Most Powerful

• #1 Patriarch Kirill
  Eastern EuropeGlobal Orthodox communitiesMoscowRussiaSt. PetersburgUkraine PoliticalReligionReligious Hierarchy 21st Century Religious HierarchyState Power Power: 100
  Patriarch Kirill (secular name Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev; born 1946) is the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’ and the primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, a position he has held since 2009. He emerged as one of the most influential religious leaders in modern Russia by expanding the Church’s institutional presence, strengthening ties with the state, and advancing a public theology that links national identity, social conservatism, and geopolitical sovereignty.
• #2 Catherine the Great
  Black SeaEastern EuropeRussia Imperial SovereigntyPolitical Early Modern State Power Power: 84
  Catherine the Great was the ruler who carried eighteenth-century Russia deeper into the European balance of power while also intensifying the empire’s internal contradictions. German-born and married into the Romanov dynasty, she seized power in 1762 after the overthrow of her husband Peter III and then governed until 1796. Britannica describes her as the empress who led Russia into full participation in the political and cultural life of Europe, and that description points to her central historical achievement: she made imperial Russia more formidable, more polished, and more deeply entangled in continental affairs.Her reign combined territorial expansion, administrative reform, court patronage, and elite cultural ambition. Under Catherine, Russia advanced into the Black Sea region, absorbed large sections of Poland through partition, and broadened its imperial reach. At the same time, she corresponded with Enlightenment thinkers, sponsored artistic and educational projects, and presented herself as a legislating and civilizing monarch. The image was powerful and not entirely false, but it rested on an empire whose social base remained deeply coercive.That tension is the key to her significance. Catherine modernized institutions without dismantling serfdom. She cultivated refinement while relying on a court and nobility enriched by the labor of the unfree. She could talk reform and still crush revolt, as she did during the Pugachev rebellion. Catherine the Great therefore belongs in any study of wealth and power because she showed how imperial sovereignty can adapt to new ideas, new geographies, and new administrative forms without surrendering the underlying hierarchy that makes empire profitable.
• #3 Semion Mogilevich
  Eastern EuropeRussiaUkraineUnited States CriminalCriminal EnterpriseFinancial Cold War and Globalization Finance and WealthIllicit Networks Power: 62
  Semion Mogilevich (born 1946) is a Ukrainian-born figure whom U.S. and European authorities have long described as one of the most significant organizers of transnational post-Soviet crime. Unlike classic gang leaders identified mainly with one city or one visible syndicate, Mogilevich became associated with a networked model of criminal power built around finance, corporate fronts, multiple aliases, and cross-border mobility. He has been accused or indicted in connection with fraud, money laundering, racketeering, and other offenses, including the YBM Magnex securities case in the United States. His historical importance lies in the way his name became shorthand for a shift in organized crime from territorially bounded underworlds to globally mobile systems in which laundering, shell structures, and regulatory arbitrage could matter as much as narcotics routes or street crews.