The Seven Bankers (Russian: семибанкирщина, romanized: semibankirshchina) were a group of powerful Russian oligarchs who played an important role in the political and economic spheres of the Russian Federation between 1996 and 2000. In spite of their internal conflicts, members of the group worked together in order to re-elect Boris Yeltsin in the 1996 Russian presidential election, and thereafter to successfully manipulate him and his political environment from behind the scenes.

Initially, the clique of seven businessmen were identified by oligarch Boris Berezovsky in an October 1996 interview. In an article published on 14 November 1996, journalist Andrei Fadin [ru] coined the term semibankirshchina as a takeoff on the Seven Boyars who deposed Tsar Vasili Shuisky in 1610 during the Time of Troubles. Later, other persons were included in the list, but the catchy term remained.

Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, in a 29 October 1996 interview in the Financial Times, named seven Russian bankers and businessmen from six businesses that he claimed controlled about 50% of the economy of Russia and most of the mass media in Russia, and had helped bankroll Boris Yeltsin's re-election campaign in 1996.

The word semibankirshchina was subsequently coined by the Russian journalist Andrei Fadin of the Obshchaya Gazeta newspaper, in a 14 November 1996 article titled "Semibankirshchina as a New Russian Variation of Semiboyarshchina". He wrote that "they control the access to budget money and basically all investment opportunities inside the country. They own the gigantic information resource of the major TV channels. They form the President's opinion. Those who didn't want to walk along them were either strangled or left the circle." Slightly over a year later, Fadin was killed in a car accident. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also used this word in his critical 1998 essay Russia Under Avalanche to describe the current political regime and to warn people of what he considered an organized crime syndicate that controlled the President and 70% of all Russian money.

Berezovsky named the following seven persons: Stolichny Bank head Alexander Smolensky; Mikhail Khodorkovsky, president of the Menatep financial and oil empire; Petr Aven and Mikhail Fridman, of Alfa-Bank; Vladimir Gusinsky, head of the Most banking and media group; Vladimir Potanin, former head of ONEXIM Bank and then–first deputy prime minister in charge of the economy; and Berezovsky himself.

In some lists some other people were included, and eventually the clique was recognized to consist of:

Petr Aven, who was close to Berezovsky, describes appearance of the word semibankirshchina in his book The Age of Berezovsky as follows: "He [Berezovsky] didn't use this word, but he gave an interview to the Financial Times in which he said that seven businessmen were de facto ruling the country. He named a fairly random list — whomever he could recall at the time. I was listed together with Fridman; there was one representative of each group there."

It is generally considered that the group was created in March 1996 when the political consultant Sergey Kurginyan invited a group of thirteen Russian oligarchs to sign the so-called "Letter of Thirteen" (headlined as "Come Out of the Dead End!") in an attempt to cancel the 1996 Russian presidential election. The manifest was published in Nezavisimaya Gazeta and suggested that two major candidates—Boris Yeltsin and the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov—should strike a "political compromise" in order to prevent "the economical collapse". It contained eight tips that described the position of business elites. The letter was called "a provocation" by the Communists and thus ignored.