Browder is one of the first westerners to invest heavily in newly-privatized Russian companies; he establishes Hermitage Capital to manage those investments. Hermitage does well, at one point becoming the most successful emerging-markets fund in the world. It then suffers a string of setbacks as markets totter and corrupt powerbrokers move in for the kill, forcing Browder to liquidate Hermitage’s Russian investments. He then develops a worldwide emerging-markets fund, Hermitage Global. Hermitage functions as the catalyst for the trouble he and his team get into, in Russia.

At a meeting in Switzerland between several Russian billionaire oligarchs, who already control nearly 40% of Russia’s newly privatized industries, they agree to engineer the re-election of the unpopular Boris Yeltsin. “In exchange,” Browder writes, “they would get whatever was left of the unprivatized Russian companies for next to nothing” (91). This deal symbolizes the rampant corruption of Russian privatization.

An oligarchy is a small group of people who control a country. When the Soviet Union collapses, Russia privatizes all its industries, which had for decades been owned and operated by the government. The system to do so quickly becomes corrupted, to the point where a dozen or so men manage to corner nearly 40% of Russian industrial resources—oil and gas companies, mining operations, banks, and so on.