On Putin's anti-liberalism: https://www.newstatesman.

com/politics/uk/2019/07/vladimir-putins-
quest-build-anti-liberal-empire. I always recommend to people to reread Herzen's From the Other
Shore. I also liked Kerensky's Memoirs. In political terms, one wanders about the fate of the
Russian liberals today.

Krugman likes Branko's blog piece on Putin's and oligarchs in general:

https://glineq.blogspot.com/2019/07/oligarchs-and-oligarchs.html. That is on his twitter account.
He, Krugman, manages to cover Rome, the Middle Ages, and goes all the way to today in few
twits. Awesome.

Branko uses Olson's distinction between the stationary and the roving bandit to distinguish
between, let me call them, benign and malign oligarchs. This is inaccurate as the interpretation of
Olson's theory, which is in fact useful in the context of Putin's oligarchs.

The two Olson’s types of bandits are political entrepreneurs who provide security and extract taxes.
From mostly the wealthy who in turn squeeze the labourers. Some, like Stalin, who Olson saw as
a stationary bandit, use the monopoly of the power to maximise their own benefits by efficiently
using their tax base (that is empirically wrong, but that is what Olson argued). The roving bandits
are like Mafia. They fight over territory and thus ruin each other’s businesses and also the welfare
of the producing classes. One can think of international relations in the non-liberal order as
basically the competition of roving bandits (where Putin already has a head start).

It is assumed, very importantly, that the rich as well as the working people cannot move - the
former cannot move their wealth, the latter themselves. So, these oligarchs are like Russian
oligarchs before and now. Their wealth is territorial - land and natural resources. Oligarchs in the
developed world are indeed roving, in Branko's terms, owning wealth in industry and services,
which is in fact constraining the stationary bandit in power. That is where Branko goes wrong as
Krugman, I think, is trying to suggest.

What Putin did was drive that point to the Russian oligarchs. By way of the Khodorkovsky affair.
You can end up in jail or abroad (Herzen's case), but you cannot take your wealth with you. You

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are well advised to keep your money outside Russia, but your oil well you cannot take with you.
So, you better stay on good terms with Putin. It is different if an oligarch invests in industry and
keeps his money in foreign currency or abroad. They can threaten the stationary bandit with a shut
down. (In industrialised countries that may not be much of a threat, but then there is always
outsourcing.) And invest their money someplace else. That is costly, but the risk is calculated in
advance. That is not so with the land-based or natural resources-based oligarchy.

(Parenthetically, people make the mistake when they warn that Chinese investments in
infrastructure or mining and natural resources in general will necessarily lead to their political
domination in those countries. That is probable, but with bribes and corruption of all kinds, not
because they own e.g. a road or a railroad or a mine. Because they cannot threaten to shut down
the road or the railroad. Investments in industry are different precisely because they can move.)

Now, and more interestingly, assume sanctions are put on Russia, both on the bandit in power and
on the oligarchs. The aim being to turn the oligarchs against the stationary bandit. That may work
if no conspiracy is needed, e.g. there is only one oligarch. However, if there are few of them, you
get the Khodorkovsky case. They let him go. There will also be enough commentators and
newspersons and even experts who will argue that the victim was a bad person anyway (an
oligarch, after all). In addition, if the sanctions are imposed by a country or countries with
industrial and services (financial) oligarchy, it may very well be more feasible to bribe them to
change their own stationary bandits rather than to risk the ire of their own. So, Russian money can
influence US elections in order to get rid of the sanctions or at least get around them.

So, yes, there are two types of oligarchs, but with practically the opposite influences to Branko's.

Of course, this does not exhaust the potential relationships and consequences. E.g. oil-based
countries may combine autocracy with oligarchy to their mutual benefit. Or, as in Saudi Arabia,
of which I know nothing, combine the two.

PS. Martin Wolf, in the FT, offers a very shallow account of liberalism and in fact of liberal
nationalism. Classical liberals were cosmopolitan. Liberal nationalism was basically anti-colonial

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or anti-empire. Theoretically, Herder and following him to an extent Mill argued for some kind of
linguistic liberal nationalism, which they could extend to cultural or social closeness respectively.
That was more of a project than an explanation and went nowhere with the rise of class politics.

What is strange with Wolf's piece is that he buys into the populist narrative that it is the people
who will rebel against the cosmopolitan, a-national, elite. But we know quite a lot about liberal
nationalism and now about populism to know that that is nonsense.

American liberalism is closest to social democracy, today at any rate. Except that it still has some
cosmopolitanism within itself mainly because most of these liberals are relatively recent
immigrants. Ideological cosmopolitans are the libertarians who have not sold out to Trump; they
tend to be aligned with the conservatives mainly because both support, at least ideologically, free
trade.

PPS. Liberal international order is a tatonnement process towards the classical liberal idea of the
perpetual peace. It is based also on the liberal idea of sovereignty as responsibility to others and to
international legitimacy. When I used to teach the subject, I found Kissinger's Diplomacy useful
as a historical overview (he is no liberal though).

These rants against multiculturalism even in Martin Wolf's mild form are irrelevant (to put it as
mildly as possible) because the world is multicultural. So, any world order has to be multicultural.
The liberal one follows the basic liberal idea that religion is private and not public affair, which
generalises to culture in whatever definition.

Can peoples i.e. nations or ethnic groups rebel against multiculturalism? Indeed, and not only in
the nineteen thirties.

Somewhat unrelated. Stalin switched the source of legitimacy of the Soviet regime: from the
interest of the working class to that of the masses or the people. At the time, his populism shocked
his party's members. There were also consequences for multiculturalism, or rather against it, which
is another well-known change he introduced.