Vadim nikitin biography
- Vadim Nikitin is a Murmansk-born, London-based Russia analyst and financial-crime specialist.
- Journalist Vadim Nikitin claims to be working on a book about nostalgia.
- Vadim Nikitin, born in 1961, live in Moscow.
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Saintly Outliers
Last February , after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the word ‘oligarch’ experienced a brief spike in Google searches, just as a volley of Western sanctions hit these Russian billionaire businessmen, who were deemed responsible for propping up the government of Vladimir Putin. The oligarchs are a diverse bunch, but they have certain characteristics in common. Most made their initial fortunes from the opaque and often criminal privatisation of former Soviet state-owned enterprises in the early 1990s. They backed Boris Yeltsin in his desperate bid for re-election in 1996, and gained untold dividends from his victory. Not all welcomed Putin’s election in 2000, but most eventually accepted the deal he offered: their wealth would be left alone so long as they supported him at home and acted as his lobbyists and moneymen abroad. Those who reneged were either jailed (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) or went into exile, sometimes meeting mysterious deaths (Boris Berezovsky).
It’s easy to reduce the oligarchs to caricature. Until recently, they fl
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Doesn’t it sometimes feel like we’re living a low-budget rerun of our parents’ era? They had the Beatles. We got Lady Gaga. They had Paris 1968. We got Occupy. They had Vietnam. We got Iraq. They had Marlon Brando. We got … George Clooney. But there is one thing we’re just as good at as […]
The downfall of Silvio Berlusconi leaves Jacob Zuma the sole custodian of an exclusive club of self-made, charismatic populists with persistent legal issues. Not to mention leaving no-one to send him pyjamas! “There’s not really much difference between Zuma and Berlusconi,” emailed my friend Christiaan. “Both are dogged by allegations of corruption and sexual exploits. […]
So the census has come and gone. Now the government knows where I live, that I am a white foreigner and own a DVD player, but no DStv (thanks, freelance journalist salary!) Though I certainly felt guilty ticking the box for “2 bedroom flat” when the first option said “shack”, it felt strangely anticlimactic to […
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NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS
We got out of bed this time to talk to Vadim Nikitin, a journalist and blogger born in Murmansk, about his immigrant experience.
We had a really interesting talk. Vadim’s story is unique. His father, a captain on a fishing ship out of Murmansk, was sent to the U.S. to get an MBA during perestroika. He took Vadmin and his family with him and while they were in America, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. When he returned to Russia right after the failed 1991 putsch, he was told to take a hike. Nobody wanted him back at his job. The huge Soviet Murmansk fishing fleet — worth billions — was being picked up apart and privatized by his former coworkers and comrades and they, not surprisingly, weren’t too eager to share the spoils.
Some of the things we talk about: living among the Anglo-Saxons, the perils of individualism, Soviet nostalgia, sanctions and the corruption of the democratic process, Russia’s liberal intelligentsia, 1990s privatization, the war in Ukraine, similarities between “the West” and the Soviet Union…actually too many to list!
Enjoy!
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