The Oligarchs

When jeans arrived in the 1970s, Irina remembered how her generation went crazy. Clothes were important because as poor as they were, it was the only thing that differentiated them from each other. People would deny themselves food to buy something flashy or extravagant. They knew they could never afford to move to another apartment, but they could buy something to stand out in a crowd.

In the months before the final collapse, Yeltsin had begun to assemble a parallel regime that would take the radical economic measures Gorbachev had never made.

THE REVOLUTIONARIES were young men in their thirties, selfconfident, hopeful, untested in power, and confronted with a task far beyond their imagination or practical experience.