Power, money, courts, and fear in Putin’s Russia.
The Big Steal follows the making of modern Russian power, from post-Soviet privatization to the seizure of Yukos and the invasion of Ukraine. It suits listeners who want geopolitical history told through testimony, legal detail, and hard questions about money, fear, and state control.
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The Big Steal is a documentary account of modern Russian power, built around the question of how a country moved from post-Soviet uncertainty into a political order ruled by loyalty, fear, and private gain. It is grave work. The series follows the fall of communism, the rushed creation of new businesses from Soviet ministries, and the narrow class of people who understood what privatization was really doing as it happened. From there, it turns toward Yukos. The oil company becomes the show’s central case study, not because it is only a business story, but because it shows how courts, television, police, corporate control, and political warning can be made to operate together. Mikhail Khodorkovsky is treated as both a participant in Russia’s new capitalism and a symbol of what happened when that capitalism collided with Putin’s state. The cage matters. The public image of a rich and powerful man behind bars becomes, in the show’s telling, a message to everyone else with money or influence. Gavin Esler’s interviews are direct, patient, and skeptical. He asks for causes, consequences, and moral meaning rather than easy outrage. Bill Browder’s account brings in corporate identity theft, corrupt officials, and organized criminals. Khodorkovsky’s account brings in corruption as administration, where loyalty protects officials until it does not. Episodes on Ukraine widen the frame. Shelling, small armed groups, Russian state television, relatives in Kharkiv and Kyiv, and arrests in Moscow make the geopolitical argument immediate and human. NATO, energy dependence, Western weakness, and Russian grievance are treated as linked pressures rather than background noise. The show is strongest when it moves from a large claim to a specific mechanism. A court case explains fear. A missing section of video explains power. A bribe allegation explains how personal profit and state policy can blur. Its tone is measured but never neutral about authoritarian coercion. It gives listeners a clear path through difficult material without flattening the difficulty. The Big Steal suits anyone looking for political history that stays close to evidence, testimony, and the machinery of power.
Made for: For listeners who follow international politics, corruption investigations, post-Soviet history, or the war in Ukraine. It works best for people who prefer careful documentary reporting over fast punditry.
What sets it apart: The series connects sweeping geopolitical change to concrete mechanisms: privatization, oil ownership, court spectacle, propaganda, and the treatment of specific people. Its strength is the way testimony and institutional detail make authoritarian power legible.
The Big Steal tells the story of Vladimir Putin and his violent assault on human dignity, rule of law, democracy and truth – in Russia, its neighbours and across the West. A former KGB officer, Putin climbed his way to the presidency of the world’s largest nation, and put in place a mafia state that steals from its own people to cause havoc abroad. When he stole the country’s most successful energy company, Yukos, he gave a clear warning of what was to come. Since then, Western enablers in politics, business and the law have helped Putin on his way. G...
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Gavin Esler connects Russia's political power to money, courts, corporate control and war through narration and firsthand testimony.
The Big Steal follows money, coercion and institutional failure to explain how power operates in Vladimir Putin's Russia. Gavin Esler combines tightly structured narration with substantial interviews, moving between the collapse of Soviet industry, the privatization years and…
A jailed oligarch becomes your guided tour through the machinery of Putin's Russia.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grave, close account of invasion, propaganda, and the personal ties that make the war immediate.
It widens the invasion of Ukraine beyond battlefield detail. The piece follows how shelling gives way to armed groups moving through buildings, then to a story told to soldiers and civilians through talk of liberation, warm clothes, money, food, and fantasy.
A steady look at Russia's power politics, humiliation, and the West's limits.
The episode treats Russia's borderlands, NATO expansion, and Putin's sense of humiliation as a live strategic problem, not a history lesson. Its strongest stretch comes when it gets specific, especially around the Czech Republic arms depot case in Vrbyatica and the larger…
A grave account of how state power, money, and fear fused into one system.
The episode follows Russia's move from communism to kleptocracy through the seizure of Yukos and Mikhail Khodorkovsky's imprisonment. It treats the theft as a system of power, not a one-off scandal, and makes that case through Putin's warning to the oligarchs, courts taking…
A stark account of how a Kremlin power struggle became a lesson in control.
The piece treats Russia under Vladimir Putin as a system held together by corruption, state power, and spectacle, with Mikhail Khodorkovsky at the center.
A sober account of Russia's move from communism to kleptocracy through Yukos, Khodorkovsky, and Putin.
The episode follows Russia's move from communism to kleptocracy through Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky's prosecution, and Vladimir Putin's rise as the main beneficiary.
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Recorded within days of Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, this episode captures immediate first-person accounts from both Kyiv and Moscow alongside expert analysis.
This episode of The Big Steal examines Russia's strategic relationship with NATO, the EU, and Western democracies through interviews with former diplomats, historians, and opposition politicians.
This episode of The Big Steal reconstructs Putin's televised show trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, who was caged in a Moscow courtroom in 2004 after his arrest at gunpoint in Siberia.
This episode of The Big Steal focuses on the 2003 confrontation between Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Putin, in which Russia's richest man publicly accused Putin's government of corruption on live Russian television — and then paid for it with his arrest at gunpoint on a Siberian airfield.
Host Gavin Esler frames this opening episode of The Big Steal as the story of how Russia went from communism to kleptocracy in one generation, centered on the seizure of oil company Yukos by the Russian government.