Zakhar Smushkin
Source of wealth: Pulp and paper, diversified
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Modules
Biography
In the early 1990s Zakhar Smuskhin and his business partner Boris Zingarevich were active in barter trading with Russian pulp and paper mills.
Later in the 1990s, during the privatization phase in Russia, they bought their first plant, the Kotlas pulp and paper mill.
The partners' Ilim Group formed a joint venture in 2007 with multinational firm International Paper; the venture operates in Russia as Ilim Group.
As part of the deal, International Paper purchased 50% of Ilim for approximately $650 million.
In 2023 International Paper sold its 50% interest in Ilim Group to the Russian partners.
Smushkin also owns some 3,500 acres of land near Saint Petersburg.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Zakhar Smushkin
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Zakhar Smushkin, linked to Diversified and 'Pulp and paper, diversified', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 13 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 0.8 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.