Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall. Andrew Meier

had returns of 228 percent; Browder’s return on his initial capital was 725 percent.

      Ryan first came to Russia after working at the EBRD, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Together with one of Russia’s leading reformers, former Finance Minister Boris Fyodorov, Ryan founded the United Financial Group, which, by 1998, managed more than a billion dollars in assets. With his main line roots and mainstream résumé, he was an anomaly, a reflective banker. “Of course the money brings us here,” Ryan told me in 1997. “But it’s much more than that. We’re building something entirely new. Okay, you can get stability and good returns in the U.S. But can you get the buzz?”

      Over snails and caviar, king prawns, and medallions of New Zealand lamb, the evening’s theme, at my request, was “What went wrong?” For the next three hours, the foursome pointed fingers at the IMF, former Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko, inborn Russian corruption, falling commodity prices, the global recession, prudish U.S. investors, prudent Asian investors, again the IMF. Jordan inevitably dropped the name of every player in Russia, from Kiriyenko to Soros, and declared early on: “This’ll help them” (“this” being the crash, “them” being the Russians). Derby spoke in breathless arias on the chronology of the fall. Ryan waxed philosophical, and Browder concluded, “Sadly, this is a crash with too many morals.” Sadly, too, the meal, by far the most expensive I had ever eaten, got lost in the burlesque of charge and countercharge.

      “The basic problem is you can’t control a company in this country,” stated Jordan.

      “You can have controlling stakes,” said Browder.

      “And get ripped off on every level,” parried Jordan.

      Derby announced that his number two, “a great Russian guy,” would go to jail in days. (In fact, he didn’t.) Derby paused, then said: “We will stay and try to be honest and fulfill our responsibilities.”

      “This country’s so corrupt they fucked themselves,” added Browder.

      “Bill, you obviously don’t believe that,” replied Jordan, “or else you didn’t do your fiduciary duty for your clients, investing a billion in the place.”

      At this moment the joust between Browder and Jordan was interrupted by the governor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Yakovlev, a blithe opportunist, who stopped by for a round of handshakes. When the governor floated away, Derby seized his chance. “The worst thing about it was there was no reason to default,” he said. “Absolutely none. There wasn’t that much debt coming due, like twelve billion dollars over the six weeks. And it was ruble-denominated. There were reasons to take action, but not to default on the domestic debt.”

      “Any country will default if they can’t roll over their debt,” noted Browder. “If the U.S. couldn’t sell T-bills for a month straight, they’d have a big fucking problem. But the thing that’s most damaging is the collapse of the banking system …”

      “This place never had a banking system,” scoffed Derby.

      “It had a system where you made payments,” Browder retorted. “You can’t make payments now.”

      “The banking sector did not take savings, invest it, and get growth through investment,” said Derby.

      “There was no multiplier effect,” Ryan summed up.

      “And the reason you don’t have people breaking the windows here is that they didn’t deposit their money in the banks,” said Jordan.

      “This is one the great mysteries of Russia,” Ryan noted. “No one’s had a job in a lot of towns for years. But car ownership in those same towns has gone up by two hundred percent. Consumer durables are way up. And at the same time no one’s rioting. That’s a clear sign that no one’s being very honest about their real net worth or about their real sources of income.”

      “Let’s say you’ve got twenty-five percent of your money in the bank and seventy-five percent in your mattress,” said Browder. “Eventually your mattress money is going to disappear.”

      Tuxedoed waiters unveiled course after course with remarkable flair, raising broad silver lids from big silver plates, making sweeping bows in unison. As the evening wound down, Browder, more puckish than the rest, observed, “There used to be Third World countries. Then they became Developing Countries. Then Less Developed Countries. Then the wall came down, and we got Emerging Markets. Well, folks, now they’re gone, too.”

      With dessert the conversation drifted to talk of the price of bodyguards, the best tax havens for billionaires, and the travails of Bermudan citizenship. Over coffee, Jordan offered a parable: Back when it was flush, the Central Bank decided to buy an American satellite to monitor electronic trading across Russia’s eleven time zones. No sooner had the satellite been launched than it spun out of orbit. Eventually it disappeared altogether.⁸

       SEVEN

      So many wonderfully fine women can hardly be seen in any country in one assemblage.

       –Cassius Marcellus Clay, the Kentucky abolitionist Lincoln sent as America’s emissary to Alexander II

      ANOTHER STREAM OF PROSPECTORS had started in the last days of the old USSR. American men, weighted with middle age and regret, began to come to Moscow to troll. Back then they were searching for a woman they had heard of, the charming and servile Russian antifeminist, the alluring woman who could be wife, lover, cook, cleaner, and mother all in one. Moscow, the American lonely hearts believed, would be their mecca. For thousands, it was.

      In the hotel bars and nightclubs you ran into all sorts: human rights lawyers and postdoctoral scholars, cardiologists, and even astronauts. Most of the men spoke no Russian, knew nothing of Tolstoy or Pushkin. To them, the girls were “Natashas,” one and all, and Moscow was heaven. That was in the pioneer days. As time moved on, the marriage market slumped. “Russian bride” agencies still claimed a strong niche, but many of the men who came to Moscow now wanted only one thing. Sex ruled the night, and the dollar was the coin of the realm.

      During Bill Clinton’s last presidential visit to Moscow, Mia and I went for a beer at a new hotel on Tverskaya, Moscow’s main drag. We found half a dozen Secret Service agents lining the bar. (After Tatum’s murder the White House was relieved that a new American hotel had opened in Moscow.) Nearby sat several other Americans, from their banter, junior-level White House adjutants. The Secret Service on that night was more than happy to share a tip. “Go to Night Flight,” one agent in a pinstriped suit said, “and you’ll never regret it.”

      Night Flight was Swedish run and scarcely resembled a bordello, but it was famed for offering Moscow’s most beautiful, and most expensive, prostitutes. (“DO IT TONIGHT,” said its ads at the airport, tempting new arrivals.) The cover was steep, the Secret Service agent said, twenty dollars after 9:00 P.M. “But,” he added, “it’s the best twenty bucks you’ll ever spend.”

      If Night Flight was the high end, the Hungry Duck anchored the low end. Run by a Canadian innkeeper who opened his first bar in Moscow in 1993 and housed in the old House of Culture for Soviet Workers in the Arts, a few minutes’ walk off Red Square, the Duck, as the bar was known among ex-pats and natives alike, grew world famous. The Washington Post even dubbed it “the wildest bar in the world.” While it lasted, it was certainly one of the most vulgar, with drunken sex in its dark corners and vomit on its floors.

      The first time I braved the Duck, I ended up bartending. I had come to interview the club’s impresario, Stanley Williams, a black deejay from Brooklyn who had recently emerged from a Moscow prison cell. Caught up in a sweep targeted against African students in a Moscow disco, Stanley had been arrested for possessing “less than an ashtray” of marijuana. In the end the charges were dropped, but by then he had spent nearly two years in Moscow’s worst jails. I was writing a story on the miserable state of Russian prisons