Ihe transition of Russia to capitalism in the 1990s led to the replacement of the words “apparatchik” and “nomenklatura”, designating the dignitaries of the Soviet regime, by the terms “oligarch” and “oligarchy”, which referred to personalities of the business world who have become the beneficiaries of post-Soviet Russia, following privatizations and thanks to their links with the political world.
Today, these Russian billionaires see their gains jeopardized by the economic sanctions imposed by the West after the attack on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s army on February 24. And all the Western press uses this word together, which comes etymologically from the Greek oligos (“few”) and arkhe (here, “command”).
Latin America Survey
However, the first time The world employs him, on October 12, 1950, it is not at all a question of Russian businessmen, but of rich Argentineans having a link with political power. In an investigation in Latin America devoted to General-President Peron and his “sans-culottes”, the journalist Pierre Frédérix writes: “When the military junta, of which Colonel Juan Domingo Peron was a member, took power in June 1943, there was no question of socialism. The “united officers” did not pose as popular candidates overthrowing a government of oligarchs. They were Axis-sympathetic nationalists, men who wanted to make their country the ruling power of South America. »
In 1998, the journalist Sophie Shihab uses quotation marks to designate the “oligarchs”, as if the term were redefined by these new businessmen.
When the term is first used in a daily newspaper headline it is,
once again, within the framework of an investigation devoted to Argentina without Peron, on November 5, 1955, and entitled ““Nègres” et oligarques”. Here, the oligarchs are the members of Argentina’s 2,000 wealthy families, and journalist Marcel Niedergang to note that “The oligarchs are no longer the only ones to hold economic power and practice the exploitation of man by man denounced by Argentine justicialism. One would even easily find among them men who supported Peron. »
After the collapse of the Soviet empire, the term “oligarch” logically made a comeback in the pages of the World. It is not insignificant that Sophie Shihab, then the daily’s correspondent in Moscow, used it on April 18, 1998, in an article describing two camps vying for power in the Kremlin: the “materialists” and the “Yeltsinologists”. She uses quotation marks to designate “oligarchs”, as if the term was being redefined by these new businessmen. Moreover, on June 2, 1998, the evening daily again uses quotation marks in the title, to report on the unprecedented financial crisis encountered by the President of the Russian Federation: “Boris Yeltsin is seeking the support of the ‘oligarchs’ Russians”.
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