After my link to that fine paper about the durability of networked authoritarianism around Putin the NYT has an excellent piece of reporting about how a private bank fuels the fortunes of his inner circle. Some has already be known, of course, but it adds new insights and puts all together. The graph about it's rise in assets is quite stunning...

He had arrived in Moscow as a midlevel apparatchik in ill-fitting suits, had ascended to power as a thoroughly unexpected president and won his first presidential election in 2000 on the crest of war to suppress separatists in Chechnya. By 2004, Mr. Putin had become the paramount figure in Russia, winning a second term with 72 percent of the vote, in a race tainted by allegations of strong-arm tactics and vote rigging. Yet Mr. Putin probably would have won a fair election easily, too. The Russian economy, buoyed by high oil prices, was booming, creating huge fortunes and also lifting the middle class. The long era of post-Soviet gloom seemed done.

Not many people yet understood that in the middle of Russia’s prosperity, the men in the tight circle close to Mr. Putin were becoming fabulously wealthy, and increasingly powerful, in what critics now consider a case study in legalized kleptocracy.
Sadly for many Russians the shock will all be greater if the economy goes where it seems to be headed in the mid run...