Casino Moscow : a tale of greed and adventure on capitalism's wildest frontier /

A staff writer for the Wall Street Journal in Kiev and Moscow from 1996 to 1998, Brzezinski had a front-row seat at the turbulent privatization of Russia's post-Communist industrial base. Modernization and efficiency along Western lines may have been the official goals of the campaign, but Brzezinski argues that, in the end, it resulted in large-scale robbery in which Russia's elite spirited an estimated $150 billion to $300 billion out of the country, stowing it in Swiss bank accounts and other offshore hideaways. The book is filled with hair-raising details: before setting up a company in Russia, a Canadian businessman has to interview several gangs to decide who will cover his back; families wanting to earn a living wage have chosen to live and work near Chernobyl, emphatically denying its well-known health hazards. But although he regards Russia's failure to modernize during this period a tragedy, Brzezinski offers an irreverent account of greed and corruption in this rollicking page-turner. In the face of rampant cronyism, corruption and fraud, Brzezinski (whose uncle Zbigniew was the national security adviser to the Carter administration) can still laugh at striving Moscow's claims to be the New York of the East (when expats like himself preferred to call it the Big Cucumber). Righteous indignation at the betrayal of a country and of the international organizations that tried to lend assistance, however, resonates in his assertion, "What passed for capitalism in Russia was a grotesque perversion of the American variety." (July) Forecast: The author's Wall Street Journal credentials and the cachet of his uncle's political connections should help call attention to this smart, firsthand report on a particularly volatile historical event. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A cool stroll down the mean streets of Novy Russky's financial madness, under a rain of cynicism from former journalist Brzezinski. Working as a stringer for the Wall Street Journal, Brzezinski poked about the backwaters of post-Soviet Russia and the republics before landing a job in the Moscow bureau. Returning to the capital after a five-year absence, he was dazzled by the wealth on display in the city, but he cast a more jaundiced eye on the sources of that wealth, from the big business of humanitarian relief-aid theft to the disastrous privatization of the nation's resources (natural gas, oil, gold, diamonds, and aluminum are now all under the command of the banking oligarchy). The author tried to rustle up interest in big-money operators in Moscow (grasping bankers both native and foreign, the robber baroness Timoshenilo, the lord of privatization Anatoly Chubais), but the only remarkable thing about most of these characters (many of them former Party apparatchiks) is their wealth-and even Brzezinski's caustic pokes can't turn them into a good story. But when he returned to the provinces, he found the kind of natural resources that make for captivating reading, hiply told: a visit to a Russian submarine in Sevastapol, the wasteland of St. Petersburg as it makes a pathetic bid for the 2004 Olympics, the beyond-rough-and-tumble of the Far East energy business, and the dead zone around Chernobyl (where the grass is always greener-literally-thanks to the irradiated soil). And the story of his mugging in his Kiev apartment is riveting in its menace, although his description of its milieu-"the overflowing dumpster that formed the decorative centerpiece of our courtyard"-allows some comic relief. Russia's tailspin is by now a tale with some moss on it, but Brzezinski tells it with appealing dash and indispensable black humor.