Another brutal week, Oligarchs run for shelter and a touching love story.
March 7, 2022 Volume 2 # 40
One brutal week after another
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happens” Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union.
Russian crooks stole from their own people and moved it to the West.
They are called Oligarchs, the rich Russians who have amassed giant fortunes since the collapse of the old Soviet Union in 1989. Crony capitalism. There are 118 Russian US dollar billionaires from Alexis Mordashov, $29.1-billion, steel and investments. to lowly Vadim Bakunin, a measly $1-billion from the pharmacy business.
Many of them are laying low. One has his yacht parked in the Maldives, safe from seizure. Roman Abramovich, number 12 on the list at $129-billion, is trying to flog the Chelsea Football Club and some London property before the government grabs it.
Their cash is everywhere.
It isn’t just in London and the south of France. The New York Post mapped out just who owns what in Manhattan. Lots of talk, but no one has gone after anything yet.
It’s more than just the super-rich feeling the pinch
All of a sudden the status-conscious Russian middle class is paying through the nose for BMWs, iPhones, Gucci shoes, Uniqlo sweaters, Hermes scarves and Samsung phones. Belarus isn’t selling them anything flashy.
Even if they could get the stuff from those rich countries, the rouble has dropped like a stone and that makes all imported goods more expensive. Apple is closed. iPhones and MacBooks are black market only. A new MacBook is said to be $5,200, double the US price, if you can find one. You say you want a revolution?
A penny for your ruble?
Share, especially to people I don’t know.
What is an Oligarch?
Here is the partial entry for Oligarch from the full edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. It gives the date it was first used in English and a source.
The second definition of Oligarch is the one we use now. It also applies to Ukrainian kleptocrats, as in the last definition.
oligarch, n.
Forms: 1600s olygarch, 1800s– oligarch. Frequency (in current use): Show frequency band informationOrigin: Probably a borrowing from Greek. Etymon: Greek ὀλιγάρχης.Etymology: Probably < Hellenistic Greek ὀλιγάρχης (Dionysius of Halicarnassus) < ancient Greek ... (Show More)Thesaurus »
1. A member of an oligarchy; a person who is part of a small group holding power in a state.
a1610 J. Healey tr. Theophrastus Characters (1636) 89 Olygarches [Gk. ὀλιγαρχικὸς], or principal men in a state, have these conditions.
1821 Ld. Byron Two Foscari ii. i, in Sardanapalus 226 Groan'd under the stern oligarchs.
1849 G. Grote Hist. Greece V. ii. xliii. 287 He established the oligarchs in that town as citizens and sold the Demos as slaves.
1868 Spectator 14 Nov. 1333 In mediæval Hungary, the central power of the Crown had to contend with that of the great territorial oligarchs.
1906 T. Hardy Dynasts: Pt. 2nd vi. vii. 300 The rawest Dynast..Will..Down-topple to the dust like soldier Saul, And Europe's mouldy-minded oligarchs Be propped anew.
1967 D. L. Thomas Plungers & Peacocks xii. 249 Lavish living..was indulged in only by vulgar upstarts with a few million dollars in their pockets and not by the oligarch whose fortunes were almost too large to count.
1976 Survey Summer 14 How seriously the ageing oligarchs of the Politbureau take this theme is hard to estimate.
1991 Economist 5 Oct. 26/1 The oligarchs in Beijing are willing to indulge such foibles of the traditionally independent south, but only so long as they pose no overt challenge to communist rule or to the unity of China.
2. Originally and chiefly in post-communist Russia: a very wealthy business leader with a great deal of political influence.
1999 N.Y. Times 22 Aug. i. 22/6 Menatep, now virtually insolvent, is part of an industrial empire overseen by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of Russia's prominent financiers, or so-called ‘oligarchs’.
2009 Vanity Fair Oct. 235/1 If to their many critics they were ‘bandit capitalist’, kleptocrats who had enriched themselves at the expense of the Russian people, it was the term ‘oligarch’ that would stick because of their formidable political power.
2014 Wall St. Jrnl. (Electronic ed.) 27 June He described the rise of oligarchs like himself in Ukraine as a natural stage in the transition of some countries to democracy, similar to the robber barons of the U.S. at the beginning of the 1900s.
In other news
Much whingeing on Canadian radio stations about gasoline prices Europeans could only dream about. In London petrol is C$2.80 a litre.
Not so much talk yet about interest rates, but the Bank of Canada raised its rate a quarter percentage point. The United States Federal Reserve hints it will soon do the same. Without the Ukraine crisis it probably would have been half a percent.
Mortgage rates rising. Will it prick the housing bubble?
Feel free to upgrade to a paid subscription.
Essay of the Week
Wars produce stories of horror and bravery, as we are discovering now. What follows is a story of Alfred Bader I wrote a few years ago about a man who suffered as a Jew in Europe, but re-made his life in Canada and gave back when he succeeded.
I was reminded of his story when the picture below appeared in the latest edition of the English weekly, Country Life. I thought I had seen it before and it was an English castle that he bought and donated to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
Alfred Bader came to Canada as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany at the age of 16, deported from Britain as an `enemy alien’. After almost two years in a detention camp in Quebec, he enrolled at Queen's University, and when he became a success gave $200-million in gifts to Queen's, including a castle in England.
Alfred Bader was born in 1924 in Vienna, Austria, to a Jewish father, Alfred Bader, and Elisabeth Serényi, the daughter of a Hungarian aristocrat. The Baders were a prosperous Jewish family—his grandfather was one of the engineers on the construction of the Suez Canal—but not good enough for the devoutly Catholic Serényi family.
"When she fell in love with my father, a Jew, her parents objected violently and tried to have her committed to an asylum, so she and my father eloped and were married in London," wrote Dr. Bader in the first volume of his autobiography, Adventures of a Chemist Collector.
The marriage didn't last He described his father as "a charming, shiftless gambler" who depended on his sister, Gisela Reich. After his father died, and his mother took off, he was raised by his Jewish aunt, who he always called mother. Young Alfred's childhood was happy and deeply religious. That ended when Adolf Hitler took over Austria in March of 1938.
Jews came under pressure; Alfred was forbidden to go to school. His parents arranged to send him to England, as part of the Kindertransport, when the British government allowed in children under the age of 17 from Germany and German-annexed territories, such as Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Once the war started, many of those who were saved became `enemy aliens.' Alfred had just turned 16 when the British government arrested all Germans and Austrians over 16 and sent them to camps, first on the Isle of Man, then to Australia and Canada. Alfred Bader was in a camp in Quebec, where he said in his autobiography he was sexually molested by a guard.
The younger men in the camp were allowed to write high school matriculation exams, and Mr. Bader passed. Shortly afterwards he was released when Martin Wolff, sponsored him and he moved to a room in their house in Westmount, a prosperous part of the city. He applied to three universities, McGill, Queen's and the University of Toronto. He was turned down by the U of T and McGill, he thought because they had a quota on accepting Jews: "Jews had to have higher marks than Christians to be admitted, so Jews who were refused by McGill sought admittance to Queen's," wrote Dr. Bader in his autobiography.
That decision almost 80 years ago meant Queen's today has a first-class theatre, the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, several scholarships, an international study centre at the castle in England and three Rembrandts, along with many other valuable paintings.
“He told me as a child and as an adult that being treated fairly by the folks at Queens was one of the biggest gifts that he had ever had in his life," said his son Daniel. "It's clear that he wouldn't have been where he was in life if it wasn't for the chances that Queens gave him at a young age as an immigrant to Canada, as a refugee and as a Jew."
Alfred Bader flourished at Queen's and graduated with a degree in chemical engineering with the medal in chemistry. He returned to Montreal and went to work for the Murphy Paint Company. Its owner, Harry Thorp, encouraged Alfred to go to Harvard and paid for a large slice of his tuition. When he finished his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1950, Murphy Paint had been sold to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company (PPG), and he moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to work with the new owners.
Just before that he took a trip to Europe in 1949 that changed his life. He fell in love with a Canadian woman he met on an ocean liner, the Franconia, sailing from Quebec City to Liverpool. The date was Wednesday, July 14, 1949, and nine days after meeting Isabel Overton of Kirkland Lake, Ontario, Alfred Bader proposed marriage. She turned him down. Religion was one problem. He wanted to raise a Jewish family; she was from "a deeply religious Protestant family," as he described them.
They corresponded for a while, but in 1950 Isabel cut off ties, and she didn't come back into Alfred's life until a quarter of a century later. In 1954 Dr. Bader married Helen Ann Daniels, known as Danny, an American Protestant who converted to Judaism.
Alfred Bader started a tiny chemical business in a garage in Milwaukee in 1951 while working for PPG. The firm was called Aldrich after the fiancé of his partner. Each man put in $250 to get the business going. The idea was to provide small amounts of chemicals to research scientists in universities and private laboratories. At the time that business was dominated by Eastman Kodak, who supplied chemicals in large batches and took a long time to deliver.
"He revolutionized the chemical industry. When you were buying chemicals for research you had to go find which companies were making chemicals and you'd have to go directly to them to buy them, and these were scattered all over the world," said his son Daniel Bader. "Aldrich would have different research quantities: everything from just a few grams up to kilos so that a chemist from a government, university or food product lab could buy the chemical they needed in the quantity they needed and have it delivered quickly."
In 1954 PPG moved its chemical lab back to a town near Pittsburgh, and Dr. Bader went to work for Aldrich full time. It became an enormous success and was listed on the stock exchange. It merged with another firm and by the time he left in 1991 his original stake was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He was forced out in a corporate coup.
That left him free to pursue his other passions, art and philanthropy, and greatest beneficiary of his largesse was Queen's University.
In his personal life, Dr. Bader had re-connected with Isabel Overton, who at first was reluctant to get involved. He and his wife divorced in 1981 and he and Isabel married shortly afterwards. By 1991when he left the company as a rich man, he and Isabel were deeply involved in philanthropy. Isabel Bader went to Victoria College at the University of Toronto on a scholarship, and the Baders were generous to Victoria College.
Dr. Bader and his wife spent several months a year in England and Europe. His wife had a house in Bexhill, just south of London. He and his son David would visit galleries and auction houses in London. His interest was the Dutch school and had been since he was a boy when he was given 10 Austrian schillings to buy a camera and instead bought a print of work by a Dutch master. That print now hangs in a Museum in Milwaukee.
David Bader said his father would spend an entire day at Sotheby’s or Christie's auction houses in London sitting through an auction of about 350 paintings, noting the price and sometimes the buyer. At this stage he bought paintings, some to sell, some to keep in his collection, and some to send to Queen's University. He worked with major art dealers in London and the United States.
In July of 1992, he noticed an advertisement in the Times of London for Hertsmonceux Castle in Sussex, south of London. He and his wife went to see it. A Japanese firm had been prepared to pay 25-million pounds for it, but the collapse of the Japanese property and stock markets forced them to back out. Things went back and forth, and he eventually bought it for less than four million pounds.
"Could I pay, they wondered? I urged them to check with my bank and with Sotheby's just around the corner, to whom I had recently paid over four million pounds for a Rembrandt," wrote Dr. Bader. He also left Queen's enough money to run the castle as an international study centre.
"Alfred Bader's gifts were transformative for Queen's. How many universities have three Rembrandts?" said Daniel Woolf (no relation to the Wolff family of Montreal), the principal and vice-chancellor of Queen's University. He said Dr. Bader was involved in his philanthropy. "But he realized there is a no strings attached policy. You can't control your donations."
For many years Dr. Bader was on the Board of Trustees at Queen's. Most of his personal art collection will go to Queen’s. All because the University took in a penniless refugee from Nazi-ruled Austria.
"Alfred's life was saved by the Kinderstransport. He left in December of 1938 and lived until December of 2018. That gave him 80 years," said Mrs. Bader. "The important things in life for him was Art and giving away money. When Mr. Wolff died in the late 1940s, he left Alfred a thousand dollars. And he gave it to Queen's."
Dr. Bader was rich, but he was also frugal. And politically liberal, in the American sense. When he was in London, he and his wife took the tube, never taxis. They stayed at less expensive hotels. In the United States, he lived well, but he eschewed the trappings of wealth, such as country clubs. His son David said in the election that Trump won, Dr. Bader voted for Bernie Sanders.