In the beginning of the 21st century, things seemed to be perfectly placed for Russia to finally become a successful democratic country. After the natural resources’ prices started going up, the state became rich with money. The country had a new, young and capable leader, who promised to continue liberal reforms and to fight the influence of oligarchs. Russia has become a hot spot for investors from all over the world. However, twenty five years later, Russia is an autocratic dictatorship waging an aggressive war in Europe and trying to upend international institutions. Why did it come to this? Could it be any other way? And did the West play any part in this?
In her first book, a Pulitzer prize winning author Olesya Shmagun offers one of the possible answers to these urgent questions: it was pervasive corruption that prevented Russia from becoming happy and prosperous — and the people who allowed this corruption to become de facto law of the land, to their own profit. The book is structured through investigating and analyzing seven different big-time corruption cases — from the curious case of Vladimir Putin’s close friend, a cello player who became one of the richest men in the world, to a devastating environmental tragedy in the city of Norilsk, which was allowed to happen because of the negligence and greed of local officials and businessmen.
Combining investigative journalism with poignant narrative, the book tells the stories both of the perpetrators — dishonest officials, shortsighted businessmen, opportunistic criminals, Western politicians and institutions who helped to launder and hide dirty money — and their victims: the employees who saw everything and said nothing, the ordinary people who tried to stay honest, the activists and journalists who tried to hold the culprits accountable and paid a high price for their actions. Showing how corruption has penetrated all the levels of the Russian society and affected every citizen, Shmagun also aims to refute an old theory of corruption as an endemic feature of Russian people, and to help the reader imagine how things could be completely different.
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One of the very few Russian journalists to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, Olesya Shmagun first made a name for herself in the early 2010s, while working for The Village and reporting on Moscow urban life and small-time corruption. Soon enough, she joined the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and became one of the top Russian investigative journalists. She uncovered the assets of Vladimir Putin’s family and his closest friends, was one of the first reporters in the world to be given access to Panama Papers, exposed corruption among top Russian businessmen and European officials. In 2020, she co-founded iStories, which has soon become one of the top Russian investigative outlets. In 2021, she received the European Press Prize Investigative Reporting Award for a piece about Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law; the same year, Russia proclaimed a “foreign agent.” In 2022-2023, she got a Master’s degree in Public Policy from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. She now works as an investigative editor at Novaya Gazeta Europe.