OREANDA-NEWS  Sociologists named the distinctive features and drew up a portrait of the richest Russian billionaires — mostly among them men from good families who were educated at Moscow universities and earned their fortune in the fuel and energy, financial or industrial sectors. This is reported by RBC with reference to a study by scientists from the Center for Stratification Studies at the Institute of Social Policy of the Higher School of Economics Svetlana Mareeva and Ekaterina Slobodenyuk.

The authors of the article "The super-rich in Russia: the composition and dynamics of the group" in the magazine "World of Russia" studied the biographical data of 379 people — all businessmen who at least once got on the Russian Forbes list in the period from 2004 to 2021. Experts said that this group of Russians remains "poorly studied", and the list of people included in the ranking of the country's richest billionaires is updated very little from year to year — the share of newcomers in recent years has reached only 3 percent.

Sociologists have found out that even in such a narrow group of Russians there is inequality in terms of wealth. The average fortune of businessmen from the Forbes list in 2011 was $2.5 billion, while three quarters of the richest businessmen owned wealth less than this amount (up to 2 billion). In 2021, the average wealth increased to $3.3 billion, while the share of the least wealthy decreased to 64 percent.