To some, Grigori Romanov was an oddity, a hapless relic shuffling toward his life’s end. He was, to be sure, a diehard Communist who had chewed sour grapes ever since he fell hard from the Soviet Olympus. But oddly enough, in advanced retirement, far from his rarefied life among the Party elite, Romanov echoed the lament of many a common man in Russia. In the years after the Soviet collapse, he had found company. Romanov had no power now, but he took solace in the knowledge that millions of Russians shared his views. His principal conviction – Ran’she bylo lushche (“Things were better before”)–had become the motto of his generation. And the dirty secret, only conceded in the capital sotte voce by the ascendant Young Reformers, was that they were right. For many of his generation, things were indeed better before – for them.
Romanov lived on some sixty dollars a month. As a veteran of the blockade of Leningrad, he said he deserved much more. “I’m entitled to several war pensions. I’m a veteran and an invalid. And I received the Hero of Soviet Labor. Politburo privileges? What a joke! We have nothing. No dacha, no car, no privileges at all. Only the apartment.”
Once it was a very different story. After rising through the Party ranks, he ran Leningrad, Russia’s second city, for twenty-five years, until he was summoned to Moscow by Andropov in 1983. He survived various Politburo wars, until he was finally outflanked by the ascendant Gorbachev.
“In February 1985, Chernenko called me out to the dacha,” Romanov told me. “He was weak. He sat up in bed. I stood beside him. ‘Just wait,’ he said. ‘Relax. It’ll come to pass.’ He relied on the defense sector. He knew the importance of our work. He never wanted Gorbachev … We all knew Chernenko couldn’t last long. He was in very bad shape. So were most of the others, for that matter. They were all old and sick. Gromyko and the rest. There were two candidates discussed at that time: Vladimir Shcherbitsky and Romanov … No one talked about Gorbachev with any seriousness.”
A few weeks later Chernenko died, and within hours Gorbachev wrested control of the Politburo in a late-night five to four vote. It was a bit of spectacular luck, or so his biographers have held, that the three committee members who were Gorbachev’s chief opponents were absent from Moscow.
“The week before Chernenko died, my wife and I flew to Vilnius,” Romanov said. “They had given us a trip to Lithuania, to a sanitarium. The day Chernenko died, we were there. They said the plane would only fly the next day. They met that day, hours after he died. But the three most senior members of the Politburo weren’t present! Kunaev was in Almaty. Shcherbitsky was in the States. And I was in Lithuania. By the time we got back to Moscow he’d already done it. That fast. That was it. It was agreed to in public of course at the Politburo meeting and at the plenum. But he’d already cut the deal in secret with all of them. And you think the timing, Chernenko’s death, I mean, was all accidental?”
In the aftermath Romanov was stripped of power. He had long been renowned as an epicurean lush, ridiculed as the “Last of the Romanovs.” Gorbachev’s cronies played upon that reputation, spreading the rumor that to celebrate his daughter’s wedding. Romanov had ordered the caterers to use Catherine the Great’s Sèvres from the Hermitage. Worse still, the story went, a few pieces had been smashed. By July Romanov had been summarily retired and sent, according to another rumor fed to reporters, to dry out.
Did he ever regret, I wondered, not making it to the top?
“No,” he retorted. “I’m just sorry the wrong man did. The traitor. Because if it had been me, the invasion never would have happened.”
Please, put it in a bank … Please, let’s put it in a foreign bank.
–Vladimir Putin advising the relatives of those who died on the nuclear submarine Kursk on what to do with their compensation7
EVER SINCE RICARDO, economists have built intricate mathematical models to explain and forecast how markets will move. Calculus, however, assumes reason. When Russia crashed in the summer of 1998, there was little rational about it. “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency,” John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1921. “Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” Russia under Yeltsin was less a test market for the “Invisible Hand” or shock therapy than a new Babylon where the wheeling and dealing were nasty, brutish, and, for many in August 1998, lethal.
In the dawn of the new market those who would play its princes, if only for a while, needed gastronomic palaces where they could feast in the unreality of their reality. Across Moscow elite men’s clubs sprouted, with reliable security and robust wine cellars. Fashioned from the pages of Tolstoy and Pushkin, the clubs were draped in pre-Bolshevik bliss. Whether or not such bliss had ever existed didn’t matter. Artifice and excess were the object. In their urge to build a new world, the plutocrats imported Swiss chefs, Austrian furniture, English nannies. Having grown fat on the spoils of the Motherland, they could bask in the shimmer of their own money.
Tucked discreetly off Moscow’s Ring Road, two blocks down from the Institute of Biological Structures, which handles the annual repair work on Lenin’s corpse, is Club T. For a time it was considered among the finest restaurants in Russia. It should be, since it was designed as a private reserve for the new plutocracy, its very own “21” Club. Guests are vetted by videophone. The ten or so tables inside reflect absolute elegance, their pink tablecloths radiant under crystal and gold chandeliers. One corner of the dining room is heavy with the smell of Cuban cigars, another with the high notes of French perfume and Armenian cognac. Silk drapes keep the outside outside. Gold seraphim dance on the walls, their pudgy arms hoisting aloft little gilded candles Large mirrors announce your entrance, reassuring you that you belong, that you’ve arrived. The mirrors also assist the discreet diner to find the famous faces hidden across the room.
One evening, as the cold wake of the crash forced its survivors to renew their exit strategies, I invited four of the earliest American pioneers to join me at Club T. Paul Tatum of course was not the last American investor to see his dream sour in Russia. By the time Russia crashed in 1998, countless frontiersmen had been scalped, fled for home, or moved on to the next gold rush. But the quartet of Americans I invited to dinner – Bill Browder, Peter Derby, Charlie Ryan, and Boris Jordan – who, when their portfolios were at their fattest, controlled several billions of dollars of investments in Russia, remained.
Derby, a New Yorker of Russian descent, had arrived first, opening Russia’s first foreign-owned commercial bank in 1991. Jordan, another prodigal son of Long Island’s Russian diaspora, with roots among the Whites who fled the Revolution, had come in 1992 to help run Crédit Suisse/First Boston’s Moscow outpost. By 1995, having reaped billions of dollars in the privatization scheme, he had left to found Russia’s first Western-style investment bank, Renaissance Capital. The 1998 crash forced a divorce that split the bank, and Jordan for a time found himself isolated and on his own.
Browder, the soft-spoken grandson of, ironically, the American Communist leader Earl Browder, had also arrived in