The Guardian: Britain claims to be a moral democracy, so what do the Russian oligarchs think?

The idea that politics can be subverted by wealth is widespread in Russia.

This is why Russian billionaires feel at home in the UK.

With this introduction, Raphael Behr began his article in the Guardian by noting that Britain claims to be a moral democracy, but that the Russian oligarchs are businessmen in the former Soviet republics who acquired wealth quickly during the era of Russian privatization following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the mid-1990s. They know this isn't real.

Much has changed since then, as Russia stopped trying to transition to democracy, and then stopped pretending to try.

Britain stopped advising the Russians on how to run a market economy within the rule of law, and then stopped pretending to care about how they made their money.

He argued that a common Western misconception in those early years of Russia's post-Soviet transition was that people who had grown up under communism did not understand capitalism.

This overlooked the importance of market forces to Soviet society operating on many levels.

There was a thriving trade in illicit goods, controlled by criminal gangs that bought protection from the authorities, and police indifference came at a price.

And there was the trade of interests, either in barter or in cash, whenever the bureaucratic door was opened.

And people who used this system in the days when profit-making was an ideological taboo, don't need lessons in market forces when dirty riches become legal.

The writer commented that the more Russian money moved to Britain, the more wealthy Russians became involved with the social, political and economic elite in London, and it was difficult to argue that democracy operated to a higher standard;

Its rules are not soluble in money;

The regime did not always give in to the president's wealthy friends.

Which is why, says the writer, the appointment of Evgeny Lebedev to the House of Lords by Prime Minister Boris Johnson was so damaging even before the British intelligence agencies' fears that his nomination posed a national security risk were exposed.