Sale Of The Century: Russia's Wild Ride From Communism To Capitalism

by Chrystia Freeland

Always something of an enigma to Westerners, Russia has become a veritable paradox in the decade following its transformation from communism to capitalism. In Sale of the Century, journalist Chrystia Freeland offers a riveting bird's-eye view of this conversion that should prove fascinating to everyone still hoping to do business there, and to anyone intrigued by the erstwhile superpower. Be forewarned, though: Freeland, who began reporting on the country in 1995 as Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times, describes a nation of troubling extremes. The nation has evolved into a giddy utopia for some of its citizens, but one unable so far to handle its sudden affluence. The author portrays trendy Versace boutiques and bustling Mercedes-Benz dealerships lining Moscow's fashionable streets, whose sidewalks are patrolled by machine-gun-toting policemen trudging through the corrosive chemical waste used for melting the snow.

In well-written first-person accounts, Freeland goes on to describe how scrappy entrepreneurs made overnight fortunes and then lost them just as quickly to widespread corruption and the 1998 Russian stock market crash. By the end of the 1990s, the economy was half what it had been at the start of the decade, producing less than Belgium and only 25 percent more than Poland. Meanwhile, power blackouts, wildcat strikes, and water shortages had become commonplace. Additionally, the ordinary citizen often grew worse off than before the fall of communism, while a powerful few came to own nearly everything. This cautionary tale ends with a more "workaday economy" emerging from the wreckage, and the author's hope that Russia's economic leaders can stay this new, more-balanced course. All signs to date, however, leave her decidedly pessimistic. --Howard Rothman

Genres: Russia, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Economics, Business, Soviet History

370 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Chrystia Freeland is the Global Editor-at-Large of Reuters news since March 1, 2010, having formerly been the United States managing editor at the Financial Times, based in New York City. Freeland received her undergraduate education from Harvard University, going onto St Antony's at University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She attended the United World College of the Adriatic, Italy, 1984-86.

A Ukrainian-Canadian, Freeland has worked in Kiev, Moscow, London, Toronto and currently in New York. She is the author of Sale of the Century, a 2000 book about Russia's journey from communism to capitalism.

She lives in New York City with her husband and their two daughters.

She has appeared three times as a panelist on Real Time With Bill Maher, on February 26, 2010, January 14, 2011, and again on May 27, 2011. She has also appeared on The McLaughlin Group and The Dylan Ratigan Show. Currently, she is periodically standing in for Arianna Huffington as a panelist on public radio's political debate program, "Left, Right & Center", produced by KCRW. (Huffington recently was named president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, a newly created unit of AOL, and at least for the time being is unable to appear every week.)

Reviews

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a stunning look at the chaos Russia went through in dumping the communist system. The hardship is almost unbelievable. The vulture capitalism that emerged, partly with Western "assistance," is kleptocracy at it's worst.

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine, insightful, and incisive look at the failed hopes of post-Soviet Russia, at how the bright hopes of 1991 for a market economy and liberal democracy ran aground in a broken Russia. Freeland's family were Ukrainian emigres in the 1970s, and she came to Moscow and Petersburg with a sense of cultural affinity and a knowledge of the language. Freeland's account of the rise and fall of free-market reformers like Anatoly Chubais and the gangster capitalism of the mid-Yeltsin years is well-sourced, hilarious, heartbreaking, and (for all of her love of Russia) pessimistic. "Sale of the Century" can be read as a cautionary tale about the "shock treatment" efforts to force-feed Friedman-ite market capitalism into a country with no sense of civil society and none of the social structures (contracts, courts, an independent judiciary and police) that make markets possible--- and anyone who does read "Sale" should think about how the lessons of post-Soviet Moscow might be applied to lots of other countries and capitals...including Washington.

[Baba · Rating 3 out of 5]

Freeland documents, using her own interview transcripts and other recorded interviews, appearances etc. from the ascension of Yeltsin to his replacement by Putin, the collapse of the Communist superpower and it's ensuing attempts to embrace a capitalist democracy. Freeland cites the power struggles of the men behind the scenes as well as the more famous politicians, she gets into the nitty gritty of how the Oligarchs rose to power, their business practices and their impact on their motherland, she also writes about the force of the young capitalists and how they tried to build a capitalist state from the ashes of a communist one... but ultimately failed, due to some part by the greed and manipulations of the Oligarchs themselves. A truly fascinating book that which also includes the roles of the World Bank, IMF, Swiss and German banks, BP, American consultancies etc. and gives the rationale for what Putin did to the so-called free press and the other Oligarch power bases when he came to power. 7 out of 12

[Ali · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not a primer, and at times dry. I expect that this would be a better read for a russophile?

[Hanaan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was EXCELLENT. Part business history, part thriller, this tells the story of the rise of the oligarchs politicians that shaped post-soviet Russia. It reads like a spy novel but the author is very skillful (unlike some other non-fiction writers) in only including descriptive detail where she actually has the facts - if she begins a chapter saying it was a snowy day, she was there and convinces me that she actually recorded the weather. She has huge credibility, and now I can't imagine trying to understand Russia without having read this. It influenced my worldview, particularly of non-functioning state systems. I really enjoyed it.

[April · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an extraordinarily insightful look at the early days of Russia's transition to...wherever it is going.
I'm not sure how I missed it. But I'm glad I'm reading it now.
For goodreads friends who may not know, I worked in Russia during this period, on the Russian privatization program. So I expect I'm a tougher reader than most. So far, Freeland is on track for a five star rating.

[Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interested to know how corporate Russia started in 1990s?
Enormously interesting to find out the oligarchy was lending money to Russian government and privatized for pity amounts the wireless spectrum or copper/oil/gas colossus companies. It is due to a sequel for the period 2000-2015, when power has shifted and Putin came to power and played the president's mandate with his Medvedev friend.

[David Wilby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Subheaded 'The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution', this excellent book offers a front-row seat on the nineties sell-out of the Kremlin's vast state assets to the elite oligarchy. Chrystia Freeland, who worked for several years as Moscow correspondant on the Financial Times, recounts the events, often commandeering first-hand interview access to her sources amongst the Russian oligarchs.

In the first half Freeland details the fraught clammer for the reins of power following Gorbachev's dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Subsequently the Yeltsin era is covered in detail with the constitutional crisis of 1993 given in-depth attention and analysis. Freeland's portrayal of the figure of Boris Yeltsin is expertly rendered, and a credit to her powers of research and occasionally highly colourful writing style.

At times the book loses pace, becoming mired in grainy detail and we get several rather contrived character-studies of the oligarchs' business personas. Writing also for the Economist, Freeland defaults all too often to a brisk, matter-of-fact tone, veering off suddenly at intervals into gossip and anecdote terŕitory, presumably in order to add panche to the lengthy pages listing figures, lacklustre share prices, stakeholder buy-outs and banking crises. And I was really mystified about why amongst all this intrigue there's strangely no reference made to the 1998 redenomination of the Rouble.

Reading Sale of the Century, it quickly becomes clear what a fine balancing act it took to get the Russian economy on track towards some recognisable form of capitalist democracy. Those behind the scenes at the beginning had no choice other than to trust in the stewardship of the oligarchs, yet that inevitably turned out to be a Faustian bargain. The oligarchs were wheeler-dealer types and kept large cash reserves in off-shore banks. Eventually they even began to assume governmemt positions themselves. This book explains a lot about how all that was kick-started.

[Andrew Baldwin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Near the start of this book, Freeland writes: ““During the Second World War, my maternal grandparents fled western Ukraine, careful always to stay a few miles west of the invading Soviet Red Army. Their dangerous, grueling escape was the best decision they ever made. Many of the brothers, sisters, and cousins who stayed behind either died in the war or spent the decade after imprisoned in Stalinist labor camps.” She does not add that her maternal grandfather, Myhailo Chomiak, spent the war as the editor of a Ukrainian-language Nazi propaganda newspaper, riddled with anti-Semitic content. However, Chomiak did not die, like so many millions of Ukrainians, fighting in the Red Army to put an end to Nazism. That, in Freeland’s mind, was part of what made this such a brilliant decision.
The book itself, if it is not anti-Semitic, certainly resorts to anti-Semitic tropes. The apple never falls far from the tree. In a report for the Financial Times Freeland co-authored in 1996, the Russian Jewish oligarch Boris Berezovsky was quoted as saying that seven bankers controlled half the Russian economy. In Berezovsky’s quite arbitrary list, these were: Berezovsky (of Menatep) himself, Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven (of Alfabank), Vladimir Gusinsky (of Most Bank), Aleksandr Smolensky (of Stolichny Bank), and Vladimir Potanin (of Oneksimbank). Potanin was the only non-Jewish oligarch of the seven, in Freeland’s words, “a full-blooded ethnic Russian”, and by far the richest oligarch of the seven. As Daniel Treisman estimated for 1996, the actual share of the economy that these bankers controlled probably varied between 6% and 15% of GDP. Nevertheless, Freeland seems to have taken this on board. In “Sale of the Century”, she drops Aven and Smolensky from the list of oligarchs she gives special attention to, reducing their number of five, but this means that four Jewish oligarchs are profiled and only one “full-blooded” Russian. (Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and Gorbachev would not be “full-blooded ethnic Russians”, by the way, but most people are unconcerned with their Greek or Ukrainian antecedents.) Later, in December 2012, publicizing her book Plutocrats, which takes the same kind of anti-Semitic trope global, Freeland said: “In Russia, as it happened, most of the oligarchs were Jewish.” This has no basis in fact. A study by Sergey Braguinsky of the oligarchs in the 1990s found that 73% of them were of Eastern Slavic ethnicity (Russian, Ukrainian or Belorussian), 14% were of Jewish ethnicity, with the remainder being of other ethnicities. Nevertheless, it was a falsehood that took on a life of its own, being repeated by British journos like John Lloyd and Ian Birrell.
The sale of the century the title refers to is the loans-for-shares program arranged by young reformers in the Yeltsin government to raise money for the Russian government before the 1996 presidential election. The government gave tranches of shares in 12 large, state-owned corporations to particular businessmen to manage in trust, in return for loans to the federal budget totaling about $800 million. If the government did not repay the loans by September 1996, the creditors were allowed to auction off the tranches and keep 30% of any profit. As it happened, the government did not repay the loans, and the creditors sold the stakes, usually to themselves.
The bidding was rigged to keep competition to a minimum, and would not pass scrutiny in that respect. Nevertheless, it was a pretty straightforward process, so why Freeland calls it “a fiendishly complicated scheme” is a mystery. She also calls it “a Faustian bargain”. In this metaphor, the young reformers sold their souls to this gaggle of mainly Jewish oligarchs. In fact, the idea of loans-for-shares seems to have come from Vladimir Potanin, the only non-Jewish banker in Berezovsky’s original list of seven, and only two or three of the remaining six besides Potanin, won anything our of the loans-for-shares scheme.
According to Freeland: “loans-for-shares scotched any short-term hopes there still were for the emergence of a healthy, prosperous Russian capitalism. Instead, Russia’s market economy is now corrupt, distorted, and inefficient, and loans-for-shares is both cause and symbol of its malaise.” Daniel Treisman estimates that the valuation of the 12 companies at the time the loans-to-shares program began was probably 8-10% of the total capitalization of the Russian stock market at that time. He also believes that the motivation for the young reformers to crook things in the direction of the businessmen who were the designated purchasers was only partly to get them to support Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential election since they were unlikely to support his Communist opponent anyway. They did believe that the companies would pass into more competent hands who were more likely to make them profitable concerns. It seems they weren’t wrong. The very high growth rate of the Russian economy from 1999 to 2004 wasn’t solely, or even principally due to loans-for-shares, but it did contribute to it. Freeland turned out to be a terrible financial prophet.
Freeland is grossly unfair to Boris Yeltsin in her book, a brilliant man who she dismisses as a dolt. Gaidar, she sniffs, had “a gift for explaining complex economic problems in terms even Yeltsin could understand.” She is libelous regarding Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, accepting Berezovsky’s claim that he gave Tatyana a Russian jeep, a claim Timothy Colton, Yeltsin’s biographer, dismisses as claptrap. Dyachenko was in fact suspicious of Berezovsky’s motives in trying to befriend her and they met only once every two or three months. After 1996, there were few Yeltsin policies that served Berezovsky’s interests, or of the oligarchs in general. Freeland exaggerates Berezovsky’s influence because it suits her narrative to have Jewish oligarchs running the show.
Early in her book, Freeland writes: “Russia, which just a few years earlier had counted itself a superpower, now produced less than Belgium and only 25 percent more than nearby Poland.” Of course, just a few years ago, there was no Russian national state. Russians considered themselves part of a superpower because they were part of the Soviet Union, which was a superpower. Freeland’s comparisons of national output are garbage, likely based on nominal GDP estimates exchange-rate-adjusted to US dollars. The IMF estimated that in 1999, using GDP on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis as the standard, had the world’s 10th largest economy, 4.9 times greater than Belgium’s, the world’s 28th largest economy. For some reason, Poland is not given in the 1999 estimates, or at least I couldn’t find it. However, for the year 2000, Russia, now the world’s sixth largest economy, had a GDP 3.8 times as large as Poland’s, the world’s 23rd largest economy. In 2000, Belgium was the world’s 31st largest economy, and must have outranked Poland in 1999 as well. Freeland is as clueless about comparing the GDPs of different countries as her fellow NATO war hawks, Anne Applebaum and Stephen Kotkin, but they are both historians, and never ran the Moscow office of the Financial Times. She should know better how to compare GDPs of different countries, but doesn’t. It makes one wonder how she ever became Canada’s Finance Minister.
In an interview with Allan Gregg about “Sale of the Century” in May 2005, Freeland makes an astonishing confession: “A friend of mine set me up with a St. Petersburg entrepreneur, one of the biggest insurers in St. Petersburg. And he took me out to supper because I had wanted to learn about the lifestyle of a group of people called the New Russians.” “Sale of the Century” and “Plutocrats” are both dominated by Freeland interviewing filthy rich businessmen, Russian oligarchs or American plutocrats or whatever, in snotty restaurants, and this passage suggests that they were paying the bill. She never seems to be interested in talking to the workers at the bottom of the food chain, wherever they live. She doesn’t want to eat in a McDonald’s, and the people she would be talking to wouldn’t want to pay her tab anyway.
Freeland has no background in finance or economics, but in “Sale of the Century” it is strange to see the problems she has operating in her own field of Slavic Studies. She writes: “Horrified that their own tough timetable could undermine the entire privatization process, the young reformers persuaded the president to extend the vouchers for six months, until July 1, 1994. Then they adopted the tried-and-true, hell-for-leather implementation campaign the Soviets had called shturmirovka.” Freeland is talking about a last-minute rush, for which the Russian word is shturmovshchina (штурмовщина). There could be no confusion between Russian and Ukrainian in Freeland’s mind, as the Ukrainian term is very close to the Russian one: штурмівщина.
She has the Vikings moving north to Kyiv instead of south.
Unlike almost anyone writing this kind of a book, she won’t say what transliteration system she uses for Russian names: “I have tried to be consistent in transliterating Russian names into English, except in those cases where an odd spelling has become the English-language standard.” (It looks to me like she is using the Library of Congress system without diacritics, like her former Harvard University professor, Richard Pipes. However, I am just guessing.) Her choices for breaking away from that system are a little strange. Thus, she refers to one Russian banker as Mikhail Friedman, when his name is usually transliterated as Fridman.
Strangely, as a former student of Pipes, her references acknowledge inspiration derived from his “three-volume history of the Russian Revolution.” Pipes did intend to publish his history in three volumes, but it was actually published in just two volumes, so “The Russian Revolution” is about twice as long as “Russia under the Bolshevik Regime.”
Freeland’s insistence on Russia seeing itself as the Third Rome in threatening terms is dysfunctional. Muscovy freed itself from the Tartar yoke shortly after Constantinople, the second Rome, fell to the Ottoman Turks. As Orthodox Christians, what alternative did the Russians have but to see themselves as the Third Rome, with the sobering thought, that if Moscow were also overcome, there could be no fourth. This is all very well explained in Geoffrey Hosking’s “Russia and the Russians”. The Muscovites then didn’t have an urge to rule the world any more than the Russian government now does.
Some of her deprecatory geographic references seem distinctly Russophobic, perhaps because she is Myhailo Chomiak’s grand-daughter: “’Zhuganov’s reforms have ended in the total collapse of the state’ Zyuganov complained to an audience in Akademgorodok, a scientists’ ghetto in central Siberia.” Freeland fails to mention that this academic township is located 30 km south of Novosibirsk, the largest city in Siberia. The ‘ghetto’ appellation suggests an impoverished community. Being built for the Soviet elite, people lived much better there than in the Soviet Union in general. She doesn’t say that Zyuganov was speaking to the right audience for the message he wanted to deliver, since Akademgorodok suffered considerable decay with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the privatization of the economy. “The Communist attack on Yeltsin’s patriotic failings reached a sentimental peak the next day in Krasnoyarsk, a robust frontier city.” This imprecise description of Krasnoyarsk would not lead any uninformed reader to think that Freeland was describing a city that was founded in the 17th century, and is one of the major stops on the Trans-Siberian Railway. It has a lovely landscape as it is on the upper part of the great Yenisey River. “Moscow, for most of its history a global synonym for ‘hellhole’, became a desirable place to live.” So at no time before the 1990s had Moscow ever been considered a desirable place to live?
Sometimes the prose is also marred by lazy mistakes: “The young reforms [“reformers” was intended] could and did call on the business people to use their formidable lobbying muscle.”
Freeland, who can be patronizing in assuming her readers are ignorant of certain facts (e.g. in “Plutocrats”, when she assumes none of them have heard of Henry George, the 19th century champion of a land tax. Oddly however, she can also assume that readers are familiar with even the most obscure terms: “Every society has its moments of money madness, when a natural discovery or a sudden social fetish throws the entire citizenry into a frenzied pursuit of instant fortunes. In seventeenth century Holland it was the tulip craze, when a single Viceroy bulb sold for two lasts of wheat, four last of rye, [etc.]” A last, in this context, for a measure of grain, is 80 bushels. By the way, this passage was setting the stage for the huge runup in the Moscow stock exchange, which ended in the May 27, 1998 stock market crash. The two events are not at all commensurate. The tulip bulb craze has been way overblown as a phenomenon. It was not so irrational as it seemed, as some tulips were very rare and unusually beautiful. Only a small number of speculators engaged in bidding up the prices and there is not a single recorded bankruptcy associated with the crash in the market. The Russian debt crisis of 1998, by contrast, was a huge hit to the Russian economy and had a worldwide impact.
“Sale of the Century” is unlikely ever to be reprinted, as it is a deeply flawed study of Russia in the 1990s. Such value as it has is mainly in the interviews that Freeland obtained with the reformers in the government and the oligarchs themselves. If it has not attracted the attention of Freeland’s numerous political critics it is perhaps due to how fashionable the Russophobia that infects it has become throughout Canadian society, and indeed Western society as a whole.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book on the economic history of Russia from 1991 to 2003. It’s amazing to see how Russia messed up.

I think Russia’s failure has a number of reasons:
1. The young reformers had the wrong goal - they prioritized the wrong thing. They believed if a company is privatized, it will take care of itself. It should be a means, rather than a goal.
2. The young reformers don’t have enough political support. Kremlin has never whole heartedly support the reform. They have their own concern and agenda. Interests are not aligned.
3. State became too weak - bad actors took advantage of it. Corruption was out of control.
4. The creation of oligarchs was unintentional, but had very bad impact on reform and economy. Once they became so powerful, it was impossible to get rid of them.
5. Overly rely on foreign experience and financing. Failed to adjust reform to its own condition. 1998 crisis was a big blow to the whole system.


Overall, Russia reform was too fast and too aggressive initially, and then too weak and too much compromise later on. It was just a very poorly managed process, but some idealistic and not-so-competent people. It didn’t face up to the real issue in the economy, or don’t know how to tackle them.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book about how Russia's economy transitioned from communism to free market capitalism after the fall of the Soviet Union. Well-written, easy to read, and fascinating.

The basic outline: the government sold off public companies at bargain prices, often to insiders, instead of selling to foreigners. The result: inefficient management and the continuation of cronyism. Bummer for Russia, but I guess they're ok now that they've got oil and gas to sell.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely becoming a fan of Ms. Freeland. Trudeau was smart to recruit her. As for the book, well-researched and well laid out. Easy enough to follow, even with the cast of thousands. What's happening today makes sense after reading Sale of the Century-- everyone's a player, and those without power are played ruthlessly. Makes our grifters appear quite benign in comparison.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Sale of the Century in 2018, 18 years after it was published. With hindsight it reads as an intelligent analysis of his we got to where we are today. And poignant to note how the story continued.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book enlightening. I thought that I was cynical and well educated, but this book made me understand that Russia has many hidden layers of corruption.

[Greynomad · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a push to get through the book but interesting data

[Austin Barselau · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sale of the Century (2000) examines Russia’s tumultuous transition after the collapse of the Soviet Union, tracing the economic and political upheavals that accompanied the birth of a fledgling state and market economy. Drawing on extensive firsthand reporting and personal interviews, Chrystia Freeland—then Moscow Bureau Chief for the Financial Times and now a Canadian MP—offers a vivid account of how the optimism of the early post-Soviet “young reformers,” bolstered by Western advisers and institutions, devolved into widespread disillusionment.

Freeland portrays the Russian 1990s as a decade defined by poorly managed privatization, endemic corruption, and the moral and institutional vacuum left in the wake of Soviet collapse. Through her journalism, she exposes a chaotic “loophole economy” shaped by shadowy financial schemes such as the notorious loans-for-shares program—a misguided attempt to exchange state property for political loyalty to President Yeltsin. In this vacuum, she argues a new “neo-aristocracy” of oligarchs emerged, exploiting weak institutions and an absence of state oversight to seize vast swathes of national wealth.

Freeland laments the failures of the young reformers: their lack of popular support, their naïve and overly "fanatical" faith in market mechanisms, and their uneasy alliances with the very oligarchs who would come to dominate the new Russia. She argues that their aspirations for liberal reform might have succeeded had they possessed the political authority to challenge the entrenched “red directors”—Soviet-era factory bosses who rebranded themselves as capitalist elites. Instead, the state itself became complicit in its own dismantling. As Freeland memorably concludes, “Russia was robbed in broad daylight, by businessmen who broke no laws, assisted by the West’s best friends in the Kremlin—the young reformers.”

The book closes with Boris Yeltsin’s resignation, marking the end of the reformist era and the uncertain rise of Vladimir Putin. Freeland concludes with a warning: unless Russia can cultivate a genuine civil society and a functioning rule of law capable of restraining its oligarchic elite, its experiment with capitalism will remain hollow.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Freeland's account of 1990s Russia is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the foundations of Russia today. She makes obscure financial and political machinations easy to understand and her ability to have frank discussions with the men who shaped post-Communist Russia is admirable.

[Alisha G · Rating 5 out of 5]

Freeland's writing is so clear and engaging what might feel like a staid topic is actually engrossing. (OK, and the Russian oligarchs pulled off some mind-blowing schemes.) Freeland is especially prescient with her analysis of Russia's likely slide to authoritarianism and imperialism.

[Stephen Hoffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent insight in to the chaos and disorder in the 90s after the collapse of The USSR.

[Raya Dzulynsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhat dry, however, I read this prior to reading Red Notice (Bill Browder) and I believe it helped me understand the intricacies of the political situation in that book. Would recommend!

[John Bunge · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well researched and written exploration of the outcome of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[Liam Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book about the first 10 years of Russia post Soviet Collapse that doesn’t seem remotely dated even though it was written over 20 years ago.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chrystia Freeland is a very good writer, and was able to hold my interest. But I decided that the subject of this book isn't really relevant to my life and opted not to finish it.

[Collin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I give this book four stars for Freeland's narrative of the decade and walking through how Russia turned into an oligarchy. Her firsthand accounts and interviews with many of the countries most important players was really interesting. I give this book two stars for Freeland's social and political bias towards the oligarchs. Half the time, the book felt like a humble brag of all the rich people she got to hang out with. She definitely is a capitalist at heart, making sure to emphasize the privatization of Russia was inevitable and undoubtedly better than what came before. Bonus star was lost because of her excessive use of the words "troika" and "chutzpah".