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

by Bill Browder

Seventy years of communism had destroyed the work ethic of an entire nation. Millions of Russians had been sent to the gulags for showing the slightest hint of personal initiative. The Soviets severely penalized independent thinkers, so the natural self-preservation reaction was to do as little as possible and hope that nobody would notice you. This had been fed into the psyches of ordinary Russians from the moment they were on their mothers’ breasts. To run a Western-style business, therefore, you either had to completely brainwash a fresh young Russian about the virtues of efficiency and clear thinking or find some miraculous person whose natural psychology had somehow defied the pressures of communism.

Without knowing it, I’d stumbled upon one of the most important cultural phenomena of post-Soviet Russia—the exploding wealth gap. In Soviet times, the richest person in Russia was about six times richer than the poorest. Members of the Politburo might have had a bigger apartment, a car, and a nice dacha, but not much more than that. However, by the year 2000 the richest person had become 250,000 times richer than the poorest person. This wealth disparity was created in such a short period of time that it poisoned the psychology of the nation. People were so angry that they were ready to spill their guts to anyone who wanted to talk about it.

Even Joseph Stalin, one of the most zealous mass murderers of all time, a man responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million Russians, never stooped to putting a dead man on trial. But in March 2013, that is exactly what Vladimir Putin did. Putin was creating legal history. The last time a dead person had been prosecuted in Europe was in 897 CE, when the Catholic Church convicted Pope Formosus posthumously, cut off his papal fingers, and threw his body into the Tiber River.