He made huge profits for his bank from Russia’s first privatisations, then struck out on his own, surfing Moscow’s massive 1990s boom/bust, and clinging on for the slower but eventually even bigger boom of the early Putin years. Knowing almost nothing, he talked himself up as an expert and pretty soon he was. I can’t think of another book like it: it’s like Liar’s Poker welded on to one of the angrier John le Carrés.īrowder entered eastern Europe as a banker out of the late-80s playbook. Fortunately, two excellent books by writers matching that template have come along simultaneously: Peter Pomerantsev, whose varied career has involved making films, working for thinktanks and generally charming everyone in Moscow and Bill Browder, who was once the biggest portfolio investor in Russia but is now a leading campaigner against Putin.īrowder’s Red Notice is a classic tale of two halves: the first is a ripping yarn of murky financiers, desperate investments, and huge sums of money the second is a terrible tragedy of corrupt officials, grieving friends and the murder of an honest man. It requires patience, tenacity and years of work. Fidel Castro praised his “strength and political intelligence”.Ĭoming to understand this kind of closed system is a very different challenge to reporting on open revolution. Marine Le Pen admired his “cool head” and “economic vision”. Putin has remained inscrutable throughout, allowing others to project their ideas on to him. We learn who won and who lost after the fact the Kremlinologists are back in business.
Power struggles now take place in the offices of the Kremlin, in the dachas along Moscow’s Rublevka, in palaces by the Black Sea, and on yachts on the Mediterranean. Having done so, he de-fanged them: the political parties, the oligarchs, the media, the courts, the Chechens. Vladimir Putin has managed to bring politics in-house: to urge, entice and kick the dogs back under the carpet. But assassinations are far rarer now than they were 20 years ago. They just needed to make sure they had enough pens and notebooks, and to keep their eyes open.Īs is abundantly clear from the inquiry into the 2006 murder with polonium-210 of Alexander Litvinenko, which opened in London a fortnight ago, modern Russia still excels at extreme violence. John Reed, Fitzroy Maclean, David Remnick and Chrystia Freeland all produced fantastic books during those periods but, as long as they stayed alive, they almost had it easy. These were the moments when the bulldogs burst out from under the rug, and started tearing chunks out of each other, out of the room and out of random bystanders: the Bolshevik revolution the show trials the perestroika years the chaotic 1990s. T he most famous firsthand accounts of Russia have come from times of great national convulsion.
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