{"id":464,"date":"2015-02-03T16:28:13","date_gmt":"2015-02-03T16:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/2015\/02\/03\/how-to-become-putins-number-one-enemy-nick-cohen-2015\/"},"modified":"2015-02-03T16:28:13","modified_gmt":"2015-02-03T16:28:13","slug":"how-to-become-putins-number-one-enemy-nick-cohen-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/2015\/02\/03\/how-to-become-putins-number-one-enemy-nick-cohen-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Become Putin’s Number One Enemy – Nick Cohen (2015)"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nHow to Become Putin\u2019s Number One Enemy
\nby Nick Cohen<\/strong>
\n<\/em>
\nBill Browder was a highflying businessman in Moscow, until Putin turned on him. His new memoir details how dangerous it is to end up on the strongman’s bad side.
\nIn 2013 I went to London\u2019s notorious libel courts to gaze with anger and despair on yet another case that should never had come to trial. Pavel Karpov was suing Bill Browder, an investment fund manager, who had launched a devastating campaign against corrupt officials who had driven him out of Russia, and tortured and murdered his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky.
\nThe retired major from Putin\u2019s Interior Ministry Police was appalled to be on Browder\u2019s sanctions list. His luxuriously expensive lawyers claimed that Browder had not only defamed Karpov, but caused \u201cmoral suffering\u201d to his tender frame. With evident regret, the judge stopped the hearing. Karpov had no reputation in England and therefore could not sue. Less doltish observers were struck by the Putin paradox, which niggles at everyone who watches the Kremlin.
\nIf you believe what you hear, you cannot believe what you see.
\nIf you assumed the regime was telling the truth when it said Russia wasn\u2019t a Mafia state, you wouldn\u2019t see Putin\u2019s cronies in the playpens of Manhattan and Mayfair. If you believed that Russia respected international law, you would not see its troops in Ukraine. And if you believed that Pavel Karpov was the honest cop he claimed to be, you would not see him spending close to $1 million on London lawyers and PR men, or driving one of his many sports cars around Moscow, or relaxing in one of his family\u2019s collection of upmarket apartments.
\nIn his new book, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man\u2019s Fight for Justice Bill Browder writes the way he talks\u2014which is always a good strategy. His autobiography is bracing, direct and honest, with only a little less swearing than you encounter in person. It is both a political thriller and an argument for morality in foreign policy that he could never have expected to make when he began his roaring career in finance.
\nBill Browder came from a socialist family. His grandfather Earl Browder was leader of the American Communist Party in the 1940s. Earl was so loyal a comrade he carried on supporting the Soviet Union even after Stalin had expelled him from the Communist Party and denounced the \u201cBrowderist\u201d ideological deviation as heresy. His grandson revolted in the most dramatic fashion imaginable, and became a capitalist.
\nBill Browder also went to Russia. He found that shares in Gazprom and other companies were astonishingly cheap. Investors assumed managers were ransacking their companies\u2019 assets. Browder bought shares for peanuts, and then his researchers exposed the corruption. As the authorities made their arrests, Browder\u2019s shares shot up in value. He turned $25 million in seed capital into $1 billion. The financial press rated his firm, Hermitage, the best performing investment fund in the world in 1997.
\nContemporary culture does not cast brash fund managers as heroes. But although Browder does not make a big deal about it, his defiance was heroic, and remains so. Browder and Hermitage\u2019s staff had to show physical courage, as critics of the kleptocracy ended up dead. Early on, Browder realized Russian business was like a prison yard. \u201cWhen someone is coming for you, you have to kill him before he kills you. That\u2019s the calculus that every oligarch and every Russian politician goes through every day.\u201d
\nSo it is, but Hermitage\u2019s success also depended on Putin\u2019s blessing. When he took power in 2000, the oligarchs were his rivals. Every time Hermitage exposed a fraud, Putin\u2019s officials intervened. Until, that is, October 2003, when Putin arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia\u2019s richest man and Putin\u2019s most dangerous competitor.
\nBrowder pictures what happens next.
\n\u201cAfter Khodorkovsky was found guilty, most of Russia\u2019s oligarchs went to Putin and said, \u2018Vladimir Vladimirovich what can I do to make sure I won\u2019t end up sitting in a cage?\u2019 I wasn\u2019t there, so I\u2019m only speculating, but I imagine Putin\u2019s response was something like this: \u2018Fifty per cent\u2019.\u201d
\nOnce the deals were done, the regime turned on Browder. Russia removed his visa, and Major Karpov led the secret police into Hermitage\u2019s Moscow offices. The nature of the fraud they executed tells you all you need to know about Putin\u2019s Russia. The gangsters could not seize Hermitage\u2019s money. Very quietly, Browder had moved it from Moscow to London. Instead, they stole the company\u2019s identity, postured as its legitimate representatives, and pretended to the tax authorities that the Russian state owed them a $230 million tax rebate. Bribed officials went along with the biggest tax fraud in Russian history and handed over the \u201crebate\u201d within hours.
\nPutin\u2019s supporters at home and apologists abroad justify his rule by saying that he is the nationalist leader who has made Russia strong again. Yet the Putin regime arrested and murdered Sergei Magnitsky, Browder\u2019s lawyer. (Unlike everyone else associated with Hermitage, poor Sergei did not flee the country because he believed that good people must stay and fight for a better Russia.) The Foreign Ministry made stopping Browder one of its top priorities. The Russian judiciary presided over a crime I don\u2019t believe even Stalin committed: it organized a posthumous trial of Magnitsky\u2019s corpse and found it guilty of the very fraud Magnitsky had exposed. The FSB harassed Hermitage in London, and Russian police officers put Browder on an Interpol wanted list. They did all of this to protect gangsters who had weakened the Russian state by stealing its tax revenues. Their behavior shows in Russia that there is no state above the crime gangs. They are all one.
\nBrowder earned their enmity by devising a sanctions campaign that fitted the 21st century. During the Cold War, whatever privileges and wealth the Soviet elite had, they could not enjoy them abroad. Their successors spend their money in Manhattan and Mayfair. Indeed, they have a paranoid compulsion to move money to Manhattan and Mayfair, in case the regime steals it, or in case the regime falls. By lobbying Western governments to freeze the overseas assets of dozens of officials, Browder had devised a means to deprive them of the enjoyment of their loot.
\nTo anyone who harbors illusions about Obama\u2019s foreign policy, Browder\u2019s account of the struggle to get sanctions passed into US law will be a salutary lesson. He received staunch support in Congress. But the Obama presidency and the Clinton State Department opposed him until the last minute. Their resistance was a bleak tribute to their greatest foreign policy misjudgment. They imagined they could \u201creset\u201d relations with Russia. If they were nice to Putin, Putin would be nice to them.
\nThe Obama administration was participating in the immortal turn the \u201cprogressive\u201d West took after Iraq. It reasoned the Bush presidency had been a disaster, and that was true. Apparently hostile forces, it continued, were a rational reaction to western provocation, which was at best a quarter truth. And if we removed the \u201croot cause\u201d of our aggression, our enemies would vanish, which was pure fantasy.
\nJohn Kerry displayed the double standards that followed while he was sucking up to Obama in the hope of becoming Clinton\u2019s successor. In 2012, when he was still chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he tried to prevent the Senate approving Magnitsky sanctions until superior political force overwhelmed him. America was not a perfect country, he said, and Russia had democratic \u201caccomplishments\u201d\u2014wisely he did not list them. The US should be \u201cvery mindful of the need not to be always pointing fingers and lecturing\u201d.
\nThus self-criticism prohibits criticism of others. Thus American liberals can abandon Russian liberals, and feel righteous as they leave them to their fate.
\nAs all Western leaders impose sanctions on a revanchist and expansionist Russia today, you can see the failure of the Obama doctrine. We are all Browderists now, and maybe Browder points to the future.
\nI have heard him say that Putin is not as powerful as he looks. He relies on the support of the Russian elite and if that elite\u2019s opportunities for plunder vanish, it will desert him.
\nNo one can give you the how or the when. But his grandfather Earl Browder is best remembered in my admittedly small corner of the Left for being on the receiving end of one of the finest putdowns in the history of the socialist movement. Still loyal to Stalin, despite being purged and denounced, Browder was defending the Soviet Union at a debate at the Carnegie Hall in 1950. The former Trotskyist Max Shachtman was incandescent. He told Browder he was only alive because he was beyond Stalin\u2019s reach. He listed the communist leaders in the Soviet empire Stalin had shot or garrotted. \u201cThere,\u201d he said turning from the audience and jabbing his finger at Browder, \u201cthere but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse.\u201d
\nOne day Bill Browder will be able to say the same of Putin.
\n\ue006
\nFirst published in the <a href="http:\/\/www.thedailyDaily Beast<\/a>, 02.02.2015<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[58],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}