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A NOTE FROM DAVID HOFFMANOn a sweltering afternoon in July 1996, just after Boris Yeltsin was re-elected, I knocked on the door of an elegantly restored late 19th Century mansion in central Moscow. I was ushered into a cool, pleasant conference room where, seated at a marble table, I met Boris Berezovsky for the first time. A short man with a rounded face, nearly bald, soft-spoken but with a rapid, urgent cadence in his voice, Berezovsky told me an intriguing story, which I did not fully grasp at the time. He said a group of seven businessmen, all of them young men, all of them children of the wild first years of Russian capitalism, had banded together only a few months before to save Yeltsin from certain defeat at the hands of the Russian Communist leader. Berezovsky claimed they had shaken Yeltsin out of a political stupor, persuaded him to appoint the steely manager Anatoly Chubais as campaign chief, then thrown the power of their television stations and banks behind the ailing Yeltsin, and saved Russian democracy and capitalism. The story was only partly true. The young businessmen did save Yeltsin--but they also saved themselves. For a long time, I wondered: who were these audacious tycoons, who could play power brokers in the Kremlin? How did they get their start in the Soviet years? From where did they draw such fantastic wealth in so short a period from such a devastated economy? How did they become the Russian oligarchs of the 1990s? In this book, I have tried to answer these questions for six men who were at the front lines of change as Soviet socialism collapsed and Russian capitalism--crazy, chaotic and corrupt--took root. I found their stories fascinating, surprising and deeply revealing of the path Russia has taken since the dawn of perestroika fifteen years ago. The six men are Berezovsky, the risk-taking powerbroker; Vladimir Gusinsky, media magnate; Mikhail Khodorkovsky, oil baron; Alexander Smolensky, banker; Anatoly Chubais, the longest-surviving reformer; and Yuri Luzhkov, the powerful Mayor of Moscow. Together, they are the oligarchs. |
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PAPERBACKISBN 978-1-61039-070-5 Pub date: 09/13/11 Price: $21.99/25.50 Canada 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 600 pages 8 pp b/w inser Business, Politics Selling Territory: WORLD Pub history: 978-1-58648-001-1 |
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