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

by Bill Browder

It bears mentioning that in Russia there is no respect for the individual and his or her rights. People can be sacrificed for the needs of the state, used as shields, trading chips, or even simple fodder. If necessary, anyone can disappear. A famous expression of Stalin’s drives right to the point: “If there is no man, there is no problem.”

Stanford didn’t allow you to show your grades to potential employers. All hiring decisions were made on the basis of interviews and past experience. The upshot of this was that the normal academic competition was replaced with something that none of us expected: an air of cooperation, camaraderie, and friendship.

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. To

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.

The moral is simple: when it comes to money, Russians will gladly—gleefully, even—sacrifice their own success to screw their neighbor.