Russian oligarchs

The English-speaking and western media have borrowed the term Russian oligarch (a near-synonym of the term "business oligarch" or "business magnate") from Russian parlance to describe the huge, fast-acquired wealth of some businessmen of the former Soviet republics (mostly Russia and Ukraine) during privatization in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Businessmen with great wealth from these countries were commonly labeled (simply) "oligarchs" in Russian - regardless of whether they had real political power, as the term "oligarch" might imply. Analysts have drawn comparisons between the current Russian system of oligarchs and the system of powerful Boyars that emerged in late-Medieval Muscovy.