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Media Barons: Putin and Boris Yeltsin

media barons: Within a few short years, oligarchs, media barons and officials who weren't loyal to Putin personally were eliminated, according to Toronto Star. As Russian anti-corruption crusader, Bill Browder says, the cost to those oligarchs who wished to remain in business and untouched by the Kremlin, was 50 per cent of everything they had, making Vladimir Putin one of the richest people in the world. Hope for any Western-style democratic reform was lost when Boris Yeltsin handed his country to the unremarkable former KGB officer in 2000. Russia's press, which was remarkably open and free in the early 2000s, was quickly silenced, as Putin ordered police raids of major media networks, which were expropriated by the state, broken up and sold to his friends. Anna Politkovskaya, who questioned Russia's war against Chechen separatists, was gunned down in an elevator in her apartment block. Journalists who questioned the Kremlin's tactics were silenced with assassin's bullets. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.