“Red Notice: How I Became Putin’s No. 1 Enemy” by Bill Browder

Bantam Press 2015, Corgi Books 2015 ISBN: 9780552170321

Reviewed by Paul Schimmel

This is the most gripping and shocking work of non-fiction I have ever read. On the inside cover is an introductory note; a relatively bland introduction to the book, which belies the electrifying content. I will quote from this note:

Bill Browder, founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005, when he was denied entry to the country after exposing widespread corruption. Since 2009, when his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was murdered in Russian police custody, he has been leading a global campaign to expose human rights abuses in Russia. Consequently, the ‘Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act’ was signed into US law in 2012, imposing visa bans and asset freezes on certain officials involved in Magnitsky’s death.’

Magnitsky was not simply murdered in Russian police custody but was tortured to death. Most of us will already be familiar with the long arm of Putin’s administration and its capacity to eliminate unwanted opponents, and, of course, history records Stalin’s Soviet Union’s purges which killed close to one million Russians. In itself the murder of one more innocent man may not precipitate an international crisis, but thanks to Bill Browder Magnitsky’s did.

Although Putin’s state sponsored violence is shocking enough, what really stunned me in Browder’s account was the lying and corruption that runs through all levels of government in Putin’s Russia. Extortion and Fraud carried out by government departments, and exposed by Browder, were simply denied, and to make matters worse the government made repeated and clumsy attempts to frame Browder as the architect of all these crimes.

Browder had repeatedly tried to warn Magnitsky that his life was in danger and that he should flee Russia, but Magnitsky knowing he had committed no crime, naively wouldn’t believe he would be persecuted by the state. Devastated by Magnitsky’s death, Browder exposed what had been done to him and mobilized the American House of Representatives and the Senate to pass the ‘Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act’. Quite an achievement for one man.

It was hard for me to believe that an administration such as Russia’s could be so rotten at the core. As Lee Child says of the book, ‘Reads like a classic thriller… but it’s all true, and it’s a story that needs to be told’. Because of the account of human destructiveness offered by Browder’s book I think it should be read by all psychoanalysts, and indeed by everybody.

No review could convey the extraordinary contents of this book, but I hope I have conveyed enough to move you to get a copy and read it.