Gulag

Gulag (pronounced goo-lahg)

(1) The system of forced-labor camps in the Soviet Union (with initial capital).

(2) Individually, a Soviet forced-labor camp (usually with initial capital).

(3) By association, any prison or detention camp, especially one used for political prisoners (usually not with initial capital).

(4) Figuratively, any place regarded as undesirable or one perceived as being a “punishment-post” (not with initial capital).

(5) Figuratively, any system used to silence dissent (not with initial capital).

1930-1931: From the Russian ГУЛА́Г (GULÁG, GULag or Gulág), the acronym (Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й (Glávnoje upravlénije ispravítelʹno-trudovýx lageréj) translated usually as “Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps” but also, inter alia, “Chief Administration of Corrective-Labor Camps”, “Main Directorate for Places of Detention”, “Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps” etc.).  The noun plural was Gulags.

An example of the way in which a bland acronym (like the 1933 Gestapo (an abbreviated form of the German Geheime Staatspolizei (the construct being Ge(heime) Sta(ats)po(lizei), literally “secret state police”) can become a byword for something awful, although technically, the acronym GULag (Glávnoje upravlénije ispravítelʹno-trudovýx lageréj (Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps)) didn’t come into use until 1930, the origin of what quickly would evolve into a vast, nation-wide network of concentration camps lies in the legal device created almost immediately after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917.  This was the concept of the “class enemy”, a logical crime to gazette under Marxist-Leninist theory and one that could be applied literally to anybody, regardless of their conduct; it was essentially the same idea as the crime of “unspecified offences” which appears in the judicial sentences of some authoritarian states.  Russia, as many of the Bolsheviks knew from personal experience, had a long tradition of “internal exile” and the new regime extended this concept, creating concentration camps for class enemies where convicts were required to perform useful manual labor (forestry, mining, quarrying etc).

The early camps, authorized by decree in April 1919, were the prisoner of war (POW) facilities which had become redundant after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) which concluded hostilities between Russia and the Central Powers although the first model camp was in the White Sea region, in what were once the Orthodox Church's monastery buildings on the Solovetsky Islands and the first prisoners were anti-Bolsheviks, mostly left-wing intellectuals and members of the White Army.  The Cheka, the Russian secret police (the first in the alphabet soup of the names adopted (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD, SMERSH, MGB, (most famously) KGB & FSB), was allocated the role of administration.  Reflecting the love secret police everywhere have for mysterious acronyms, the Cheka created SLON (Northern Camps of Special Significance) as an administrative template for the Solovetsky Islands which, briefly, was the only camp complex in the Soviet state.  The number of concentration (usually described as “correctional labor”) camps grew sufficiently during the 1920s to outgrow the bureaucratic structures initially formed by the Cheka and in 1930 the GULag was created as a separate division of the secret police which worked in conjunction with the Soviet Ministry of the Interior overseeing the use of the physical labor of prisoners.  Although the camps were sometimes used for those guilty of “normal” criminal offences, the great majority of inmates were political prisoners who were sometimes genuine political dissidents but could be there for entirely arbitrary reasons or even as victims of personal vendettas.  In these aspects there are parallels with the Nazi's concentration camps which also worked as systems of coercion, punishment & repression although the GULag never had a programme industrially to exterminate an entire race.  There was another striking similarity in the camp architecture of the two dictatorships which were nominally ideological opponents.  The German equivalent of the GULag, the Konzentrationlager is remembered for the words Arbeit macht frei (work makes you free) rendered in wrought iron above the gates of Auschwitz I; the inscription через труд (through labor (ie get back home through working)) was the message at the prisoners' entrance to the Magaden camp in Siberia.      

What is sometime neglected in the history of the GULag (and other systems of concentration camps) is that while it is well-understood as part of a system of repression, there were genuine attempts to locate the camps in places where the labor extracted from the inmates could be applied to the maximum benefit for the state, something of great significance because in 1929 comrade Stalin (1878–1953; Soviet leader 1922–1953) announced a programme of rapid industrialization and the first of a succession of five-year plans. In support of this, the Politburo abolished any distinction between political and other crimes and intruded a unified network of camps to replace the hitherto dual prison system.  From this point, accelerating from the mid-1930s, archipelagos of camps were built (substantially by the prisoners) close to sites of huge economic projects such as a canal from the White Sea to the Baltic Sea, gold mining in Kolyma and lines of communications such as the Baikal-Amur Mainline.

The GULag’s second great growth spurt happened during Stalin’s “Great Terror” in 1936-1938 when the upper echelons of the Communist Party, the armed forces, the civil service and even the GULag management were subject to purges and while there were many executions, most were sent to the camps which, never designed for such numbers, were unable to handle the mass influx and the already high death rate increased sometimes threefold.  During comrade Stalin's great purges, the (whispered) joke was that the Russian population consisted of (1) those in the gulag, (2) those just released and (3) those about to go back.  On a somewhat smaller scale, rapid inflows also happened in the early years of World War II because of the need to imprison those deported from territory just occupied by the Soviet Union (Eastern Poland, the Baltics, Bessarabia) but this pressure on capacity was more than off-set by the sudden release of many prisoners to meet the needs of the Red Army which had suffered massive losses in the Nazi invasion.  Needing troops, all was suddenly forgiven and it wouldn’t be until 1945 that the numbers in the camps began again to trend upwards, reflecting the waves of arrests among the ranks of the Red Army, former German POWs and ethnic minorities, including Soviet Jews.  The Cold War also fed the GULag.  In 1948-1949, Stalin launched the construction of new megalomaniacal projects, including the Volga-Don Canal, new power stations, dams, and communications, among them the Dead Road and a tunnel and railway to Sakhalin Island, both of which, despite a horrific death-toll, proved impossible to build and were cancelled when Stalin died in 1953.

After Stalin’s death, an amnesty was announced for many of those serving sentences for criminal offences and almost all of those deemed to have committed “minor offences” were released although political prisoners remained imprisoned and it wasn’t until “the thaw” under Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971; Soviet leader 1953-1964) that widespread releases were ordered after almost four million political crime cases were reviewed and in 1957, as one of a number of reforms, the GULag was abolished and most of the camps shut down.  Khrushchev himself announced that the Soviet economy would no longer based on the slave labor of prisoners which, as a piece of economic analysis was true but while the numbers of political prisoners fell, they did not disappear although they tended now to be only imprisoned for genuine opposition to the regime, dispatched most frequently to labor camps in Mordovia or in camps clustered around the Urals. The conditions remained grim but the death rates were tiny compared to those suffered in Stalin’s time but what also disguised the extent of post-Stalinist repression was than many dissidents were technically not imprisoned but instead declared insane and incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, many of which closely resembled prisons.  There, the “insane” were often subject to cruel & unusual “medical” procedures.

The number of people who passed through the GULag can never exactly be known but, using archival material which became accessible after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, historians have estimated between 15-18 million were imprisoned and the death-toll may have been almost 10%, the overwhelming majority of whom were from Russia or the constituent republics of the USSR but others were foreigners, mostly Czechoslovaks, Poles, Hungarians & Frenchmen.  The network of camps dotted around the USSR consisted of almost 500 administrative centres, each running as few as dozens or as many as hundreds of individual camps, historians having documented just under 30,000.  In the West the term GULag became widely known only after the publication in 1973 Russian of novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's (1918–2008) three-volume The Gulag Archipelago, described by the author as "An Experiment in Literary Investigation" which he wrote between 1958-1968, using documentary sources including legal papers, interviews, diaries, statements and his personal experience as a GULag prisoner.

Map of the GULag camp distribution, Plain Talk magazine, 1950.

However, both the system of slavery and the word “GULag” had, during comrade Stalin’s time, been publicized in the West, remarkably accurate maps published in 1950 in the US in Plain Talk (A US anti-communist monthly magazine, 1946–1950) magazine but, despite it being the high Cold War, the revelations didn’t resonate in public consciousness as they would a generation later when Solzhenitsyn released The Gulag Archipelago.

Hang

Hang (pronounced hang)

(1) To fasten or attach a thing so that it is supported only from above or at a point near its own top; to attach or suspend so as to allow free movement.

(2) To place in position or fasten so as to allow easy or ready movement.

(3) To put to death by suspending by the neck from a gallows, gibbet, yardarm, or the like; to suspend (oneself) by the neck until dead.

(4) To fasten to a cross; crucify.

(5) To furnish or decorate with something suspended.

(6) In fine art, to exhibit a painting or group of paintings.

(7) To attach or annex as an addition.

(8) In building, to attach (a door or the like) to its frame by means of hinges.

(9) To make an idea, form etc dependent on a situation, structure, concept, or the like, usually derived from another source.

(10) As hung jury, hung parliament etc, where deliberative body is unable to achieve a majority verdict in a vote.

(11) In informal use, to cause a nickname, epithet etc to become associated with a person

(12) In nautical use, to steady (a boat) in one place against a wind or current by thrusting a pole or the like into the bottom under the boat and allowing the wind or current to push the boat side-on against the pole.

(13) To incline downward, jut out, or lean over or forward.

(14) To linger, remain, or persist; to float or hover in the air.

(15) In informal use (to get the hang of), the precise manner of doing, using, etc, something; knack.

(16) In computing, as “to hang”, usually a synonym for “freeze”.  Nerds insist a hang refers only to a loss of control by manual input devices (mouse; keyboard etc) while the machine remains responsive to remote control whereas a freeze is a total lock-up.

(18) In chess (transitive) to cause a piece to become vulnerable to capture and (intransitive) to be vulnerable to capture.

(19) As “hang up”, to end a phone call, a use which has continued even though many phone handsets no longer physically “hang up”.

Pre 900:  A fusion of three verbs: (1) the Middle English and Old English hōn (to hang; be hanging) (transitive), cognate with the Gothic hāhan (originally haghan); (2) the Middle English hang(i)en & Old English hangian (to hang) (intransitive), cognate with the German hangen; and (3) the Middle English henge from the Old Norse hanga & hengja (suspend) (transitive), cognate with the German hängen & hangēn (to hang).  The ultimate source of all forms was the Proto-Germanic hanhaną (related to the Dutch hangen, the Low German hangen & hängen, the German hängen, the Norwegian Bokmål henge & Norwegian Nynorsk henga), root being the primitive Indo-European ḱenk- (to waver, be in suspense).  Etymologists compare the evolution with the Gothic hāhan, the Hittite gang- (to hang), the Sanskrit शङ्कते (śáṅkate) (is in doubt; hesitates), the Albanian çengë (a hook) and the Latin cunctari (to delay).  From the Latin cunctari, Modern English retains the very useful cunctator (a procrastinator; one who delays).

Past tense: hung and hanged

Hang has two forms for past tense and past participle, “hanged” and “hung”.  The older form hanged is now used exclusively in the sense of putting to death on the gallows by means of a lawful execution, sanctioned by the state.  Even in places where capital punishment is no longer used, it remains the correct word to use in its historical context.  There are two forms because the word “hang” came from two different verbs in Old English (with a relationship to one from Old Norse).  One of these Old English verbs was considered a regular verb and this gave rise to “hanged”; the other was irregular, and ended up as “hung”.  Hanged and hung were used interchangeably for hundreds of years but over time, hung became the more common.  Hanged retained its position when used to refer to death by hanging because it became fossilized in both statute and common law; it thus escaped the development of Modern English which tended increasingly to simplified forms.  Even the familiar phrase hung, drawn and quartered originally used “hanged”, a change reflecting popular use.  The only novel variation to emerge in recent years has been to use hanged to describe executions ordered by a state and hung when referring to suicides by hanging although this remains still a trend rather than an accepted convention of use.  Henry Fowler (1858–1933) in his A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) held it wasn't necessarily erroneous to use "hung" in the case of executions but in standard English it was certainly less customary although most style guides acknowledge the distinction still exists while noting the use of hung is both widespread and tolerated.  The consensus seems to be it’s best to follow the old practice but not get too hung up about it.

Portraits: hung and not hung

Most politicians, usually by virtue of uninterest, leave the arts to others but there are exceptions and while Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) wasn't unique among politicians in regarding himself as “an artist” he was untypical and his credentials were reasonable because in pre-World War I (1914-1918) Vienna he’s earned a modest living as a painter of the streetscapes in which there’s now a somewhat controversial trade.  Critics seem prepared to concede Hitler was a competent artist when depicting buildings and even the natural environment but all concurred with the examiners who denied him entry to art school on the basis he had not enough talent to handle the human form, a judgment some historians, political scientists and amateur psychoanalysts have over the years mapped onto his political career.  With that he may even have agreed because the people in his paintings are almost always small, un-detailed blotches there merely to lend scale to the buildings which were his real love but, after taking power in 1933, he didn’t let that stop establishing himself as the Reich’s chief art critic and he’d judge portraiture as harshly as any landscape.  He certainly thought an “artistic temperament” was vital for a politician to achieve greatness, rejecting the idea of Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945; Reichsführer SS 1929-1945) succeeding him as Führer because the head of the SS was “totally unartistic” and it was Hitler’s self-identification as “an artist” which in the first decade of his rule protected many painters, sculptors and others from persecution.  In his clandestine prison diary (Spandauer Tagebücher (Spandau: The Secret Diaries) (1975)) Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945) noted that for Hitler their political views were “…a matter of supreme indifference…” because “…he regarded them one and all as politically feeble-minded.”  Speer recalled a lunch in 1938 at Hitler’s favorite Italian restaurant, Munich’s Osteria Bavaria, when a senior Nazi functionary brought to the Führer’s attention a Communist Party proclamation (pre-dating the regime) which had been signed by a large number of artists; the apparatchik wanted all these artists banned from any government work but Speer recoded how “Hitler replied disdainfully, ‘Oh, you know I don’t take any of that seriously. We should never judge artists by their political views.  The imagination they need for their work deprives them of the ability to think in realistic terms. Artists are simple-hearted souls. Today they sign this, tomorrow that; they don’t even look to see what it is, so long as it seems to them well-meaning.’”  It was an indulgence to freedom of expression Hitler granted few others and a contrast also with what would have been the likely reaction of comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) to revelations of dissent.  Comrade Stalin’s three preferred ways of dealing with such problems were (1) have them murdered, (2) have them sent to the Lubyanka (KGB headquarters on Moscow's Lubyanka Square) to be tortured to death or (3) have them sent to the Gulag to be worked to death.

Portrait of Oliver Cromwell (1650), oil on canvas by Samuel Cooper.

Even if it’s something ephemeral, politicians are often sensitive about representations of their image but concerns are heightened when it’s a portrait which, often somewhere hung on public view, will long outlive them.  Although in the modern age the proliferation and accessibility of the of the photographic record has meant portraits no longer enjoy an exclusivity in the depiction of history, there’s still something about a portrait which conveys, however misleadingly, a certain authority.  That’s not to suggest the classic representational portraits have always been wholly authentic, a good many of those of the good and great acknowledged to have been painted by “sympathetic” artists known for their subtleties in rendering their subjects variously more slender, youthful or hirsute as the raw material required.  Probably few were like Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658; Lord Protector of the Commonwealth 1653-1658) who told Samuel Cooper (1609-1672) to paint him “warts and all”.  The artist obliged.

Although certain about the afterlife, Cromwell was a practical politician with few illusions about life on earth.  Once, when being driven in a coach through cheering crowds, his companion remarked that his popularity with the people must be pleasing.  The lord protector replied he had no doubt they’d be cheering just as loud were he being taken to the gallows to be hanged.

Exhibition of images of Lindsay Lohan by Richard Phillips (b 1962), hung in the Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, New York, 11 September-20 October 2012.  Described by the artist as an installation, the exhibition was said to be "an example of the way Phillips uses collaborative forms of image production to reorder the relationship of Pop Art to its subjects, the staging and format of these lush, large-scale works said to render them realist portraits of the place-holders of their own mediated existence."

Bad Teddy and Good Theodore: Portrait of Theodore Roosevelt (1903), oil on canvas by Théobald Chartran (left) and Portrait of Theodore Roosevelt (1903) oil on canvas by John Singer Sargent.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919; US President 1901-1909), famous also for waging small wars and shooting big game, after being impressed by Théobald Chartran’s (1849–1907) portrait of his wife (Edith, 1861-1948), invited the French artist to paint him too.  So displeased was he with the result (which he thought made him look effete), he refused to hang the work.  Later, he would have it destroyed, turning turned instead to expatriate American artist John Singer Sargent (1856–1925).  The relationship didn’t start well as the two couldn’t agree on a setting and during one heated argument, the president suddenly, hand on hip, took on a defiant air while making a point and Sargent had his pose, imploring his subject not to move.  This one delighted Roosevelt and prominently it was hung in the White House.

Side by side: Portraits of Barak Obama (2011) and Donald Trump (2018), both oil on canvas by Sarah A Boardman, on permanent display, Gallery of Presidents, Third Floor, Rotunda, State Capitol Building, Denver, Colorado.

In March 2025 it was reported Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021 and since 2025) was not best pleased with a portrait of him hanging in Colorado’s State Capitol; he damned the work as “purposefully distorted” and demanded Governor Jared Polis (b 1975; governor (Democratic) of Colorado since 2019) immediately take it down.  In a post on his Truth Social platform, Mr Trump said: “Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol, put up by the Governor, along with all the other Presidents, was purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before.  The artist also did President Obama and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst. She must have lost her talent as she got older.  In any event, I would much prefer not having a picture than having this one, but many people from Colorado have called and written to complain. In fact, they are actually angry about it!  I am speaking on their behalf to the radical left Governor, Jared Polis, who is extremely weak on crime, in particular with respect to Tren de Aragua, which practically took over Aurora (Don’t worry, we saved it!), to take it down. Jared should be ashamed of himself!”

At the unveiling in 2019 it was well-received by the Republicans assembled.  If Fox News had an art critic (the Lord forbid), she would have approved but presumably that would now be withdrawn and denials issued it was ever conferred.  

Intriguingly, it was one of Mr Trump’s political fellow-travellers (Kevin Grantham (b 1970; state senator (Republican, Colorado) 2011-2019) who had in 2018 stated a GoFundMe page to raise the funds needed to commission the work, the US$10,000 pledged, it is claimed, within “a few hours”.  Ms Boardman’s painting mush have received the approval of the Colorado Senate Republicans because it was them who in 2019 hosted what was described as the “non-partisan unveiling event” when first the work was displayed hanging next to one of Mr Trump’s first presidential predecessor (Barack Obama (b 1961; US president 2009-2017), another of Ms Boardman’s commissions.  Whether or not it’s of relevance in the matter of now controversial portrait may be a matter for professional critics to ponder but on her website the artist notes she has “…always been passionate about painting portraits, being particularly intrigued by the depth and character found deeper in her subjects… believing the ultimate challenge is to capture the personality, character and soul of an individual in a two-dimensional format...”  Her preferred models “…are carefully chosen for their enigmatic personality and uniqueness...” and she admits some of her favorite subjects those “whose faces show the tracks of real life.”

Portrait of Winston Churchill (1954) by Graham Sutherland.

Another subject turned disappointed critic was Sir Winston Churchill.  In 1954, a committee, funded by the donation of a 1000 guineas from members of both houses of parliament, commissioned English artist Graham Sutherland (1903–1980) to paint a portrait of the prime minister to mark his 80^th birthday.  The two apparently got on well during the sittings, Churchill himself a prolific, if undistinguished, amateur painter (in 1948 he published the book Painting as a Pastime) and it’s said he enjoyed their discussions.  He was unimpressed though with the result, telling Sutherland that while he acknowledged his technical prowess, he found the work “not suitable”.  To his doctor he was less restrained, calling it "filthy" and "malignant".

Portrait of Laurence Olivier in the role of Richard III (1955) by Salvador Dalí.

It had been intended the painting would be hung in the House of Commons but Churchill had no intention of letting it be seen by anyone.  An unveiling ceremony had been arranged and Churchill demanded it not include the painting, relenting only when a compromise was arranged whereby both subject and artwork would appear together but rather than being hung in the Commons, it would instead be gifted to him to hang where he pleased.  Both sides appeased (if not pleased), the ceremony proceeded, Churchill making a brief speech of thanks during which he described his gift as “…a remarkable example of modern art..”, praise not even faint.  It was never hung, consigned unwrapped to the basement of the prime minister’s country house where it remained for about a year until Lady Churchill (Clementine, 1885–1977)), sharing her husband’s view of the thing, had a servant take it outside where it was tossed on a bonfire, an act of practical criticism Sutherland condemned as “vandalism”.  Not anxious to repeat the experience of his brush with modernism, Churchill declined the offer of a sitting before the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), the result of which might have been interesting.  It's not known if Churchill ever saw Dali's interpretation of Laurence Olivier (1907-1989).

Two photographs of Winston Churchill (1941) by Yousuf Karsh.

Roosevelt’s pose is one favored by politicians but the expression adopted matters too.  The famous photograph taken in Ottawa in December 1941 by Armenian-Canadian Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002) was actually one of several but those where Churchill shows a more cheerful countenance are not remembered; they didn’t so well suit those troubled times.  The scowl, although immediately regarded as emblematic of British defiance of the Nazis, had a more prosaic origin, the photographer recalling his subject had appeared benign until it was insisted the ever-present Havana cigar be discarded lest it spoil the photograph.  That changed the mood but, the moment captured, he relented and permitted a couple more, including the now obscure ones with a smile.

War

War (pronounced wawr)

(1) A conflict carried on by force of arms, as between nations or between parties within a nation; warfare, as by land, sea, or air; in the singular, a specific conflict (eg Second Punic War).

(2) A state or period of armed hostility or active military operations.

(3) A contest carried on by force of arms, as in a series of battles or campaigns.

(4) By extension, a descriptor for various forms of non-armed conflict (war on poverty, trade war, war on drugs, war on cancer, war of words etc).

(5) A type of card game played with a 52 card pack.

(6) A battle (archaic).

(7) To conduct a conflict.

(8) In law, the standard abbreviation for warrant (and in England, the county Warwickshire.

Pre 1150: The noun was from the Middle English werre, from the late Old English were, were & wyrre (large-scale military conflict) (which displaced the native Old English ġewinn), from the Old Northern French were & werre (variant of Old French guerre (difficulty, dispute; hostility; fight, combat, war)), from the Medieval Latin werra, from the Frankish werru (confusion; quarrel), from the Old Norse verriworse and was cognate with the Old High German werra (confusion, strife, quarrel), the German verwirren (to confuse), the Old Saxon werran (to confuse, perplex), the Dutch war (confusion, disarray) and the West Frisian war (defense, self-defense, struggle (also confusion).  Root was the primitive Indo-European wers- (to mix up, confuse, beat, perplex) and the Cognates are thought to suggest the original sense was "to bring into a state of confusion”.  The verb was from the Middle English, from the late Old English verb transitive werrien (to make war upon) and was derivative of the noun.  The alternative English form warre was still in use as late as the seventeenth century.

Developments in other European languages including the Old French guerrer and the Old North French werreier.  The Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian guerra also are from the Germanic; why those speaking Romanic tongues turned to the Germanic for a word meaning "war" word is speculative but it may have been to avoid the Latin bellum (from which is derived bellicose) because its form tended to merge with bello- (beautiful).  Interestingly and belying the reputation later gained, there was no common Germanic word for "war" at the dawn of historical times.  Old English had many poetic words for "war" (wig, guð, heaðo, hild, all common in personal names), but the usual one to translate Latin bellum was gewin (struggle, strife (and related to “win”).

War-time appeared first in the late fourteenth century; the territorial conflicts against Native Americans added several forms including warpath (1775), war-whoop (1761), war-dance (1757), war-song (1757) & war-paint (1826) the last of which came often to be applied to war-mongering (qv) politicians (as in "putting on their war-paint"), a profession which does seem to attract blood-thirsty non-combatants.  War crimes, although widely discussed for generations, were first discussed in the sense of being a particular set of acts which might give rise to specific offences which could be codified in International Law: A Treatise (1906) by LFL Oppenheim (1858–1919).  The war chest dates from 1901 although even then it’s use was certainly almost always figurative; in the distant past there presumably had in treasuries been chests of treasure to pay for armies.  War games, long an essential part of military planning, came to English from the German Kriegspiel, the Prussians most advanced in such matters because the innovative structure of their general staff system.

In English, war is most productive as a modifier, adjective etc and examples include: Types of war: Cold War, holy war, just war, civil war, war of succession, war of attrition, war on terror etc; Actual wars: World War I, Punic Wars, First Gulf War, Korean War, Hundred Years' War, Thirty Years' War, Six-day War etc; Campaigns against various social problems: War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on cancer; The culture wars: War on Christmas, war on free speech; In commerce: Price wars, Cola Wars, turf war; In crime: turf war (also used in conventional commerce), gang war, Castellammarese War; In technology: Bus wars, operating system wars, browser wars; Various: pre-war, post-war, inter-war, man-o'-war, war cabinet, warhead, warhorse, warlord, war between the sexes, war bond, war reparations, war room.

Film set for the War Room in Dr Strangelove (1964).

Pre-war and post-war need obviously to be used in context; “pre-war” which in the inter-war years almost always meant pre-1914, came after the end of WWII to mean pre-1939 (even in US historiography).  “Post-war” tracked a similar path and now probably means the years immediately after WWII, the era generally thought to have ended (at the latest) in 1973 when the first oil shock ended the long boom.  Given the propensity over the centuries for wars between (tribes, cities, kings, states etc) to flare up from time to time, there have been many inter-war periods but the adjective inter-war didn’t come into wide use until the 1940s when it was used exclusively to describe the period (1918-1939) between the world wars.  The phrase “world war”, although tied to the big, multi-theatre conflicts of the twentieth century, had been used speculatively as early as 1898, then in the context of the US returning the Philippines (then a colonial possession) to Spain, trigging European war into which she might be drawn.  “Word War” (referring to the 1914-1918 conflict which is regarded as being “world-wide” since 1917 when the US entered as a belligerent) was used almost as soon as the war started but “Great War” continued to be the preferred form until 1939 when used of “world war” spiked; World War II came into use even before Russian, US & Japanese involvement in 1941.  For as long as there have been the war-like there’s presumably been the anti-war faction but the adjectival anti-war (also antiwar) came into general use only in 1812, an invention of American English, in reference to opposition to the War of 1812, the use extending by 1821 to describe a position of political pacifism which opposed all war.  War-monger (and warmonger) seems first to have appeared in Edmund Spenser’s (circa 1552-1599) Faerie Queene (1590) although it’s possible it may have prior currency.  The warhead was from 1989, used by engineers to describe the "explosive part of a torpedo", the use later transferred during the 1940s to missiles.  The warhorse, attested from the 1650s, was a "powerful horse ridden into war", one selected for strength and spirit and the figurative sense of "seasoned veteran" of anything dates from 1837.  The (quasi-offensive though vaguely admiring) reference to women perceived as tough was noted in 1921.

Man-of-war (a soldier and) is an old form while the meaning "armed ship, vessel equipped for warfare" is from the late fifteenth century and was one of the primary warships of early-modern navies, the sea creature known as the Portuguese man-of-war (1707) so called for its sail-like crest.  The more common form was “man o' War”.  The Cold War may have started as early as 1946 but certainly existed from some time in 1947-1948; it was a form of "non-hostile belligerency” (although the death–toll in proxy-wars fought for decades on its margins was considerable);  it seems first to have appeared in print in October 1945 in a piece by George Orwell (1903—1950).  The companion phrase “hot war” is actually just a synonym for “war” and makes sense only if used in conjunction with “cold war”.  The cold war was memorably defined by Lord Cherwell (Professor Frederick Lindemann, 1886–1957) as “two sides for years counting their missiles”.

The civil war (battles among fellow citizens or within a community (as opposed to between tribes, cities, nations etc)) for civil in a sense of "occurring among fellow citizens" is noted from the fourteenth century in batayle ciuile (civil battle), the exact phrase “civil war” attested from late fifteenth century (bella civicus in the Latin).  A word for the type of conflict in the Old English was ingewinn and in Ancient Greek it had been polemos epidemios.  The instances of what would now be called civil war pre-date antiquity but the early references typically were in reference to ancient Rome where the conflicts were, if not more frequent, certainly better documented.  The struggle in England between the parliament and Charles I (1600-1649) has always and correctly been known as the English Civil War (1642-1651) whereas there are scholars who insist the US Civil War (1861-1865) should rightly be called the “War of Secession”, the “war between the States" or the “Federal-Confederate War”.  None of the alternatives ever managed great traction and “US Civil War” has long been the accepted form although, when memories were still raw, if there was ever a disagreement about this, the parties seem inevitability to have settled on “the War”.  The phrases pre-war and post-war are never applied the US Civil War, the equivalents being the Latin forms ante-bellum (literally “before the war”) and post-bellum (literally “after the war”).

Colonel Nasser, president of Egypt, Republic Square, Cairo, 22 February 1958.

During the centuries when rules were rare, wars were not but there was little discussion about whether or not a war was happening.  There would be debates about the wisdom of going to war or the strategy adopted but whether or not it was a war was obvious to all.  That changed after the Second World War when the charter of the United Nations was agreed to attempt to ensure force would never again be used as a means of resolving disputes between nations.  That's obviously not been a success but the implications of the charter have certainly affected the language of conflict, much now hanging on whether an event is war or something else which merely looks like war.  An early example of the linguistic lengths to which those waging war (a thing of which they would have boasted) would go, in the post-charter world, to deny they were at war happened after British, French and Israeli forces in 1956 invaded Egypt in response to Colonel Gamal Nasser's (1918–1970; president of Egypt 1954-1970) nationalization of foreign-owned Suez Canal Company.  The invasion was a military success but it soon became apparent that Israel, France and Britain were, by any standards, waging an aggressive war and had conspired, ineptly, to make it appear something else.  The United States threatened sanctions against Britain & France and the invading forces withdrew.  There's always been the suspicion that in the wake of this split in the Western Alliance, the USSR seized the opportunity to intervene in Hungary which was threatening to become a renegade province.

Suez Canal, 1956.

In the House of Commons (Hansard: 1 November 1956 (vol 558 cc1631-7441631)), the prime minister (Anthony Eden, 1897–1977, UK prime-minister 1955-1957) was asked to justify how what appeared to be both an invasion and an act of aggressive war could be in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.  Just to jog the prime-minister's memory of the charter, the words he delivered at the UN's foundation conference in San Francisco in 1945 were read out: “At intervals in history mankind has sought by the creation of international machinery to solve disputes between nations by agreement and not by force.”  In reply, Mr Eden assured the house there had been "...no declaration of war by us.", a situation he noted prevailed for the whole of the Korean War and while there was in Egypt clearly "...a state of armed conflict...", just as in Korea, "...there was no declaration of war.  It was never admitted that there was a state of war, and Korea was never a war in any technical or legal sense, nor are we at war with Egypt now."

Quite how the comparison with Korea, a police action under the auspices of the UN and authorized by the Security Council (the USSR was boycotting the place at the time) was relevant escaped many of the prime-minister's critics.  The UK had issued an ultimatum to Egypt regarding the canal which contained conditions as to time and other things; the time expired and the conditions were not accepted.  It was then clear in international law that in those circumstances the country which delivers the ultimatum is not entitled to carry on hostilities without a declaration of war so the question was what legal justification was there for an invasion?  The distinction between a “state of war" and a "state of armed conflict", whatever its relevance to certain technical matters, seemed not to matter in the fundamental question of the lawfulness of the invasion under international law.  Mr Eden continued to provide many answers but none to that question.

The aversion to declaring war continues to this day, the United States, hardly militarily inactive during the last eight-odd decades, last declared war in 1942 and that was against Italy.  There is it seems, even an aversion to the word, the UK not having had a secretary of state (minister) for war since 1964 and the US becoming (nominally) pacifist even earlier, the last secretary of war serving in 1947; the more UN-friendly “defense” the preferred word on both sides of the Atlantic.  In the Kremlin, Mr Putin (b 1952; prime-minister or president of Russia since 1999) seems also have come not to like the word.  While apparently sanguine at organizing “states of armed conflict”, he’s as reluctant as Mr Eden to hear his “special military operations” described as “invasions” or “wars” and in a recent legal flourish, arranged the passage of a law which made “mentioning the war” unlawful.

Not mentioning the peacekeeping operation: Mr Putin.

The bill which the Duma (lower house of parliament) & Federation Council (upper house) passed, and the president rapidly signed into law, provided for fines or imprisonment for up to fifteen years in the Gulag for intentionally spreading “fake news” or “discrediting the armed forces”, something which includes labelling the “special military operation” in Ukraine as a “war” or “invasion”.  Presumably, given the circumstances, the action could be described as a “state of armed conflict” and even Mr Putin seems to have stopped calling it a “peacekeeping operation”; he may have thought the irony too subtle for the audience.  Those who post or publish anything on the matter will be choosing their words with great care so as not to mention the war.

However, although Mr Putin may not like using the word “war”, there’s much to suggest he’s a devotee of the to the most famous (he coined a few) aphorism of Prussian general & military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831): “War is the continuation of policy with other means.”  The view has many adherents and while some acknowledge its cynical potency with a weary regret, for others it has been a word view to purse with relish.  In the prison diary assembled from the huge volume of fragments he had smuggled out of Spandau prison while serving the twenty year sentence he was lucky to receive for war crimes & crimes against humanity (Spandauer Tagebücher (Spandau, the Secret Diaries), pp 451 William Collins Inc, 1976), Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945) recounted one of Adolf Hitler’s (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) not infrequent monologues and the enthusiastic concurrence by the sycophantic Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946; Nazi foreign minister 1938-1945):

"In the summer of 1939, On the terrace of the Berghof [Hitler’s alpine retreat], Hitler was pacing back and forth with one of his military adjutants. The other guests respectfully withdrew to the glassed-in veranda.  But in the midst of an animated lecture he was giving to the adjutant, Hitler called to us to join him on the terrace. “They should have listened to Moltke and struck at once” he said, resuming the thread of his thought, “as soon as France recovered her strength after the defeat in 1871.  Or else in 1898 and 1899.  America was at war with Spain, the French were fighting the English at Fashoda and were at odds with them over the Sudan, and England was having her problems with the Boers in South Africa, so that she would soon have to send her army in there.  And what a constellation there was in 1905 also, when Russia was beaten by Japan.   The rear in the East no threat, France and England on good terms, it is true, but without Russia no match for the Reich militarily. It’s an old principle: He who seizes the initiative in war has won more than a battle.  And after all, there was a war on!”  Seeing our stunned expressions, Hitler threw in almost irritably: “There is always a war on. The Kaiser [Wilhelm II (1859–1941; German Emperor & King of Prussia 1888-1918)] hesitated too long."

Such epigrams usually transported Ribbentrop into a state of high excitement.  At these moments it was easy to see that he alone among us thought he was tracking down, along with Hitler, the innermost secrets of political action.  This time, too, he expressed his agreement with Hitler with that characteristic compound of subservience and the hauteur of an experienced traveller whose knowledge of foreign ways still made an impression on Hitler.  Ribbentrop’s guilt, that is, did not consist in his having made a policy of war on his own. Rather, he was to blame for using his authority as a supposed cosmopolite to corroborate Hider’s provincial ideas. The war itself was first and last Hitler’s idea and work.  “That is exactly what neither the Kaiser nor the Kaiser’s politicians ever really understood,” Ribbentrop was loudly explaining to everyone.  “There’s always a war on. The difference is only whether the guns are firing or not.  There’s war in peacetime too. Anyone who has not realized that cannot make foreign policy.”

Hider threw his foreign minister a look of something close to gratitude.  “Yes, Ribbentrop,” he said, “yes!"  He was visibly moved by having someone in this group who really understood him. “When the time comes that I am no longer here, people must keep that in mind.  Absolutely.”  And then, as though carried away by his insight into the nature of the historical process, he went on: “Whoever succeeds me must be sure to have an opening for a new war.  We never want a static situation where that sort of thing hangs in doubt In future peace treaties we must therefore always leave open a few questions that will provide a pretext.  Think of Rome and Carthage, for instance. A new war was always built right into every peace treaty. That's Rome for you! That's statesmanship.”

Pleased with himself, Hitler twisted from side to side, looking challengingly around the attentive, respectful circle.  He was obviously enjoying the vision of himself beside the statesmen of ancient Rome.  When he occasionally compared Ribbentrop with Bismarck—a comparison I myself sometimes heard him make—he was implying that he himself soared high above the level of bourgeois nationalistic policy.  He saw himself in the dimensions of world history. And so did we.  We went to the veranda. Abruptly, as was his way, he began talking about something altogether banal."

Oligarch

Oligarch (pronounced ol-i-gahrk)

(1) In political science, one of the rulers in an oligarchy (a system of government characterized by the institutional or constructive rule of a few and the literal or effective exclusion of the many); a member of an oligarchy.

(2) A very rich person involved in business in a manner which interacts intimately with the organs of government, the nature of the relationship varying between systems but usually with the implication of mutually beneficial corrupt or improper (if sometimes technically lawful) conduct.

(3) In cosmogony, a proto-planet formed during oligarchic accretion.

1600-1610: From the French oligarque & olygarche, from the Late Latin oligarcha, from the Ancient Greek ὀλιγάρχης (oligárkhēs) and related to oligarkhia (government by the few), the construct being olig- (few) (from stem of oligos (few, small, little) (a word of uncertain origin)) +‎ -arch (ruler, leader) (from arkhein (to rule)).  The noun plural was oligarchs.  In English, an earlier form of oligarchy was the circa 1500 oligracie, a borrowing from the Old French.  Oligarch & oligarchy are nouns, oligarchal, oligarchical & oligarchic are adjectives, and oligarchically is an adverb; the noun plural is oligarchs.  The playful minigarch (the offspring of an oligarch) and oligarchette (a female oligarch or an aspiring oligarch not yet rich enough to be so described are both non-standard while oligarchie & oligarchisch are sometimes used to convey a deliberate sense of the foreign.  Oligarch is now almost never used in its classical sense to refer to rulers of a political entity but instead to describe the small numbers of those who have become exceedingly rich, usually in some improper (even if technically lawful) way with the corrupt and surreptitious cooperation of those in government, the implication being they too have benefited.  Words like plutocrat, potentate and tycoonocrat are sometimes used as synonyms but don’t covey the sense of gains improperly and corruptly achieved.

Oligarchs are sometimes described in the press as "colorful characters", something a bit misleading because many seek a low profile, something often advisable in Mr Putin's Russia.  In a movie about oligarchs Netflix presumably would focus on some of the more colorful.

In modern use, an oligarch is one of the select few people who have become very rich by virtue of their close connections to rule or influence leaders in an oligarchy (a government in which power is held by a select few individuals or a small class of powerful people).  Unlike the relationship between “monarch” & “monarchy”, “oligarch” & “oligarchy” are not used in the literature of political science in quite the same way.  A monarch’s relationship to their monarchy is a thing defined by the constitutional system under which they reign and that may be absolute, despotic or theocratic but is inherently directly linked.  However, even in a political system which is blatantly and obviously an oligarchy, the members of the ruling clique are not referred to as oligarchs by virtue of their place in the administration, the more common descriptors being autocrat, despot, fascist, tyrant, dictator, totalitarian, authoritarian, kleptocrat or other terms that to varying degrees hint at unsavoriness.  Instead, the word oligarch has come to be used as a kind of encapsulated critique of corruption and economic distortion and the individual oligarch a personification of that.  The modern oligarch is one who has massively profited, usually by gaining in some corrupt way either the resources which once belonged to the state or trading rights within the state which tend towards monopolistic or oligopolistic arrangements.  Inherent in the critique is the assumption that the corrupt relationship is a symbiotic one between oligarch and those in government, the details of which can vary: oligarchs may be involved in the political process or entirely excluded but a common feature to all such arrangements is that there is a mutual enrichment at the expense of the sate (ie the citizens).  The word oligarch has thus become divorced from oligarchy and attached only to oligopoly.

The word oligopoly dates from 1887, from the Medieval Latin oligopolium, the construct being the Ancient Greek ὀλίγος (olígos) (few) + πωλεῖν (poleîn) (to sell) from the primitive Indo-European root pel (to sell) and describes a market in which an industry is dominated by a small number of large-scale sellers called oligopolists (the adjectival form oligopolistic from a surprisingly recent 1939).  Oligopolies, which inherently reduce competition and impose higher prices on consumers do not of necessity form as a result of improper or corrupt collusion and may be entirely organic, the classic example of which is two competitors in a once broad market becoming increasingly efficient, both achieving such critical mass that others are unable to compete.  At that point, there is often a tendency for the two to collude to divide the market between them, agreeing not to compete in certain fields or geographical regions, effectively creating sectoral or regional monopolies.  If competitors do emerge, the oligopolists have sufficient economic advantage to be able temporarily to reduce their selling prices to below the cost of production & distribution, forcing the completion from the market, after which the profitable price levels are re-imposed.

A classic game theory model of oligopolistic behavior.

Although not thought desirable by economists, they’ve long attracted interest interest because they create interesting market structures, especially when they interact with instruments of government designed to prevent their emergence or at least ameliorate the consequences of their operation.  The most obvious restriction governments attempt to impose is to prevent collusion between oligopolists in an attempt to deny them the opportunity to set prices of particular goods.  Even if successful, this can only ever partially be done because most prices quickly become public knowledge and with so few sellers in a market, most of which tend to operate with similar input, production & distribution costs, each oligopolist can in most cases predict the actions of the others. This has been of interest in game theory because the decisions of one player are not only in reaction to that of the others but also influences their behavior.

Dartz Prombron: The Prombron is now typical of the preferred transport for an oligarch, the traditional limousine not able to be configured to offer the same level of protection against attacks with military-grade weapons.  Prombrons were originally trimmed with leather from the foreskins of whale penises but the feature was dropped after protests from the environmental lobby.

Oligarchs in the modern sense operate differently and the Russian model under Mr Putin has become the exemplar although some on a smaller scale (notably Lebanon since 1990) are probably even more extreme.  The Russian oligarchs emerged in the 1990s in the chaos which prevailed after the dissolution of the old Soviet Union.  They were men, sometime outside government but often apparatchiks within, well-skilled in the corruption and the operations of the black market which constituted an increasingly large chunk of the economy in the last decade of the USSR and these skills they parlayed into their suddenly capitalistic world.  Capitalism however depends on there being private property and because the USSR was constructed on the basis of Marxist theory which demanded it was the state which owned and controlled the means of production and distribution, there was little of that.  So there was privatization, some of it officially and much of it anything but, the classic examples being a back-channel deal between the oligarch and someone in government purporting to be vested with the authority to sell the assets of the state.  Few in government did this without a cut (often under the guise of a equity mechanism called “loans for shares”) and indeed, some apparatchiks sold the assets to themselves and those assets could be nice little earners like oil & gas concessions or producers, electricity generators, transport networks or financial institutions.  One of the reasons the assets were able to be sold at unbelievably bargain prices was a product of Soviet accounting: because the book value of assets had so little meaning in communist accounting, in many cases recorded asset values hadn’t be updated in decades and were in any case sometimes only nominal.  There were therefore sales which, prima facie, might have appeared to verge on the legitimate.

2021 Aurus Senat, now the official presidential car of the Russian state.

Few were and in any event, even if the aspiring oligarch didn’t have the cash, somewhere in government there would be found an official able to arrange the state to loan the necessary fund from the resources of the state, if need be creating (effectively printing) the money.  From that point, newly acquitted assets could be leveraged, sold to foreign investors at huge profit or even operated in the novelty of the free market, an attractive proposition for many given the asset obtained from the state might be a natural monopoly, competition therefore of no immediate concern.  Thus was modern Russian capitalism born of what were economic crimes on a scale unimaginable to the legions condemned to death or years in the Gulag under comrade Stalin.  Even before becoming prime-minister in 1999, Mr Putin was well aware of what had happened, being acquainted with some of the players in the process but shortly after assuming office, he had small a team of lawyers, accountants and economists undertake a forensic analysis to try more accurately to quantify who did what and who got how much.  Although the paperwork his investigative project produced has never been made public, it was reputed to have been reduced to a modestly-sized file but the contents were dynamic and put to good use.

In either 2003 or 2004, Mr Putin, assisted by officers of the FSB (successor to the alphabet-soup of similar agencies (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD, SMERSH, MGB & (most famously) KGB)) experts in such things, “arranged” a series of interviews with the oligarchs whose conduct in the privatizations of 1990s had been most impressive (or egregious depending on one’s view).  Well aware of the relationship between wealth and political influence, Mr Putin’s explained that the oligarchs had to decide whether they wished to be involved in business or politics; they couldn’t do both.  Mr Putin then explained the extent of their theft from the state, how much was involved, who else facilitated and profited from the transactions and what would be the consequences for all concerned were the matters to come to trial.  Then to sweeten the deal, Mr Putin pointed out that although the oligarchs had stolen their wealth on the grandest scale, “they had stolen it fair and square” and could keep it if they agreed to refrain from involvement in politics.  The Russian oligarchy understood his language, the lucidity of his explanation perhaps enhanced by oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky (b 1963; then listed as the richest man in Russia and in the top-twenty worldwide) being arrested on charges of fraud and tax evasion, shortly before the meetings were convened (he was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to nine years in prison and while serving his sentence was charged with and found guilty of embezzlement and money laundering.  Mr Putin later pardoned Khodorkovsky and he was released to self-imposed exile in late 2013).  Few failed to note the significance of Mr Khodorkovsky having been "meddling in politics".

Alastair Campbell (b 1957; Downing Street Director of Communications & official spokesperson (1997–2003) rear) with Vladimir Putin (b 1952; Prime-Minister of Russia 1999-2000 & 2008-2012, President of Russia 1999-2008 & since 2012, left) and Tony Blair (b 1953; UK Prime Minister 1997-2007, right).  Mr Putin in recent years has stretched plausible deniability well beyond the point at which plausibility can be said to have become implausible and the not infrequently seen: "cause of death: falling from window of high building" is known by Russians as the "oligarch elevator".  Predating even the Tsarist state, grim humor has a long tradition in Russia.     

Mr Putin being taken for a drive by George W Bush (b 1946; George XLIII, US president 2001-2009) in the Russian president's GAZ M21 Volga and admiring his 2009 Lada Niva.

In a sign the oligarchs were wise to comply, it was estimated by Bill Browder (b 1964; CEO and co-founder of the once Moscow-linked Hermitage Capital Management) during his testimony to the US Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017 that the biggest single increase in Mr Putin’s personal wealth happened immediately after Mr Khodorkovsky was jailed.  Given the history, Mr Browder is perhaps not an entirely impartial viewer but the pact between the autocrat and the oligarchy has been well-understood for years but what has always attracted speculation is the possibility that attached to it was a secret protocol whereby Mr Putin received transactional fees, imposing essentially a license to operate in Russia, alleged by some to be a cut of as much as 50%, based apparently on assessed profits rather than turnover.  Even if a half-share is too high and his cut is a more traditional 10%, the amount payable over the years would have been a very big number so there’s been much speculation about Mr Putin’s money, some estimates suggesting he may have a net wealth in the US$ billions.  That would seem truly impressive, given the Kremlin each year publishes a disclosure of their head of state’s income and assets and the last return disclosed Mr Putin enjoys an annual salary of US$140,000 and owns an 800-square-foot (74 m²) apartment, his other notable assets being three cars: a 1960 (first series) GAZ M21 Volga, a 1965 (second series) GAZ M21P Volga and a 2009 Lada Niva 4x4.  Keen on the outdoors, he also owns a camping trailer.

A country cottage on the Black Sea coast alleged to be owned by Mr Putin.  The large grounds surrounding the cottage are an indication why Mr Putin needs his 2009 Lada 4x4 & camping trailer.

On the basis of that, income and net wealth seem not at all out of alignment but intriguingly, he’s been photographed with some high-end watches on his wrist, including an A. Lange & Söhne 1815 Tourbograph which sells for around US$500,000.  He is rumored to be the owner of a 190,000 square-foot (17,650 m²) mansion which sits atop a cliff overlooking the Black Sea (reputedly Russia’s largest private residence and known, in a nod to the understated manner of the rich, as “Putin’s country cottage”) which has an ice hockey rink, a casino, a nightclub with stripper poles, an extravagantly stocked wine cellar and the finest furniture in Louis XIV style, the toilet-roll holders apparently at US$1,250 apiece (although, given the scale of the place, he may have received a bulk-purchase discount).  It demands a full-time staff of forty to maintain the estate, the annual running costs estimated at US$2-3 million.  Designed by Italian architect Lanfranco Cirillo (b 1959), and officially owned (though alleged to be held under a secret trust of which Mr Putin is the sole beneficiary) by oligarch Alexander Ponomarenko (b 1964), the construction cost was estimated to be somewhere around a US$ billion which seems expensive but a yacht currently moored in Italy and alleged also to belong to Mr Putin is said to have cost not much less to launch so either or both may actually represent good value and to assure privacy, the Russian military enforces a no-fly zone around the property.  Like many well-connected chaps around the world, a few of Mr Putin’s billions figured in the release of the Panama Papers in 2016.

1962 GAZ-M21 (rebuilt to KGB (V8) specifications).

Apart from the Black Sea palace, there are unverified reports Mr Putin is the owner of 19 other houses, 58 aircraft & helicopters and 700 cars (although it’s not clear if that number includes his two Volgas and the Lada).  No verified breakdown of the 700 cars has ever been published but given Mr Putin’s apparent fondness for Volgas, it may be his collection includes the special-variant of the GAZ-M21 Volga, 603 (as the GAZ-M23) of which were produced between 1962-1970 for the exclusive use of the KGB and other Soviet “special services”.  Equipped with the 5.53 litre (337 cubic inch) V8 engine from the big GAZ-13 Chaika (Gull) (1959-1981 and in the Soviet hierarchy, second only to the even bigger ZIL limousines (1936-2012)), the car was said to be a not entirely successful piece of engineering but it was certainly faster than the four-cylinder model on which it was based.  It’s never been clear just what was the top speed because the speedometer was calibrated only to 180 km/h (112 mph) but one intrepid KGB apparatchik claimed to have achieved that and reported the Volga was “still accelerating”.  Known to be nostalgic for the old ways of the KGB (with all that implies), it’s hoped Mr Putin has preserved at least one.

Separated at birth: 1962 GAZ-M21 V8 (left) and 1964 Pontiac GTO.

Although barely acknowledged by US collectors,  the V8 GAZ-M21 actually predated by Pontiac GTO by more than a year and it's the GTO which is usually cited as "the first muscle car" (a concept defined as "a big engine from the full-sized line installed in the smaller intermediate platform") but the KGB's project was exactly that.  In a sense, the true ancestor of the muscle cars of the 1960s was probably the 1936 Buick Century, a revised version of the model 60, created by replacing the 233 cubic inch (3.8 litre) straight eight with the 320 cubic inch (5.2 litre) unit from the longer, heavier Roadmaster.  It wasn’t exactly a transplant into an “intermediate” (a concept unknown until the 1960s) but the process was not dissimilar.  Still, if one sticks to the accepted the definition, it’s the V8 GAZ which came first and not the GTO and that the Soviet vehicle rates not even a mention in Mike Mueller’s otherwise comprehensive Muscle Car Source Book (2015, Quarto Publishing Group) is that’s publication’s only omission of note.  Mr Mueller’s book is unusual in the field in that it seems to contain not a single error, a rarity in such publications where misinformation is rife; it’s highly recommended.  If Mr Mueller ever produces a revised edition, hopefully the KGB’s unacknowledged contribution to the muscle car ecosystem will gain a footnote. 

Mr Putin agitprop.

Mr Putin has admitted: "I am the wealthiest man, not just in Europe but in the whole world: I collect emotions. I am wealthy in that the people of Russia have twice entrusted me with the leadership of a great nation such as Russia. I believe that is my greatest wealth."  Quite how rich Mr Putin might be is such a swirl of estimates, rumors, supposition and doubtlessly invention (lies) that it's unlikely anyone except those disinclined to discuss the matter really know and after all, if he's rich as his detractors claim, he probably isn't exactly sure himself.  Given that, his statement seemed intended to clear up any misunderstandings.