Oligarchy (from Greek ὀλιγαρχία (oligarkhía); from ὀλίγος (olígos), meaning "a few", and ἄρχω (archo), meaning "to rule or to command") is a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small number of people. These people could be distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, education, corporate, or military control. Such states are often controlled by a few prominent families who pass their influence from one generation to the next.

Throughout history, some oligarchies have been tyrannical, relying on public servitude to exist, although others have been relatively benign. Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as a synonym for rule by the rich, for which the exact term is plutocracy, but oligarchy is not always a rule by wealth, as oligarchs can simply be a privileged group, and do not have to be connected by bloodlines as in a monarchy. Some city-states from ancient Greece were oligarchies.

Some other examples include the former Soviet Union where only members of the Communist Party were allowed to vote or hold office; the French First Republic government under the Directory; and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (only the nobility could vote). In the time of the ancient Greeks, Sparta was an oligarchy that clashed with the democratic city-state of Athens, (these two nations eventually clashed in the Peloponnesian war in which Sparta defeated Athens causing the city state to rule much of Greece for some time).^{[citation needed]}

Business oligarch is a near-synonym of the term "business magnate", borrowed by the English speaking and western media from Russian parlance to describe the huge, fast-acquired wealth of some businessmen of the former Soviet republics (mostly Russia and Ukraine) during privatization in Russia and other post-Soviet states in 1990s. Businessmen with great wealth from these countries, were commonly labelled (simply) "oligarchs" in Russian regardless of whether they had real political power, as the term "oligarch" would imply.

The Russian oligarchs are business entrepreneurs who started under Mikhail Gorbachev during his period of market liberalization.

By the end of the Soviet era and during Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, many Russian businessmen imported or smuggled goods such as personal computers and jeans into the country and sold them, often on the black market, for a hefty profit.

During the 1990s, once Boris Yeltsin took office, the oligarchs emerged as well-connected entrepreneurs who started from nearly nothing and got rich through participation in the market via connections to the corrupt, but democratically elected, government of Russia during the state's transition to a market-based economy.

Stelios Kouloglou is a Greek journalist and writer. He is the creator of the news web channel "TVXS" and a board member of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation. He is, also, a columnist for the LIFO magazine.

He was born in Athens. He graduated from the University of Athens and studied journalism in Paris, Tokyo and India. He has worked as a political correspondent in Greece and as a foreign correspondent in Paris and Moscow, from where he covered developments in the Soviet Union and the other ex-communist countries. In the 1992-95 period he covered the war in Yugoslavia as a special war correspondent.

In 1996 Kouloglou created and introduced for the Greek national television Reportage Without Frontiers. Although disputed in terms of originality at home as considerably based on international investigative reportage, his documentaries have won awards in Greece and abroad (2000 and 2001 "Euro-Comenius" historical documentary Award).^{[citation needed]}.

On June 2008 he began writing a column for the Greek free press magazine LIFO, called "Spin Doctor". On November 1, 2008 he began an internet channel named "TV Without Frontiers", a news and political analysis website.

Webster Griffin Tarpley (born 1946) is an American historian, author, journalist, lecturer, and critic of US foreign and domestic policy. Tarpley maintains that the September 11 attacks were engineered by a rogue network of the military-industrial complex and intelligence agencies as a false flag operation. His writings and speeches describe a model of terror operations by a rogue network in the military/intelligence sector working with moles in the private sector and in corporate media, and locates such contemporary false flag operations in a historical context stretching back in the English speaking world to at least the Gunpowder Plot in England in 1605.

Tarpley was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1946. He received a BA degree summa cum laude in English and Italian from Princeton University in 1966. While a student at Princeton he became a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and was a Fulbright Scholar at University of Turin in Italy. Tarpley also obtained a MA degree in humanities from Skidmore College. As well as a Ph.D. from The Catholic University of America in History.

Mark Ames (born 3 October 1965) is a writer known for his work as a Moscow-based expatriate American journalist and editor. He is the founding editor of the satirical biweekly the eXile in Moscow, to which he regularly contributed before he returned to America. Ames has also written for the New York Press, The Nation, Playboy, The San Jose Mercury News, Alternet, Птюч Connection, GQ (Russian edition), and is the author of three books.

Ames was raised in Saratoga, California, a newly urbanized town in the San Francisco Bay Area's Silicon Valley, where he attended an Episcopalian private school. He graduated from Saratoga High School in 1983.

After leaving Saratoga, Ames attended the University of California, Berkeley, while living with his father (his parents had divorced when Ames was eight years old). He later described how his college years shaped his later political views in a section of the book The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia:

After college, Ames lived in New York City, Boston, San Francisco, and Prague, and played briefly in a punk band.