I made 40 highlights while reading Red Notice by Bill Browder. The book will give you insights into seeking justice against Putin's Russia.
Going after information in Russia is like hurtling down a rabbit hole. Ask a question, get a riddle. Track a lead, hit a wall. Nothing is self-evident or clear.
In prison, all you have is your reputation. Your position is hard-earned, and it is not relinquished easily. This is the calculus that every oligarch and politician lives by.
If the tide goes out in one place, it goes out everywhere.
Losing love is a lot harder than losing money.
The feeling of finding a ‘ten-bagger’ must be the financial equivalent of cocaine.
Exploit any avenue that can help you establish yourself as an expert in your niche.
In any major crisis, what you do in the first few hours defines it forever.
The best way to answer difficult questions is to find the people who know the answers and interview them about it.
During privatisation the valuation of the entire Russian economy was only $10 billion. Yet, Russia had 24% of the world’s natural gas, 9% of the world’s oil and produced 6.6% of the world’s steel, among many other things.
Instead of 150 million Russians sharing the spoils of privatisation, Russia wound up with 22 oligarchs owning 39% of the economy.
Russia is still a sovereign state that most Western governments cooperate with.
The FSB (infamously known as the KGB during Soviet times) doesn’t just issue arrest warrants. It dispatches assassins.
The Russian Interior Ministry was not a reputable police organisation, but rather a collection of officials abusing their positions to perpetrate massive financial frauds.
A strategy out of the FSB playbook is to create a character with a believable story. Then have this person pass valuable information to his target, wait for the target to disclose this information publicly, then show how the information is false.
Russia is such a decentralised country. The power of an influential businessman in some areas rivals that of the Moscow Interior Ministry.
The Russian government couldn’t have cared less about a couple of paragraphs in a US-government human rights report.
When the mass graves of Katyn Forest were discovered in 1943, the Soviets claimed that Germany was responsible for the murder of 7,000 Polish prisoners.
Interpol has a reputation for cooperating with authoritarian regimes to chase down enemies.
You can be untouchable by law enforcement, but not by the court of public opinion.
Sergei was a religious man, and he would not violate God’s ninth commandment; ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’.
Every prisoner has his own way of dealing with the adversity of being in jail, and Sergei’s had been to write everything down.
Visa sanctions and asset freezes are how you fight authoritarian regimes today.
While there is nothing wrong with pursuing a life in commerce, that world now feels like watching TV in black and white for me.
There is no feeling as satisfying as getting some justice in a highly unjust world.
No matter how scared you are at any particular moment, the feeling subsides. Your body can’t feel fear for an extended period.
They say there are five stages of grief. Recognising the pain is the vital one.
Nobody knows how much hardship one can endure until one is forced to handle it.
The Soviets severely penalised independent thinkers, hence over the 70 year period of communism the work ethic of Russians was destroyed.
In Soviet times, the wealthiest person in Russia was x6~ richer than the poorest. By the year 2000, the wealthiest person had become x250,000~ richer than the poorest.
Russians are familiar with hardship and suffering – not with success and justice.
Russian stories never have happy endings.
I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. (Winston Churchill)
When Putin became president in 2000, the actual power of the presidency lay with the oligarchs, regional governors and organised-crime groups.
Putin’s golden rule: stay out of politics, and you’ll keep your ill-gotten gains.
Putin now has the oligarchs in his pocket, he has consolidated his power and, by many estimates, he has become the richest man in the world.
Putin never mentions his enemies by name.
Unpredictability is Putin’s modus operandi.
Putin put a dead man on trial (Sergei Magnitsky), not even Stalin, a man responsible for the death of 20~ million Russians stooped to that level.
When Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, instead of dismantling the machine of lying and fabrication, he modified it and made it all the more powerful.
No man, no problem. (Stalin)
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