Most Powerful

• #1 Boris Godunov
  MuscovyRussia Imperial SovereigntyPolitical Early Modern State Power Power: 100
  Boris Godunov was the dominant statesman of late sixteenth-century Muscovy before becoming tsar in his own right. First as chief adviser to Tsar Fyodor I and then as ruler from 1598 to 1605, he stood at the point where Muscovy’s expanding autocracy, service nobility, and fragile dynastic legitimacy met one another. His career shows how imperial sovereignty could be built not only through hereditary title, but through proximity to the court, control over office, and command over a state that increasingly concentrated authority in Moscow.Godunov rose from a noble family that was important but not of the highest princely rank. He advanced under Ivan IV and then secured a stronger place through marriage ties linking him to the ruling world of the late Muscovite court. Under the weak and pious Fyodor I, Boris became the indispensable broker of state business. Foreign policy, military organization, church affairs, appointments, and frontier management all increasingly passed through him. By the time the Rurik dynasty failed in 1598, he had already been governing in practice.His reign as tsar was marked by serious ambition and terrible misfortune. He promoted colonization, supported education and church policy, and tried to stabilize rule after a succession crisis. But famine from 1601 to 1603, aristocratic hostility, and the appearance of the pretender known as False Dmitry shattered the legitimacy he needed. Britannica notes that his reign inaugurated the devastating Time of Troubles, and that judgment captures why he remains so important. Boris Godunov matters as both a capable state-builder and the ruler under whom Muscovy’s dynastic system broke open.
• #2 Boris Yeltsin
  Former Soviet UnionRussia Imperial SovereigntyPolitical Cold War and Globalization State Power Power: 100
  Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007) was the first president of the Russian Federation and the dominant political figure in the chaotic transfer from Soviet rule to post-Soviet statehood. He belongs to imperial sovereignty because his career revolved around control of the state during a constitutional and civilizational break: the power to dissolve old institutions, create new ones, command coercive force, and redistribute vast assets that had previously belonged to the Soviet system. Yeltsin was both destroyer and founder. He helped break the monopoly of the Communist Party, resisted the August 1991 coup, and presided over the end of the Soviet Union. Yet the order that followed was not a clean liberal settlement. It was a volatile mixture of executive improvisation, rushed privatization, oligarchic bargaining, regional tensions, and periodic recourse to force. Yeltsin’s Russia opened markets and elections, but it also normalized a powerful presidency and a style of rule in which constitutional order could be remade through confrontation. His legacy therefore lies at the origin of post-Soviet Russia’s freedoms and its later pathologies alike.
• #3 Ilham Aliyev
  AzerbaijanEuropeRussiaTurkey Party State ControlPolitical 21st Century State Power Power: 100
  Ilham Heydar oghlu Aliyev (born 1961) is an Azerbaijani politician who has served as president of Azerbaijan since 2003. He succeeded his father, Heydar Aliyev, and has remained in office through repeated elections and constitutional changes that expanded presidential authority and removed term limits. His administration has also elevated family-linked political roles, including the creation of a vice-presidential position filled by his wife, Mehriban Aliyeva, reinforcing the perception of a consolidated ruling family at the center of the state. Under his leadership, Azerbaijan has leveraged hydrocarbon wealth and strategic pipeline geography to build state capacity, maintain alliances, and project influence abroad.
• #4 Ivan III
  Russia Imperial SovereigntyPolitical Medieval State Power Power: 100
  Ivan III Vasilyevich (1440 – 1505), commonly known as Ivan the Great, was Grand Prince of Moscow from 1462 until his death and a central figure in the rise of Muscovy as the dominant power among the eastern Slavic principalities. During his reign Moscow absorbed major rival territories, expanded into borderlands contested with Lithuania, and asserted a degree of independence from steppe powers that had long demanded tribute from Rus’ rulers. Ivan’s consolidation of authority, legal reforms, and court symbolism helped lay foundations for a more centralized Russian state, even though many institutions remained personal, dynastic, and dependent on coercion.He is associated with the transition from a fragmented landscape of competing principalities to a political order in which Moscow could plausibly claim supremacy. His reign combined conquest and annexation with administrative measures that tied elites to service, standardized aspects of law, and concentrated fiscal resources at the court. These policies increased the reach of central authority while deepening the human costs of consolidation for communities that lost autonomy or became subject to heavier extraction.
• #5 Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible)
  Eurasian SteppeMuscovyRussia Imperial SovereigntyMilitaryPolitical Early Modern Military CommandState Power Power: 100
  Ivan IV was the first Muscovite ruler formally crowned as tsar and one of the defining architects of Russian autocracy. His reign joined two different stories that are often told apart but belong together. One is the story of state-building: legal reform, military expansion, administrative growth, and the elevation of Moscow into a more self-conscious imperial center. The other is the story of terror: purges, mass violence, confiscation, and the oprichnina. To understand Ivan IV as a figure of wealth and power, both stories must be held at once.As ruler of Muscovy from childhood and crowned tsar in 1547, Ivan inherited a polity still marked by elite rivalry, frontier danger, and uncertain central reach. Early in his adult rule, he worked with advisers on reform, codification, and military strengthening. The conquests of Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556 dramatically expanded Muscovite power along the Volga and altered the balance between the Russian state and the steppe. These victories enhanced the monarchy’s prestige and widened the strategic and fiscal horizon of the realm.Yet Ivan’s reign became increasingly defined by suspicion and coercion. The death of his wife Anastasia, setbacks in the Livonian War, fear of treason among boyars, and his own sharpened sense of sacred-autocratic mission all contributed to the brutal experiment of the oprichnina. In Ivan IV one sees a sovereign trying to make the state more absolute and in the same movement damaging the social foundations on which that state depended. His reign was formative precisely because it was both constructive and destructive.
• #6 Ivan the Terrible
  MuscovyNovgorodRussia Imperial SovereigntyMilitaryPolitical Early Modern Military CommandState Power Power: 100
  Ivan the Terrible is the remembered political persona through which Ivan IV’s reign entered history: a sovereign of brilliance, fury, conquest, ritual, and fear. The epithet does not simply mean monstrous in the modern sense. It points toward awe, dread, and terrible majesty. Even so, the name now evokes a ruler who turned suspicion into system and made terror one of the defining instruments of monarchy. In that respect, this entry focuses less on Ivan as institutional founder and more on Ivan as the dramatist of autocratic power.The terror associated with Ivan was not random violence detached from politics. It was organized and communicative. The oprichnina created a separate zone of royal control, empowered agents personally loyal to the tsar, and subjected elites and towns to confiscation, humiliation, and death. Spectacle mattered. Public punishment, black garments, ritualized raids, and the relentless identification of treason gave the regime a theatrical quality. Power was exercised by making subjects feel that the sovereign could see hidden disloyalty and strike without warning.Yet the terrifying image endured precisely because it was attached to a real state. Muscovy under Ivan expanded, conquered Kazan and Astrakhan, and claimed a larger imperial horizon. That combination made the reign unforgettable. Ivan the Terrible was not simply a murderer on a throne. He was a ruler who showed how expansion, sacred kingship, and psychological domination could be fused into one model of command. His memory survives because later generations kept recognizing in him the spectacle of unchecked sovereignty.
• #7 Kim Jong-un
  ChinaNorth KoreaRussiaSouth KoreaUnited States MilitaryParty State ControlPolitical 21st Century Military CommandState Power Power: 100
  Kim Jong-un (born about 1984) is the supreme leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. He succeeded his father, Kim Jong Il, in late 2011 and consolidated authority through control of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the Korean People’s Army, and the internal security apparatus. His tenure has been defined by the expansion of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, a sustained effort to prevent elite fragmentation, and alternating cycles of confrontation and diplomacy that tie the country’s external posture to regime security.
• #8 Mikhail Gorbachev
  RussiaSoviet Union Party State ControlPolitical Cold War and Globalization State Power Power: 100
  Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (2 March 1931 – 30 August 2022) was a Soviet and Russian politician who served as the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 until its dissolution in 1991. Rising through the Communist Party, he became general secretary at a moment of economic stagnation, international tension, and growing public cynicism. He pursued reforms known as perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), aiming to modernize the Soviet economy, reduce corruption, and create a more responsive political system. Internationally, he sought to de‑escalate the Cold War through arms control and a less interventionist approach toward Eastern Europe. The reforms, however, accelerated forces that the party-state had long contained: nationalist movements, institutional fragmentation, and elite conflict. Gorbachev became a widely admired figure abroad for helping end the Cold War while remaining a deeply divisive figure at home, associated by many Russians with state collapse, economic hardship, and the loss of superpower status.
• #9 Nicolás Maduro
  ChinaCubaLatin AmericaRussiaUnited StatesVenezuela FinancialParty State ControlPoliticalResource 21st Century Finance and WealthState Power Power: 100
  Nicolás Maduro (born 1962) is a Venezuelan politician and former union leader who rose to national power under Hugo Chávez and became president of Venezuela in 2013. His leadership has been associated with prolonged economic crisis, international sanctions, contested elections, and intensified reliance on security institutions and party control. Maduro’s government maintained influence through the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), control over the state oil company PDVSA, and a blend of patronage and coercive enforcement. In January 2026, Reuters reporting described a United States military operation in Caracas that resulted in Maduro and his wife being captured and transferred to U.S. custody, after which Venezuelan authorities indicated that Vice President Delcy Rodríguez would act as interim president. The episode added a new layer of legal and constitutional dispute over sovereignty, legitimacy, and the future of the Venezuelan state.
• #10 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.
• #11 Patriarch Kirill of Moscow
  Russia PoliticalReligionReligious Hierarchy World Wars and Midcentury Religious HierarchyState Power Power: 100
  Patriarch Kirill of Moscow (born 1946), born Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev, is the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and one of the most consequential religious authorities in post-Soviet Eurasia. Elected patriarch in 2009 after decades of ecclesiastical administration and church diplomacy, he inherited an institution that had been dramatically revived after the fall of official Soviet atheism. Under his leadership, the church deepened its public role in education, media, military symbolism, and state ceremony, presenting itself as a guardian of civilizational continuity, national memory, and traditional morality.Kirill‘s importance lies in the way he has fused spiritual office with broad agenda-setting power. He does not command a party machine or an army, yet the patriarchate under him has influenced public language, church appointments, school culture, diplomacy, and the moral framing of Russian state priorities. He has often presented church and nation as mutually reinforcing, arguing that Orthodoxy is not merely a private confession but one of the foundations of Russia‘s historical identity. That posture gave him visibility and influence far beyond the liturgical sphere.It also made him one of the most controversial religious leaders of his era. Critics have long accused him of drawing the church too close to the Kremlin and of turning ecclesiastical legitimacy into support for state power, especially in relation to Ukraine. Admirers see a patriarch who restored confidence and public relevance to Russian Orthodoxy after the Soviet rupture. Detractors see a hierarch whose moral authority has been compromised by nationalism, institutional wealth, and theological justification for coercive politics. His career therefore belongs at the intersection of faith, hierarchy, ideology, and modern state alignment.
• #12 Patriarch Nikon
  Russia PoliticalReligionReligious Hierarchy Early Modern Religious HierarchyState Power Power: 100
  Patriarch Nikon (1605 – 1681) was the Patriarch of Moscow and a leading figure in the Russian Orthodox Church during the reign of Tsar Alexis I. Rising from a provincial background into monastic leadership, he became a central architect of church reform in the 1650s, seeking to standardize Russian liturgical practice and align service books and rituals more closely with contemporary Greek usage. Nikon’s program relied on the institutional mechanics of a religious hierarchy: councils, discipline, appointments, and the control of printed texts that shaped public worship.Nikon’s influence was also political. His early partnership with the tsar gave him unusual leverage over policy, property, and personnel, and his language of authority suggested a church capable of setting terms for the state as well as serving it. Resistance to his reforms hardened into an enduring schism, with “Old Believers” rejecting the revised rites and, in many regions, facing state repression. Nikon was eventually deposed and exiled, but the reforms remained, and the split became one of the most consequential religious fractures in Russian history. The episode offers a clear example of how doctrine, ritual uniformity, and institutional legitimacy can function as tools of governance and social control.
• #13 Peter the Great
  BalticEuropeRussia Imperial SovereigntyMilitaryPolitical Early Modern Military CommandState Power Power: 100
  Peter the Great was the ruler who forced Russia into a new scale of military and administrative power at the turn of the eighteenth century. Reigning first jointly with his half-brother Ivan V and then alone, Peter converted the Muscovite tsardom from a comparatively inward-looking and unevenly administered state into an empire that could intervene decisively in European power politics. He did so not through cautious institutional evolution but through relentless pressure: military campaigns, administrative redesign, new taxes, compelled service, cultural discipline, and the creation of new centers of political authority.He matters in the history of wealth and power because his reforms were not merely decorative westernization. They were instruments for extracting greater resources from society and routing them toward the army, navy, workshops, shipyards, and bureaucracy required for great-power competition. Peter wanted ports, artillery, engineers, officers, taxable populations, and obedient nobles. He judged institutions by whether they increased the usable strength of the state. St. Petersburg, naval construction, the Table of Ranks, and the reorganization of central administration were all parts of that larger program.The result was transformative and brutal at the same time. Peter expanded the empire’s reach, defeated Sweden in the Great Northern War, opened Russia more forcefully to European techniques and commerce, and gave the monarchy a new imperial form. Yet he also imposed staggering burdens on peasants and elites alike, widened the coercive reach of the state, and tied modernization to compulsion rather than consent. His reign is therefore central not only to Russian history but to the broader question of how rulers turn reform into an engine of extraction and command.
• #14 Vladimir Lenin
  RussiaSoviet Union Party State ControlPoliticalRevolutionary World Wars and Midcentury State Power Power: 100
  Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) was the Bolshevik revolutionary who led the seizure of power in 1917 and became the founding head of the Soviet state. He combined ideological rigor, conspiratorial organization, tactical flexibility, and ruthless centralization to turn a relatively disciplined party into the nucleus of a new regime. His importance lies not only in making revolution but in creating the institutional pattern of party-state control that later communist systems would inherit and expand.
• #15 Vladimir Putin
  EurasiaEuropeMiddle EastMoscowRussiaSt. PetersburgUkraine Party State ControlPolitical 21st Century State Power Power: 100
  Vladimir Putin (born 1952) is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who has shaped Russia’s state structure and external posture more than any leader since the collapse of the Soviet Union. He rose from the security services into national office in 1999 and has served as president from 2000 to 2008 and from 2012 to the present, with a term as prime minister in between. His governing model is defined by the consolidation of executive authority, the elevation of security institutions as core instruments of rule, and a strategic use of energy, state corporations, and law enforcement to discipline rivals and manage elite competition.
• #16 Yevgeny Prigozhin
  AfricaInternationalRussiaSyriaUkraine FinancialMilitaryMilitary Command 21st Century Finance and WealthMilitary Command Power: 100
  Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin (1961–2023) was a Russian businessman and paramilitary leader best known for his role in building and directing the Wagner Group, a private military organization that operated in multiple conflict zones while maintaining deep connections to Russian state interests. He also controlled a contracting and catering business empire that obtained substantial government-linked procurement, which contributed to his nickname in international media as “Putin’s chef.”
• #17 Oleg Deripaska
  Russia IndustrialIndustrial Capital Control Cold War and Globalization Industrial Capital Power: 90
  Oleg Deripaska (born 1968) is an industrialist associated with Russia. Oleg Deripaska is best known for building a metals-and-energy empire around aluminum production, including roles tied to Rusal and the En+ / power platform. This profile belongs to the site’s study of industrial capital control, where influence depends on controlling systems rather than possessing money alone. In the modern and globalized world, concentrated influence is often exercised through finance, media, regulation, infrastructure, corporate governance, and cross-border market access.
• #18 Igor Sechin
  Russia IndustrialPoliticalResource Extraction Control 21st Century State Power Power: 87
  Igor Sechin (born 1960) is a Russian energy and political power broker whose career illustrates how resource control and state authority can merge into a single system. As chief executive of Rosneft since 2012, and as a long-time ally of Vladimir Putin dating back to the St. Petersburg mayor’s office, Sechin has stood at the center of one of the world’s largest oil producers. His importance is not simply that he runs a major company. It is that Rosneft under his leadership has functioned as a strategic arm of Russian state capitalism, a commercial enterprise, and an instrument of geopolitical leverage at the same time.
• #19 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.
• #20 Pavel Durov
  InternationalRussia TechnologicalTechnology Platform Control 21st Century Technology Platforms Power: 80
  Pavel Durov (born 1984) is a Russian-born technology entrepreneur best known as the founder of VKontakte (VK), one of the largest social networking services in the Russian-speaking internet, and as the founder of Telegram, a global messaging platform known for encryption features and channel-based broadcasting. Durov became prominent in the early social media era, when user-generated networks and messaging tools began to function as major public communication infrastructure. His career is often framed through the topology of technology platform control because social networks and messaging apps create network effects, determine how information spreads, and can become central battlegrounds between private governance and state authority.
• #21 Sergey Brin
  RussiaUnited States TechnologicalTechnology Platform Control 21st Century Technology Platforms Power: 80
  Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (born August 21, 1973) is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur who co-founded Google with [Larry Page](https://moneytyrants.com/larry-page/). Google’s early innovations in web search, particularly link-based ranking methods, helped the company become a dominant gateway to online information and a major advertising intermediary. Brin later served in senior leadership roles as Google reorganized into the holding company Alphabet, and he remained a controlling shareholder and board.
• #22 Vitalik Buterin
  CanadaRussia FinancialTechnologicalTechnology Platform Control 21st Century Finance and WealthTechnology Platforms Power: 80
  Vitalik Buterin (born 1994) is a software developer and protocol designer best known as a co-founder of Ethereum, a blockchain platform built to support programmable “smart contracts” and decentralized applications. Buterin became prominent in the cryptocurrency world as a young writer and researcher, arguing that blockchains could be more than payment networks. His Ethereum proposal, published in 2013, helped catalyze an industry centered on tokenized networks, on-chain finance, and open-source governance debates that attracted investors and operators, including figures such as [Marc Andreessen](https://moneytyrants.com/marc-andreessen/).Buterin’s influence derives from a distinctive mix of technical authorship and community credibility. Ethereum is designed to be decentralized, and Buterin does not control the network in a corporate sense. However, as an originator of core ideas and a frequent voice in protocol research, he has had outsized impact on how developers and stakeholders interpret Ethereum’s priorities, security assumptions, and upgrade paths. He has also influenced public debates about how decentralized systems interact with law and social norms. His public work has also included philanthropy and advocacy for cautious, research-driven scaling and governance.
• #23 Yury Kovalchuk
  Russia FinancialFinancial Network ControlMedia 21st Century Finance and WealthMonopoly Control Power: 77
  Yury Kovalchuk (born 1951) is a Russian financier and business figure widely described as a central node in the country’s state-linked banking and media networks. His influence is associated with Bank Rossiya, a St. Petersburg-based institution that grew into a specialized hub for politically connected clients, as well as with a set of affiliated holdings that extend into insurance and media distribution. In Western policy discussions he has been characterized as a key facilitator for senior officials, and he has been designated under multiple sanctions programs.
• #24 Alexey Mordashov
  Russia IndustrialIndustrial Capital Control 21st Century Industrial Capital Power: 72
  Alexey Mordashov (born 1965) is a Russian businessman best known as the principal shareholder and chairman of the steel and mining company Severstal. He emerged from the post-Soviet privatization era as one of Russia’s most prominent industrial owners, building wealth through majority stakes in core production assets and through diversification into related holdings.
• #25 Arkady Rotenberg
  Russia FinancialFinancial Network Control 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 62
  Arkady Rotenberg (born 1951) is a businessman and contractor associated with Russia. Arkady Rotenberg is best known for building wealth through large infrastructure and state-linked contracting networks. This profile belongs to the site’s study of financial network control and finance and wealth, where influence depends on controlling systems rather than possessing money alone. In the twenty-first century, power frequently travels through digital platforms, data, logistics, attention, cloud infrastructure, and the ability to set terms for other participants in the market.
• #26 Gennady Timchenko
  InternationalRussia FinancialFinancial Network Control 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 62
  Gennady Nikolayevich Timchenko (born 1952) is a Russian billionaire businessman whose influence has been built primarily through commodity trading and investment holdings that sit at the junction of energy production, transport logistics, and cross-border finance. He is widely associated with the creation and growth of Gunvor, an international oil-trading firm, and with Volga Group, a private investment company that has held significant stakes across Russia’s energy and industrial sectors. His profile is frequently discussed as an example of how modern wealth can be produced by intermediating flows rather than owning the original resource: in commodity markets, the power often lies with the party that can reliably connect producers to buyers, arrange shipping, manage credit risk, and navigate regulatory constraints.Timchenko’s career has also been shaped by the political economy of post-Soviet Russia, where access to export licenses, state-connected networks, and strategic assets helped determine which private actors could scale. Western governments have sanctioned him in connection with Russia’s foreign policy and the country’s broader system of oligarchic influence. Those sanctions, along with his sale of his stake in Gunvor in 2014, have become part of the public record surrounding his wealth. In the language of financial network control, Timchenko’s significance is not merely in personal net worth but in the structural role of an actor who can move goods, credit, and contractual obligations across borders under conditions of uncertainty.
• #27 Mikhail Fridman
  Russia FinancialFinancial Network Control 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 62
  Mikhail Maratovich Fridman (born 1964) is a Ukrainian-born Russian–Israeli businessman best known as a co-founder of Alfa Group, a private conglomerate that grew during the post-Soviet privatization era into a network spanning banking, investment, retail, telecom, and commodity-linked holdings. He became prominent through institutions that sit close to the financial plumbing of modern economies: banks that move deposits and extend credit, investment structures that consolidate ownership, and partnerships that link private capital to state-regulated markets.
• #28 Mikhail Prokhorov
  Russia FinancialFinancial Network Control 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 62
  Mikhail Dmitrievich Prokhorov (born 1965) is a Russian–Israeli businessman and former politician who became one of the most visible beneficiaries of Russia’s post-Soviet privatization and resource-finance consolidation. He built wealth through ownership stakes in metals and mining-linked assets, then shifted into a diversified investment posture through the ONEXIM Group. Internationally, he became widely known for purchasing and later selling control of the Brooklyn Nets and for participating in the financing and branding of a major sports-and-real-estate project centered on the team’s move to Brooklyn.
• #29 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.
• #30 Suleiman Kerimov
  EuropeRussia FinancialFinancial Network ControlPolitical PowerResource Extraction 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 62
  Suleiman Kerimov (1966–020) was an investor; politician (Federation Council senator); commodities owner associated with Russia and Europe. Suleiman Kerimov is best known for Building a fortune through leveraged stakes and commodity holdings, including family control linked to Polyus; sanctions and international asset scrutiny. This profile belongs to the site’s study of financial network control and finance and wealth, where influence depends on controlling systems rather than possessing money alone. In the twenty-first century, power frequently travels through digital platforms, data, logistics, attention, cloud infrastructure, and the ability to set terms for other participants in the market.
• #31 Viktor Bout
  AfricaMiddle EastRussiaSoviet Union CriminalCriminal Enterprise Cold War and Globalization Illicit Networks Power: 62
  Viktor Bout (born 1967) is a Russian arms trafficker whose career became emblematic of the lawless logistics that followed the collapse of the Soviet order. He did not command an army or lead a mass-membership syndicate in the style of a traditional mafia boss. His importance came from infrastructure. Through fleets of aging cargo aircraft, front companies, pliable paperwork, and constant jurisdiction-shopping, Bout turned transport itself into a criminal instrument. Investigators, journalists, and diplomats tied his networks to weapons shipments reaching conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere, often in places where embargoes, weak customs control, and corrupt officials made enforcement uncertain. His historical significance lies in the way he treated global disorder as a market. Bout showed that in the post-Cold War arms trade, the decisive source of power was often not manufacturing but delivery. Whoever could move rifles, ammunition, and heavier systems across borders, under false names and through deniable carriers, could profit from war while remaining personally distant from the battlefield.
• #32 Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov
  Russia CriminalCriminal Enterprise World Wars and Midcentury Illicit Networks Power: 52
  Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov (born 1949), often known by the nickname “Taiwanchik,” is a Russian businessman and widely reported organized crime figure whom U.S. authorities have accused of operating at the highest level of Eurasian criminal networks. Public attention to Tokhtakhounov increased after U.S. prosecutors alleged that he participated in attempts to influence judging outcomes at the 2002 Winter Olympics. A later set of U.S. allegations connected him to an international sports-betting and money-laundering enterprise that moved large sums through offshore structures and into the United States, with investigators describing him as a dispute resolver and enforcer within that network.Tokhtakhounov’s profile illustrates a characteristic feature of transnational criminal enterprise: the most powerful figures often operate less as direct managers of day-to-day crews and more as brokers who connect capital, protection, and trusted intermediaries across borders. Their influence depends on reputation, the ability to enforce agreements, and the use of jurisdictions that complicate arrest and extradition. In this topology, authority looks like access: access to safe haven, to financial channels, to elite contacts, and to a reputation strong enough that others comply without constant demonstrations of force.
• #33 Gennady Petrov
  RussiaSpain CriminalCriminal Enterprise World Wars and Midcentury Illicit Networks Power: 52
  Gennady Vasilyevich Petrov (born 1947) is a Russian entrepreneur who has been described by investigators and journalists as an alleged leader or key figure in the Tambov–Malyshev organized‑crime network associated with Saint Petersburg. His profile sits at the intersection of criminal allegations, post‑Soviet privatization, and the creation of business structures that blurred boundaries between legitimate enterprise and illicit influence. Petrov has been linked in public reporting to money‑laundering investigations in Europe and to networks that used corporate vehicles, real‑estate investment, and political connections to protect assets and expand control.
• #34 Alisher Usmanov
  Russia IndustrialResource Extraction Control Cold War and Globalization Finance and Wealth Power: 47
  Alisher Usmanov (born 1953) is a business magnate associated with Russia. Alisher Usmanov is best known for holding major stakes in metals and resource-linked assets and using investment networks to project influence. This profile belongs to the site’s study of resource extraction control and finance and wealth, where influence depends on controlling systems rather than possessing money alone. In the modern and globalized world, concentrated influence is often exercised through finance, media, regulation, infrastructure, corporate governance, and cross-border market access.
• #35 Andrey Melnichenko
  EuropeGlobal commodities marketsRussiaSwitzerland IndustrialResource Extraction Control 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 47
  Andrey Melnichenko (born 1972) is a Russian industrialist associated with large commodity enterprises in fertilizers and coal, most prominently the EuroChem Group and the coal company SUEK. He rose during the post-Soviet era when banking, privatization, and consolidation created opportunities for a small number of business figures to assemble control over strategic assets. Over time, his influence came to rest less on financial engineering and more on industrial scale: fertilizer production sits at the core of global food systems, while coal and related logistics remain significant in power generation and industrial supply chains.
• #36 Leonid Fedun
  RussiaUkraine IndustrialResource Extraction Control 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 47
  Leonid Fedun (born 1956) is a Russian businessman best known as a co-founder and long-time senior figure of Lukoil, one of the major oil companies to emerge from the post-Soviet reordering of the energy sector. His career is important because it captures a specific route to wealth in modern Eurasia: the transformation of former Soviet managerial and technical networks into private ownership over vast resource systems. In that world, fortunes did not arise merely from entrepreneurial invention. They arose from control of infrastructure, legal transitions, and privileged access to the commanding heights of the oil economy.Fedun belongs in resource extraction control because oil sat at the heart of both his wealth and his influence. Lukoil was never just a producer. It was a vertically integrated company spanning extraction, refining, trading, and fuel distribution, with a reach that extended into foreign assets and international capital markets. To hold a large stake in such a company was to hold more than personal wealth. It was to occupy a strategic position within the machine that converted hydrocarbons into state revenue, corporate power, and geopolitical leverage.Unlike some oligarchs whose public image depended on flamboyance, Fedun often appeared more technocratic and less theatrical. Yet that should not obscure his significance. He was part of the class that turned the dislocation of the 1990s into durable command over Russian resource capitalism. His long partnership with Vagit Alekperov made him one of the principal architects of Lukoil’s rise, while his financial structures and investments extended the reach of that influence beyond the core business itself.His story also reveals the fragility of such fortunes in a sanctions era. What looked for decades like a stable stake in a globalizing oil champion became far more precarious after Russia’s confrontation with the West hardened and capital became politically trapped. Fedun’s biography therefore runs from expansion and asset accumulation to withdrawal and unwinding. That arc makes him a useful figure for understanding both the making and partial unmaking of post-Soviet oil wealth.
• #37 Leonid Mikhelson
  Russia IndustrialResource Extraction Control 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 47
  Leonid Mikhelson (born 1955) is one of the central figures in Russia’s private gas economy. Best known as the leading shareholder and long-time chief executive of Novatek, he built influence through a part of the energy system often overshadowed by oil oligarchs and by the state giant Gazprom. His significance lies in demonstrating that private wealth in Russia could still rise to strategic scale in natural gas, especially when coupled with petrochemicals, liquefied natural gas, and close coordination with state priorities.Mikhelson belongs in resource extraction control because his fortune rests on command over upstream gas reserves and the industrial systems that turn those reserves into transportable, monetized products. Novatek’s growth was not a matter of passive ownership alone. It involved field development, export ambition, long-term engineering projects in the Arctic, and partnerships that connected private capital to Russia’s geopolitical energy strategy. Through Yamal LNG, Arctic LNG 2, and related ventures, Mikhelson became associated with one of the most consequential attempts to turn Russia into a larger force in seaborne LNG.His career also shows the modern form of resource power: not just drilling, but integrated project execution. A gas reserve in the ground is only latent wealth. It becomes power when someone can finance liquefaction, secure logistics, withstand sanctions, negotiate with foreign partners, and tie the output to global buyers. Mikhelson’s business life has revolved around that transformation.At the same time, his story cannot be separated from the political conditions of Russian capitalism. Novatek’s success emerged in a landscape where private initiative existed, but only within limits defined by the state and by elite networks. Mikhelson therefore stands at the intersection of entrepreneurship, oligarchy, and national strategy. He is one of the clearest examples of how a nominally private resource empire can operate as both commercial enterprise and strategic instrument.
• #38 Mikhail Khodorkovsky
  Russia IndustrialResource Extraction Control Cold War and Globalization Finance and Wealth Power: 47
  Mikhail Khodorkovsky (born 1963) is a Russian businessman best known for building and leading Yukos, one of the largest oil companies created during the post-Soviet privatization period. He rose from the late Soviet cooperative economy into banking and then into the acquisition of major energy assets, using corporate consolidation and export-oriented strategy to convert oil output into private capital at a scale that shaped Russia’s politics and business culture.
• #39 Rex Tillerson
  InternationalRussiaUnited States IndustrialResource Extraction Control 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 47
  Rex Tillerson (born 1952) is an American energy executive and former secretary of state whose importance rests on how fully his career embodied the connection between large-scale resource extraction and geopolitical power. As chief executive of ExxonMobil, he stood at the head of one of the most influential corporations in the global oil industry, operating through concessions, reserves, pipelines, liquefaction systems, refining networks, and negotiations with states across multiple continents.He belongs in resource extraction control because the authority he wielded at ExxonMobil was inseparable from access to hydrocarbons and the contracts that governed them. Oil executives at that level do not merely manage a company. They negotiate with governments, influence capital allocation across regions, and help shape the long-term map of energy dependence. Tillerson’s later elevation to the top diplomatic office of the United States only made explicit what was already true in corporate form: his career sat at the junction where commercial energy power and state power meet.Tillerson was not a founder or a flamboyant entrepreneur. He was a career operator who rose through engineering and management ranks to lead one of the world’s largest energy firms. That origin is essential to understanding him. His authority was built less on showmanship than on disciplined execution inside a giant organization whose scale itself functioned as geopolitical leverage.His profile matters because he demonstrates how extraction-based power can travel across institutional boundaries. The habits and relationships formed in oil diplomacy did not remain inside Exxon’s boardroom. They followed him into national politics, controversy over Russia, debates over sanctions, and a short but revealing tenure as secretary of state. He is therefore a key figure for understanding the political afterlife of corporate resource command.
• #40 Roman Abramovich
  Russia IndustrialResource Extraction Control Cold War and Globalization Finance and Wealth Power: 47
  Roman Abramovich (born 1966) is a Russian-born businessman and investor whose wealth rose from the privatization-era acquisition of resource assets, most notably the oil company Sibneft. His career illustrates how control of extraction and export revenues can be converted into political access, global investment capacity, and durable influence across sectors that are not themselves extractive, including sport and regional administration.
• #41 Vagit Alekperov
  Caspian RegionInternationalRussia IndustrialResource Extraction Control 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 47
  Vagit Alekperov (born 1950) is an oil executive and co-founder of Lukoil associated with Russia and Caspian Region. Vagit Alekperov is best known for building Lukoil into a major vertically integrated oil company with upstream, refining, and international assets. This profile belongs to the site’s study of resource extraction control and finance and wealth, where influence depends on controlling systems rather than possessing money alone. In the twenty-first century, power frequently travels through digital platforms, data, logistics, attention, cloud infrastructure, and the ability to set terms for other participants in the market.
• #42 Viktor Vekselberg
  InternationalRussiaSwitzerland IndustrialResource Extraction Control 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 47
  Viktor Vekselberg (born 1957) is a Russian industrialist whose fortune and influence were built across metals, oil, aluminum, and related industrial assets assembled during the post-Soviet transformation. He is best known through Renova and for his role in large holdings tied to natural resources and heavy industry. His importance lies in having used the privatization era to build a portfolio that linked extraction, processing, finance, and international ownership into a durable oligarchic position.He belongs in resource extraction control because the material basis of his wealth has been tied to industries that begin in the earth: oil, bauxite and aluminum chains, mineral-intensive manufacturing, and the infrastructure required to move those commodities into revenue. Even where later holdings extended into technology or services, the original scale of his power came from resource-connected industrial concentration.Vekselberg matters because he embodies a particular type of post-Soviet businessman: part asset consolidator, part cross-border financier, part political insider, and part patron of modernization projects. For years he presented himself not only as a magnate but as a sponsor of a future-oriented Russia connected to international capital and innovation. That image made him more complex than a simple caricature of extractive oligarchy, but it never fully separated him from the system that enriched him.His career also demonstrates how vulnerable cross-border oligarchic wealth can become when geopolitical conflict intensifies. Sanctions, asset freezes, and corporate disentanglements exposed the dependence of global business empires on legal access to Western markets. Vekselberg’s story therefore belongs to both the rise of post-Soviet resource fortunes and the later constriction of those fortunes under political rupture.
• #43 Vladimir Lisin
  EuropeInternationalRussia IndustrialResource Extraction Control 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 47
  Vladimir Lisin (born 1956) is a Russian metals executive best known for controlling NLMK, one of the major steel producers to emerge from the post-Soviet industrial order. His importance lies in the way he combined steel production with transport, ports, and resource-linked logistics, turning command over heavy industry into one of the largest private fortunes in Russia. He is not merely a steel businessman in the narrow sense. He is an example of how industrial power becomes most durable when it extends across supply, processing, and distribution.He belongs in resource extraction control because steel at this scale depends on upstream material access, energy inputs, transport corridors, and export infrastructure. Although steelmaking is a manufacturing activity, its economics remain anchored in ore, coal, electricity, and the systems that move bulk commodities. Lisin’s wealth came from commanding that chain rather than from isolated ownership in a single plant.He matters because his career illustrates a more quietly technocratic type of oligarchic power. Compared with some post-Soviet magnates, Lisin often appeared less theatrical and less politically vocal. Yet that relative quiet should not be mistaken for modest importance. Control over a giant steel enterprise and major transport assets can generate enormous leverage even without constant public drama.His profile is also instructive because it shows how logistics magnify industrial power. Steel production alone creates wealth, but when the same owner also influences railcars, shipping, and terminals, the ability to manage costs, timing, and export access becomes much greater. Lisin therefore represents a form of resource-linked capitalism in which the movement of commodities is nearly as important as their production.
• #44 Alexei Miller
  EurasiaEuropeMoscowRussiaSt. Petersburg FinancialResource Extraction ControlResources 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 37
  Alexei Miller (born 1962) is a Russian energy executive best known as the long-serving head of Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled gas champion. He became chief executive in 2001 as the Kremlin reasserted control over strategic sectors and treated hydrocarbons as both an economic foundation and a tool of statecraft. Under his leadership, Gazprom expanded major pipeline programs, negotiated long-term supply contracts, and defended a privileged position in Russia’s gas export system while adapting to shifting market conditions, regulatory pressure, and geopolitical confrontation.
• #45 Mikhail Gutseriev
  BelarusRussia Resource Extraction ControlResources 21st Century Finance and Wealth Power: 37
  Mikhail Gutseriev (born 1958) is a Russian businessman whose rise illustrates the post-Soviet pattern in which fortunes were built by acquiring, reorganizing, and defending control over hard assets in sectors that states never stop caring about. He is best known for RussNeft and for the broader Safmar orbit of oil, mining, finance, property, and industrial holdings that made him one of the more durable tycoons to emerge from the 1990s and 2000s. Unlike an entrepreneur who becomes wealthy by creating a single consumer brand, Gutseriev accumulated power through pipelines, fields, refineries, commodity flows, and the legal structures that hold them together.He belongs in resource extraction control because the core of his wealth came from hydrocarbons and related mineral projects. Oil production is not just another business line. It ties private ownership to licensing regimes, transportation networks, export politics, tax bargains, and the constant risk that a state may decide strategic assets matter more than ordinary market freedom. Gutseriev’s significance lies in having survived within that world, repeatedly rebuilding position after political pressure, asset disputes, and sanctions-era complications.His career also shows that oligarchic power in a resource state is rarely simple. It is part entrepreneurship, part state accommodation, part elite conflict, and part family strategy. Gutseriev moved through all of those layers. He built banks and industrial companies, entered parliament, endured confrontation with authorities, left and returned, and diversified into sectors meant to reduce dependence on one asset class without ever fully leaving oil behind. The result is a profile that helps explain how post-Soviet wealth was assembled, protected, and repackaged over time.Gutseriev is therefore not merely a billionaire with oil holdings. He is a case study in how extraction-based fortunes evolve when private capital is allowed to exist but never entirely free itself from politics. His legacy is tied as much to endurance and adaptation as to the initial act of accumulation.
• #46 Vladimir Potanin
  Russia Resource Extraction ControlResources Cold War and Globalization Finance and Wealth Power: 37
  Vladimir Olegovich Potanin (born 1961) is a Russian businessman and former government official who became one of the central owners of Norilsk Nickel, a major global producer of nickel and palladium. His rise is closely associated with post-Soviet privatization, in which large industrial enterprises moved from state ownership into private hands through auctions, banking alliances, and political negotiation. Potanin built a long-running investment structure around Interros and related financial entities, using those vehicles to acquire and consolidate resource assets and to defend them through corporate governance and state relationships.In the logic of resource extraction control, Potanin’s influence has been rooted less in consumer-facing brands than in the strategic position of metals within global supply chains. Nickel, palladium, and associated byproducts are inputs for manufacturing, electronics, chemical processing, and, in more recent years, battery and emissions-control technologies. Ownership of extraction sites, smelters, and transport routes gives leverage that is not easily displaced by new entrants. In Russia’s commodity economy, that leverage is further shaped by the regulatory environment, export channels, and the political stakes attached to revenue streams that fund regional budgets and national priorities.