Red Notice is an autobiographical account by Browder, the grandson of a famous U.S. Communist and the son of a Harvard legal scholar, of his efforts to make his own mark in the world by becoming a hedge fund manager in the newly "free" economies of Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s.
He succeeded in that, and quickly became very wealthy in the new "Wild West" of the post-Soviet economy. But in the process, by expecting Russian business to be governed by the rules of fairness and transparency that are generally honored in the West, he ran afoul of Putin and the new generation of Russian oligarchs, and discovered the reality of "Russian rules", including all the sorts of dirty operations, corruption, murder and mayhem with which we have lately become so familiar.
When one of his lawyers was imprisoned for defending him and his hedge fund, and ultimately was killed by the Russian state, it led him to fight back, leading to U.S. Congressional passage of the Magnitzky Rule, which placed personal sanctions on key Russian business and government figures, and triggered our ongoing national crisis over Putin, Trump and the Russian attacks on our political processes. The Magnitzky Rule is prelude to the sanctions now being imposed on Russian oligarchs around the world in response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Red Notice is a gripping personal story, and a foundational background piece in the complicated history of our current political moment, and our complicated relationship to the post-Soviet world of Russian politics and finance in the Putin era. Recommended.
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