For a hedge fund manager, Bill Browder writes an engaging and interesting story. His judgement only failed him at the end, when he wrote as this book’s subtitle ‘How I Became Putin’s No. 1 Enemy.’ This may or may not be true. But the book’s subtitle should have been ‘The Education of Bill Browder’. For this is what the book really is about, even if it starts in November 2005 when, on a routine flight into Moscow, he was stopped, held overnight, and then deported back to London, where he was living at the time with his second wife. All this is told in the present tense, before switching into the past tense to describe the events leading up to the book’s writing in 2014. Those events are described in an autobiographical way and recount the author’s education, fascination with the post-Communist world in Eastern Europe, his subsequent disillusionment, and transformation into a lobbyist for travel and foreign asset restrictions on Russian officials involved in human rights abuses.
It is a story of material success and then some, written in a racy style, with dialogue and short chapters, starting with the author’s climb to the pinnacle of high finance, his first gatecrashing of Davos in 1996 to his acceptance there; then come the first puzzling, unsettling incidents of corporate financial skulduggery, leading to the murder at the climax of the book, which reveals that doing business in Russia can have fatal consequences.
Earl Browder
What adds a certain piquancy to Bill Browder’s story is his family background, as the grandson of Earl Browder (1891-1973), the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the United States of America (of whom more below). The older Browder’s family paid the consequences of his politics in the anti-Communist fervour of the mid-20th century. But, true to their Marxist inspiration, they excelled academically. Only the grandson Bill rejected his family’s socialism, and determined early on to become a capitalist. However, without capital this is not really practicable. The nearest substitute is to go to a prestigious business school and make one’s way up the bureaucracies that manage big business and big finance. In a counter-intuitive calculation, Bill Browder added his grandfather’s name to give distinction to his application to Stanford Business School, and got in.
