BOOK REVIEW – ‘RED NOTICE’: HOW I BECAME PUTIN’S NO 1 ENEMY
Wednesday, May 31st, 2017
This book is all the rage now that so much is in the news about Russia and Putin. The author, Bill Browder, was interviewed on Fox Business today. Sounds like a fascinating read for the summer ! Nancy
Red Notice: How I Became Putin’s No 1 Enemy by Bill Browder – review
A gripping account of murder, high finance and the Russian president’s Achilles heel

IIn 2008 a young Russian lawyer called Sergei Magnitsky uncovered a massive tax fraud. He found evidence that a group of well-connected Russian officials had stolen a whopping $230m. The same officials had Magnitsky arrested; he was tossed into a freezing cell and refused medical treatment. Magnitsky – who suffered from pancreatitis and gall stones – spent months in pain. This state-sanctioned torture was meant to make him withdraw his testimony. He didn’t. One day his condition grew critical. Guards put him in an isolation cell. There, they beat him to death.
Magnitsky’s case was to become the most notorious and best-documented example of human rights abuse in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. That this happened was down to one man: Bill Browder, a US-born financier and the CEO of a successful asset management company. Once a Putin fan, Browder found himself in trouble in 2005 when he was deported from Russia. He hired a team, including Magnitsky. When the Kremlin got nasty, most of the lawyers fled. Magnitsky – a family man with two small boys, who liked Beethoven – refused to leave. He believed the law would protect him, that Russia had said farewell to its Soviet ghosts. It was a tragic misjudgment.
Red Notice is a dramatic, moving and thriller-like account of how Magnitsky’s death transformed Browder from hedge-fund manager to global human rights crusader. Its title refers to the extradition request served by Russia on Interpol, demanding Browder’s arrest. (A Russian court later jailed him in absentia for nine years.) In truth, there are quite a few pretenders to the exalted post of “Putin’s No 1 Enemy”, as he describes himself. They include Michael Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch whom Putin (pictured) jailed and sent to Siberia. There is the lateBoris Berezovsky, another tycoon who fell out with Russia’s grudge-bearer-in-chief and decamped to London, playing Trotsky to Putin’s Stalin. Or Alexei Navalny, the Moscow opposition leader, currently under house arrest. Or the murdered Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in a Mayfair hotel with radioactive green tea.