• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1727 0

of Russian business. From driving a gypsy cab to hawking blue jeans on the black market, the hustling, volatile Gusinsky finally broke through with copper bracelets, a kind of New Age fad that was supposed to prevent high blood pressure. Gusinsky then put his money in real estate and construction before realizing that the real money was to be made in banking. Shamelessly cultivating his relationship with Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow’s powerful mayor, Gusinsky was soon making millions managing the city’s operating capital. Snapping up newspaper, magazine, and television interests right and left—in some cases letting the business run into the ground while pocketing the assets—Gusinsky became in the nineties the most powerful man in Russian media. By turning his television station NTV into a massive propaganda machine for Yeltsin, Gusinsky—along with his sometimes-ally, sometimes-nemesis fellow oligarch Boris Berezovsky—played a crucial role in Yeltsin’s 1996 victory over the Communists.

21

“I cannot say I am an absolutely honest man, an example for everyone,” Gusinsky admitted in an interview with Chrystia Freeland. “Nor can any person who survived in this country before 1985, or who built great things after 1985. We all have things that we would not like to tell our children.”

22

Like Friedman and Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky was unable to realize his childhood dream, which in this case was to work in a leading Soviet defense plant, because of his Jewish ancestry. But Khodorkovsky had an important advantage over his fellow Jewish oligarchs: He had served in the Communist Youth League and from the outset enjoyed the patronage of senior Soviet-era government officials. Thus in the late 1980s, when Khodorkovsky ventured into private business with the establishment of Menatep Bank, he had the support and protection of the Communist regime. After 1990, Khodorkovsky served as economic adviser to the prime minister of the Russian Federation—a role he apparently had no trouble playing while continuing to run Menatep.

Just as Gusinsky made his initial fortune managing Moscow’s money, Khodorkovsky made untold millions managing the federal government’s finances. In the early nineties, Khodorkovsky’s Menatep went on a “mass privatization shopping spree” in which it bought, at bargain basement prices, everything from a titanium-magnesium plant to glass and textile factories to food-processing companies.

23 In 1996, Khodorkovsky emerged from the loans-for-shares deal as the powerful chairman of Yukos, Russia’s second-largest oil company, with an estimated $170 billion in oil reserves. In addition to Yukos, Khodorkovsky today controls massive mineral and timber interests as well as the Moscow Times, St. Petersburg Times, and other newspaper interests. In 2002, Forbes named him the richest man in Russia.

24

Many, to put it mildly, have a low opinion of Khodorkovsky. He is famous for his ruthlessness. In one company he took over, he installed surveillance cameras in every office to monitor his new employees. He decided that over a third of them weren’t working hard enough, so he fired them.

25 He flagrantly swindled his minority shareholders, setting what one Moscow brokerage firm called “a benchmark for unacceptable behavior.” After his Menatep Bank collapsed in 1998, Khodorkovsky transferred its good assets to a different entity, leaving its creditors empty-handed. A court-appointed manager was unable to trace the transactions, as a truck carrying most of Menatep Bank’s records mysteriously drove off a bridge into the Dybna River.

26

There are worse suggestions about Khodorkovsky. In 1998 the mayor of Nefteyugansk was murdered, not long after he publicly insisted that a Yukos subsidiary pay its local taxes. A year later Yevgeni Rubin, head of a company that had sued Yukos, had his car blown up. Meanwhile, as the car bomb scandal spread across Russia, Khodorkovsky accompanied then prime minister Yevgeni Primakov on a trip to meet President Clinton (never making it to the United States as Primakov turned his