Here’s what two prominent Russian Putin-haters had to say about Oleg Deripaska’s links with Putin. Masha Gessen doesn’t mention his name once in “The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin”. Anna Politkovskaya, in her book “A Russian Diary”, includes Deripaska in a list of oligarchs, also mentioning Potanin, Mordashev and Fridman, whose wealth was created under Yeltsin, Putin’s predecessor, not under Putin. She suggests that the murder of Georgiy Tal, the Director of the Federal Service for Financial Recovery and Bankruptcy from 1997 to 2001, may have been directed by Putin, because Tal knew too much about how these oligarchs got their wealth. She adds: “It is unlikely, however, that Tal’s murders were in the interest of these people.”