Customer Reviews

Casino Moscow: A Tale of Greed and Adventure on Capitalism's Wildest Frontier

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Casino Moscow, about post-Soviet Russian and Eastern Europe, is a surprising page turner. Having worked in Russia and other former Soviet Republics, I was walking back in time as I read the book. Brzezinki's accurate portrayal of the life an expat (from the initial shock upon arrival, to the slow immersion to local custom, all the way to going native) and the business customs and irregularities (finding business partners, traveling on local transport, needless and antiquated bureaucracy, the mafia and all of the ironies in between). I laughed at loud at times and other times was reminded how scary a place to live it was. I think the comparisons to Liar's Poker are apt. The story is griping, funny, and for many people I know, all too close to reality. Billions of dollars at play in an unregulated wild west arena. He has the oil fields, oil men, bankers, Chechens, Tartars, Radisson, Nightflight, dinner parties, expat haunts, trips to the provinces,....all of it down pat and eerily reminiscent of what I know to be true. Casino Moscow culminates with an interesting and credible (hailing from the WSJ) perspective on the final spurts of Russian economic "growth."

I read this book cover-to-cover this past weekend and found that it captures the spirit and feelings I experienced while working and living in Russia myself in 1994-1996 as a highly paid and pampered business consultant. To this day, I still cannot accurately explain the living and working conditions as an expat in Russia/East Europe during those crazy years. I generally resort to pulling out the more than 300 hours of videotape and some 4000 pictures I took while there in order to remind myself what I went through. I do recall both cursing and thanking my circumstances on a daily basis -- cursing the long winter days, the inability to accomplish simple business tasks; thanking the opportunity I had to help transform the former "Evil Empire" into a potential commercial, financial, military and social ally of the West (Needless to say, those expats on the ground during those years had some lofty aspirations.)

I have been back to Moscow (as recently as this recent August) many times since my long-term stay and continually ask myself how the changes put into play in the early/mid-1990s resulted in the current state of the country and people.

For all of those who want to know what it was like during those wild and insane mid-1990s as an expat in Russia, this book is for you. There is no need for endless hours of videotape and pictures to see -- this book captures a big chunk of history in a neat and concise bundle.

This book is an entertaining and valuable read for anyone interested in the countries and people emerging from the collapse of the Soviet empire. The book covers far more than just Moscow but ranges into the Ukraine, Belarus, Siberia and Poland. The author has a good eye for physical and personal detail and sets scenes well. He is also able to draw the reader into an understanding of the larger implications of the events he witnessed. Brzezinski also has the advantage of growing up in French Canada as the son of Polish immigrant parents. The resulting linguistic and ethnic understanding has given him a feeling of closeness to the Slavic people of whom he writes. He is able to write in a fluid style for an American audience but at the same time he reveals a sense of irony toward the wonders of the capitalistic system that many Americans, no matter how well traveled, lack.

At first I was captivated by the story and the author's flamboyant sense of humor. However, further reading revealed that the author is very biased in his views, I could sense contempt and disgust mixed with jealosy to New Russians. Everything is painted black or gray at best. Russians are either mafia goons or dirt poor. Women are either prostitutes or ugly babushkas. Looks like the author was only exposed to the dark side of the moon without even looking at the other side. The author seems to be morbidly attracted to filthy clubs, mafia gatherings, and etc. THe analysis of the economy and politics in Russia leaves much to be desired. Very shallow. There are many inconsistencies and mistakes in the story that make me believe that the autors has never actually visited places he described in his book.

For example, I personally come from Vladivostok, which is 7 time zones from Moscow, not 5 as the author put it. The author said they had driven for three hours to a submarine plant on Amur river, which is over 1100 kilometers to the north. It takes at least 20 hours to get there by Russian roads. The name of the hotel he stayed in is incorrect. His description of the casino and club he went to doesn't ring a bell - I've been to every single club in Vladivostok. The description of bouncers wielding K47 guns is just ridiculous - an absolute lie. There are many other details that make me believe that the author just recorded somebody else's stories and made up the rest without ever visiting places.

Bottom line: one-sided and shallow. Will give you a very biased idea of what Russia really is.

The book is entertaining, though glib and superficial. I've lived in Moscow for three years and Brzezinski's book sounds like so much standard ex-pat piffle: constant moaning about how it's not like back home, coupled with high-sounding moralizing, topped off by a mercenary drive to grab as much as possible from the place before bailing out. I have some doubts about the quality of Brzezinski's reportage, since he seems not to put himself out on much in-depth research. I thought it was particularly odd that he got most if not all of his information about Umar Djabrailov by reading Umar's own collection of press clippings while waiting for an interview. Actually, I'm dismayed to learn that the Wall Street Journal would appoint him one of its Moscow correspondents when his main financial training was watching "Bonfire of the Vanities" and reading "Liar's Poker". It casts doubt on the quality of the WSJ's reportage in general.

And I have to wonder about the quality of his analysis; how could anyone spend as much time in Russia as he did and not understand that Zhirinovsky is but a political clown propped up and used by the Kremlin to advance its own agenda? How can he summarily dismiss the U.S. policy towards Russia (too much support of Yeltsin) without discussing some of the alternatives? And how, oh how, could he not have known that Night Flight was a bordello before going in? Almost every visiting foreign businessman figures this out within 24 hours of arrival.

The book seems content with tossing out the types of cliched characters that will play well with the folks back at the Home Office but it doesn't break out of its limitations with any fresh insights. It's as though the book is setting the standard for a new, post-Cold War rhetoric ("those awful, thick-necked, thieving Russkies!"), but then maybe it's an inevitable tradition in his family (picking up where his uncle Zbigniew left off). Make no mistake, there are a lot of baddies in the upper reaches of power in Moscow, but the situation's a bit more complicated than as presented in this book. By not having distracted himself from his high-priced dinners and social circle of Bright Young Things, Brzezinski hasn't sweated enough to try to get below the surface of the current situation in Russia.

If you read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, many of the stories in this book will seem familiar to you. They should. Matthew Brzezinski was a reporter for both publications in the 1990s. In this witty revealing book, he shares with you not only the stories he covered but the experiences he had in covering them and living in Kiev and Moscow. The stories are connected by his descriptions of what happened to him, his fiancee, their friends, and the people he wrote about. The book begins with being mugged in his own apartment by a confidence team in Kiev and ends with leaving the country to avoid confiscatory taxation. Unfortunately, he ends up having a regret. A year later, one of his Journal colleagues wins a Pulitzer for her reporting of the aftermath of the Russian debt crisis.

Crony Capitalism is the name that has been applied to the Russian tendency for government officials to share the benefits of special favors with their buddies, and probably get a rake-off in the process. In substance, it is little different than the corruption in many third-world countries. The key difference is that Russia as an advanced industrial country with lots of natural resources had a lot of booty to share. As a result, people arise out of nowhere to command enterprises worth billions. And disappear just as quickly when their sponsors in the government are ousted.

Although these scenes occur in the 1990s, they will remind you of stories about Prohibition in the United States. For example, night spots are publicly rated for the likelihood that criminals will start shooting at each other in them as well as the likelihood of being able to arrange for sexual favors. Business people operate with teams of former commandos as body guards.

The disregard for society's needs is pretty strong. In a section called "The Zone" you will read about visiting the radioactive sites in and around Chernobyl. While the visitors are wearing protective gear and leaving quickly when the radiation count gets too high, people have been bribed with good jobs to come work and live in these dangerous areas without any protection. Stories about six-fingered children and other indications of genetic damage abound.

But the most chilling story for me was about a training session in capitalism run for some youths in a Young Pioneers camp. Set up to mimic a free market, the youngsters were soon counterfeiting money, intimidating each other, cornering scarce supplies, and generally running the show corruptly to favor themselves. It seemed like a perfect analogy for what was occuring in the whole country. With such an ingrained, warped reaction to wide-open capitalism, can Russian have much hope for improvement? I certainly hope so. But, if that is to occur, the prescription will not be found in these pages that outline the abuses.

The stories of daily living are also compelling. If you drive a car in the capital, you will get at least one traffic ticket a day. That's the way that the local Moscow police earn a living wage. On some days, you might get two. For an airplane trip, no one is sure if the planes will take off or land. Great risks are run in the process. Businesses don't pay their taxes, workers, or bills. The new rich seem to be living at the ultimate, while most are desperately poor. Naturally, a lot of this goes up in smoke when the currency crashes in the debt crisis. Savings are destroyed, and foreigners leave behind the billions that they thought they had scored big with.

Clearly, much of the money earned through Crony Capitalism was simply looted and sent to foreign bank accounts. The result was probably to impoverish the country more than it was to begin with.

After you finish this fascinating book, think about where else unrestrained greed has negative consequences. How can the benefits of individual iniative be gained in the context of lawlessness . . . except by joining a criminal gang? That seems like the lesson of this book. Where's Wyatt Earp?

Appreciate your responsibilities to others as a way to ensure the benefits of being supported by their efforts as well as your own.

As someone who has been involved in Russian legal matters for the past ten years, I found this book quite interesting, if not always accurate. It is not so much that it is inaccurate with respect to what it reports, it is that it so much sensationalizes Russian business that it ignores the great multitudes of Russian businesses that are out there slogging it out just like most businesses in the West. So while I greatly enjoyed the book from a mostly prurient perspective, I did not find it terribly helpful in improving my knowledge of Russian business.

Matthew Brzezinski, former reporter in the Moscow bureau of The Wall Street Journal (and nephew of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's anti-Soviet National Security Advisor) writes about his time in Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when a gambling mentality took over from the collapsed aspirations of Russia's 70 year experiment with Communism.

His book captures something of the atmosphere of Moscow and the former Soviet Union of the 1990s when anything seemed possible in the world of finance, set in a time and place in which Berezovsky, Gusinsky, and Potanin were discussed with the same awe (and envy) as Bezos, Case and (Martha) Stewart were in the United States.

One tale of a board meeting in the mid-1990s in the chapter "Potemkin Inc." (after the phrase "Potemkin village", a sham devised by 18th century bureaucrats to impress their sovereign) is particularly telling, not only about how far corporate governance has to go to attract foreign investors but also how the 'Soviet' mentality continues:

"One by one, the nine board members followed, one elderly official pausing by the microphone. 'Foreigners need to think about the future of the plant and about the welfare of its employees, not just about pumping profits,' he spat, white with anger. 'This meeting is over,' he added, storming off the stage."

Such comments have a familiar tone to consumers of Soviet propaganda. For 70 years the Soviet Union spoke of the horrors of Western imperialism, while at the same time running the most far-reaching totalitarian empire the world has ever seen.

At times Casino Moscow veers too much between being a personal memoir of his time in Moscow along with his growing relationship with Roberta and the larger story of the first few years of freedom in Russia. Snippets of the life of an expat in Moscow-the problems with personal staff, fears about safety, frustration with the petty bureaucracy-leave the reader wanting to learn more about what it is like to be in a country that has collapsed and is trying to find its place in the world community. Although I can sympathize with the desire for maintaining discretion regarding his wife's career, it was somewhat teasing that Brzezinski doesn't name her shadowy (although well known in Russian finance circles) and immensely profitable employer; he writes, "...I have taken the liberty of changing [her firm's name] to VSO, for Very Secretive Organization." Such subterfuge does little to dispel the notion of a cabal of financiers plotting the future of the world behind the scenes (which does not make Western capital look too attractive to its recipients).

Casino Moscow is an enjoyable book to read for anyone wondering about the beginnings of Russia's post-Soviet history.

I would probably rate this 3.5 stars, but erred on the high side since I did not have that option. I enjoyed this book, just as I enjoyed Godfather of the Kremlin by Paul Klebnikov. However, Casino should not be purchased as an in-depth study of the rise and fall of the free-market system in Moscow during the 1990's. I expected a former financial writer for the Wall Street Journal to have included a little more background and detail as to what events led to the rise of the free market system and its fall. Throughout the book, Brzezinski refers to the looting of Russia's assets by the oligarchs, the corruption of government officials and business leaders, the moving in of organized crime, etc., but there is not even the most basic explanation of these happenings to give the reader the context of the events discussed in the book. This could have been done without turning it into an economic treatise. In contrast, even considering its flaws (as discussed in its reviews), Godfather of the Kremlin did try to give the reader more detailed and in-depth information concerning the government and business actions that got Moscow and Russia in that situation. Having said that, I enjoyed the book for what it was - sort of a "year in the life" of the author's time in Moscow with anecdotes and a few flashbacks to his family in Poland and other events in his life. As someone who has experienced the coldness of previously closed Russian cities (with defense factories), train rides across the country and being frisked before going into mob-controlled Moscow restaurants, I enjoy these stories. I am, however, still looking for a book with the perfect balance between entertaining and educational, although given the constant changes over the past couple of years it may be difficult. Next up, the book by the Miller Beer salesman in Moscow, whose name I cannot remember.

This is a book that deserves its five stars. Excellently written and covers a fascinating subject -- the development of capitalism in Russia. The author who is Canadian with Polish heritage ventures to the east to become a journalist for the Wall Street Journal and to see first hand the continents progress from communism to market economy. Much to his surprise it is not exactly a sight for sore eyes but a wild-west robber baron type mentality where the ones with the money and the guns to back it up rules. The amount of money, power, and blood that is at stake are staggering and the quest for control has always its ties to Kremlin and organized crime. The book offers great insight in the complexity of both the workings of Russia and its surrounding countries (i.e former Soviet Union states) and the eagerness of international finance to earn a quick buck along the way, which might not be the best way to find stable growth and development that is so much needed.