Abramovich Roman Arkadievich - Once upon a time in Russia: the rise of the oligarchs -- a true story of ambition, wealth, betrayal, and murder

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The names of many of the characters and locations in this book have been changed, as have many physical characteristics and other descriptive details. Some of the events and characters are also composites of several different events and persons.

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Copyright 2015 by Ben Mezrich

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jacket design by jason smith

jacket photography: men in suits matthias clamer/getty images;

gold dollar sign dimitri otis; red square michael kirchoff/alamy;

red star ivan vdovin/alamy

author photograph by eric levin

Interior design by Dana Sloan

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4767-7189-2

ISBN 978-1-4767-7191-5 (ebook)

O NCE UPON A TIME IN Russia is a dramatic narrative account based on numerous interviews, multiple first-person sourcesmost of whom have asked to remain anonymousand thousands of pages of court documents. In some instances, settings have been changed, and certain descriptions have been altered to protect privacy. I employ the technique of re-created dialogue, based on the recollection of participants who were there, court documents, and newspaper accounts, doing my best to communicate the substance of these conversations, especially in scenes taking place more than a decade ago.

A good man, maybe. But its best to shoot him.

OLD RUSSIAN PROVERB

July 2000,

Kuntsevo Dacha, Fili District

T HE SILENCE WAS EXCRUCIATING, the minutes ticking by thick and heavy, time itself gorging on the tension in the humid air. Even though the shades had been drawn back from the trio of windows pocking the long plaster walls of the cavernous dining room, it was impossible to tell how deep into the afternoon the day had drifted; the dense forest that surrounded the isolated, two-story compound cast deep shadows across the reinforced glass panes, shifting whatever remained of the bright summer light toward an ominous, gunmetal gray.

For the eighteen middle-aged men in dark suits shifting uncomfortably in their seats as they waited in that palpable silence around an oversize dining room table, it was hard to believe that they were still technically within Moscows city limits. Though, to be fair, this aging, stone house tucked in the middle of the dark woods, surrounded by a pair of chain-link fences topped by barbed wire, was a symbol of a much different Moscow than the rapidly growing metropolis beyond the wire. The men in this room had traveled back in time more than fifty years the minute they had been ushered out of their chauffeured limousinesnow parked in glistening rows behind the double fencesand led through the dachas front door.

The setting of the meeting was not lost on any of the men. The invitation that had been delivered by official courier to each of them in the preceding weeks had been met by everything from incredulous laughter to expressions of suspicion. Every soul knew what this place was: whose house this had once been, and what had supposedly taken place here. None of the men looked carefully into the shadows that played across the aging walls, darkening the corners of the vast, high-ceilinged room.

Even though this house had fallen into disuse a generation agoand was now more museum than functioning dachathe meetings address had meaning far beyond the invitation itself. And the longer the men were forced to wait for whatever was going to happen next, the more ominous the setting seemed.

Under the best of circumstances, these men were not accustomed to waiting. To describe them as powerful businessmenor even billionaireswould have been a laughable understatement. Among them, they represented the largestand fastestaccumulation of wealth in modern history. Within the Russian media, they had garnered the label Oligarchs a term that was usually derogatory, defining them as a class apart and above. According to the popular notion, over the course of the past decade, as the former Soviet nation had lurched into capitalism through a complex, often shadowy process of privatization, this classthe Oligarchshad accumulated insane riches, and they had used this wealth to imbed and twist themselves, like strangling vines, into the ruling mechanisms of the nations government, economy, and culture.

Most of the men in this room would have bristled at the designation. If anything, they saw themselves as representatives of the new, free, and modern Russia. Almost all of them had come from poverty; many had clawed their way out of childhoods filled with deprivation and prejudice. Many at one point had been mathematicians, scientists, or academics before they had turned their ambitions to business. If they had succeededand yes, as a group they had succeeded to a degree perhaps unique in historyit was despite the chronic corruption and cronyism of the shifting Russian paradigm, not because of it.

Oligarchs or not, men who earned billions were not known for their patience. Eventually, the silence got the better of the room, and one of the invitees, seated closest to the door that led back into the interior of the house, cleared his throat.

If some Chechen managed to get a bomb in here and blew us all to hell, he asked, do you think anyone would mourn?

Awkward laughter riffed through the room, then trickled away into the shadows. The macabre joke may have hit too close to home. Whatever the men thought about themselves, it wasnt exactly the best time to be a billionaire in Russia. Worse yet, the idea of a bomb going off in the dining room of such an ominous address wasnt as far-fetched as they would have liked to believe.