Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

by Bill Browder

Instead of 150 million Russians sharing the spoils of mass privatization, Russia wound up with twenty-two oligarchs owning 39 percent of the economy and everyone else living in poverty.

when it comes to money, Russians will gladly—gleefully, even—sacrifice their own success to screw their neighbor.

You may wonder why Vladimir Putin allowed me to do these things in the first place. The answer is that for a while our interests coincided. When Putin became president in January 2000, he was granted the title of President of the Russian Federation, but the actual power of the presidency had been hijacked by oligarchs, regional governors, and organized-crime groups. As soon as he took office, it became his highest priority to wrest power from these men and return it to its rightful place in the Kremlin, or more accurately, into his own hands.

What saved me was not anyone’s fear of the law, but paranoia. Russia is a country that lives on conspiracy theories. There are layers upon layers of explanations for why things happen, and none of them is straightforward.

This was not what they wanted to hear because ever since Barack Obama had become president in 2009, the main policy of the US government toward Russia had been one of appeasement.

They had inadvertently discovered a new method for fighting human rights abuses in authoritarian regimes in the twenty-first century: targeted visa sanctions and asset freezes.

In his mind, he hasn’t succeeded until his opponent has failed, and he can’t be happy until his opponent is miserable. In Putin’s world, the humiliator cannot, under any circumstances, become the humiliatee.