The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia.

• Author: Chollet, Derek
• Position: Political booknotes: russian toward capitalism

THE OLIGARCHS: Wealth and Power in the New Russia by David Hoffman Public Affairs, $30.00

EXACTLY A DECADE AGO, THE world looked to post-Soviet Russia, then in its infancy, with a great sense of hope and possibility. Freed from the shackles of Communism, embracing democracy and market economics, Russia in the 1990s promised to be an era of rebirth. No one thought that this would be easy, but from the perspective of 1992, it looked as if Russia had all the right ingredients to succeed: a populace eager for political and economic freedom, a vibrant leader in Boris Yeltsin, and a group of young, committed, Western-oriented technocrats ready to embark on bold reforms.

Of course, as is often the case with Russia, history unfolded harshly. Far from becoming a stable democracy and market economy, Russia turned into a sort of Wild West of unbridled capitalism, where corruption reigned supreme and many aspects of life seemed to come straight out of a bad gangster movie. By the turn of the century, Russia's politics, like its economy, seemed bankrupt. Yeltsin, once the world's white knight, had come to personify his country: big, blustery, and not very healthy. Most of his bright reformers had been driven from office in disgrace. And in Washington, those American policymakers and pundits who had once looked toward Russia with optimism were reduced to presumptuous finger-pointing about how and why Russia was "lost."

This sad story comes to life in David Hoffman's sprawling new book, The Oligarchs. Hoffman, who spent the decade in Moscow as one of The Washington Post's most respected foreign correspondents, focuses on the so-called "winners" of Russia's nosedive--the six business heavyweights who maneuvered to dominate Russia's politics, economy, and media. In the tradition of other recent American journalist-chroniclers of life in Russia, such as Hedrick Smith and David Remnick, Hoffman provides us with a vivid tableau of these men and their lives, showing how their ambitions shaped society and, in the end, brought Russia to the brink of collapse.

Hoffman's perspective is clearly critical of the oligarchs, but unlike other books about them, his is not a screed. In fact, what makes his work different is that, in a way, he humanizes them. In the finely sketched personality profiles of the six men in the book's opening, Hoffman shows how the roots of

Russia's current condition stretch back to the Soviet era, when men like Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir...