yeltsin’s “loans for shares” scheme, through which Russia’s late president hoped to put the country’s assets in private hands. Mr Potanin used this scheme to take ownership of natural resources. He is one of only a few Yeltsin-era oligarchs to have thrived under Vladimir Putin; the two are ice-hockey chums. He retains the biggest stake in Norilsk Nickel, one of the world’s largest nickel and palladium producers, though for years he and fellow moguls squabbled over its ownership. Unlike other Kremlin-linked oligarchs, neither he nor his business is subject to Western sanctions levied after Russia invaded Ukraine. But the war has cost him. His wealth has fallen by about a quarter this year, even as the prices of nickel and palladium have soared.Such is life for tycoons in an increasingly tyrannical world. It is one of the strange features of globalisation that autocracies, such as Russia and China, are breeding grounds for billionaires. For a while, Moscow minted more of them than any other city on Earth. Now three Chinese cities, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, outstrip liberal honeypots like New York. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening up of communist China have done as much to spur a new gilded age for the super-rich as all the technological wizardry of Silicon Valley. The early years of freewheeling capitalism in both Russia and China unleashed a shift in wealth—both from genuine enterprise and the transfer of public assets into private hands—perhaps unparalleled in human history.