I recently read “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man’s Fight for Justice” by Bill Browder. Below are the quotes I found most interesting:
“Instead of 150 million Russians sharing the spoils of mass privatization, Russia wound up with twenty-two oligarchs owning 39 percent of the economy and everyone else living in poverty.” (87)
“Seventy years of communism had destroyed the work ethic of an entire nation. Millions of Russians had been sent to the gulags for showing the slightest hint of personal initiative. The Soviets severely penalized independent thinkers, so the natural self-preservation reaction was to do as little as possible and hope that nobody would notice you. This had been fed into the psyches of ordinary Russians from the moment they were on their mothers’ breasts.” (97)
“There’s a famous Russian proverb about this type of behavior.
One day, a poor villager happens upon a magic talking fish that is ready to grant him a single wish. Overjoyed, the villager weighs his options: “Maybe a castle? Or even better—a thousand bars of gold?
Why not a ship to sail the world?” As the villager is about to make his decision, the fish interrupts him to say that there is one important caveat: whatever the villager gets, his neighbor will receive two of the same. Without skipping a beat, the villager says, “In that case, please poke one of my eyes out.”” (116)
“This whole exercise was teaching me that Russian business culture is closer to that of a prison yard than anything else. In prison, all you have is your reputation. Your position is hard-earned and.it is not relinquished easily. When someone is crossing the yard coming for you, you cannot stand idly by. You have to kill him before he kills you. If you don’t, and if you manage to survive the attack, you’ll be deemed weak and before you know it, you will have lost your respect and become someone’s bitch. This is the calculus that every oligarch and every Russian politician goes through every day.” (125)
“What I’d completely missed was that the world is one big sea of liquidity. If the tide goes out in one place, then it goes out every-where. When big investors started to lose money in Asia, they began unloading risky securities from their portfolios everywhere else s the world and anything Russian was at the top of that list.” (132)
“Strangely, in the hedge fund business, if you’re down 30 percent or 40 percent your clients will withdraw all their money and you’ll be shut down in no time. However, when you’re down 90 percent, as the Hermitage Fund was in 1999, most clients said to themselves, “What the hell. Might as well hold on and ride it out to see if it recovers.”” (141)
“In Soviet times, the richest person in Russia was about six times richer than the poorest. However, by the year 2000 the richest person had become 250,000 times richer than the poorest person.” (156)
“Both of them had been adults during the Soviet era and had seen firsthand how capricious the government could be. If powerful people wanted you arrested, then you were ar-rested. The law didn’t matter. Sergei, on the other hand, was thirty-six years old and had come of age at a time when things had started to improve. He saw Russia not how it was but how he wanted it to be.
Because of this, he didn’t realize that Russia had no rule of law, it had a rule of men.
And those men were crooks.” (253)
“ I feel fear as much as the next person. But what I’ve discovered about fear is that no matter how scared I am at any particular moment, the feeling doesn’t last. After a time it subsides. As anyone who lives in a war zone or who has a dangerous job will tell you, your body doesn’t have the capacity to feel fear for an extended period. The more incidents you encounter, the more inured you become to them.” (375)
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