Bill Browder: Red notice

I woke at around 6:30 a.m., when there was a crush of new detainees. More of the same. No one like me. More cigarettes, more whispering. The smell of sweat increased by several orders of magnitude. My mouth tasted foul, and for the first time I realized how thirsty I was. Chris Bowers had been right to ask if they’d offered me anything to eat or drink. We had access to a rank toilet, but these bastards should have given us food and water.

All the same, I’d awakened feeling positive that this was just a bureaucratic misunderstanding. I called Ariel. He still hadn’t been able to figure out what was going on, but he did say that the next flight to London left at 11:15 a.m. I had only two alternatives: I would either be arrested or deported, so I tried to convince myself I’d be on that flight.

I busied myself as best I could. I answered some emails as if it were a normal workday. I checked with the embassy. The new consul on duty assured me that once things started opening for the day, they’d take care of me. I got my stuff together and tried once more to talk to the guards. I asked them for my passport, but they continued to ignore me. It was as if that were their only job: to sit behind the glass and ignore all the detainees.

I paced: 9:00; 9:15; 9:24; 9:37. I grew more and more nervous. I wanted to call Elena, but it was too early in London. I called Ariel and he still had nothing for me. I stopped calling people.

By 10:30 a.m. I was banging on the glass, and the officers still ignored me with the utmost professionalism.

Elena called. This time she couldn’t soothe me. She promised we’d figure out my situation, but I was beginning to feel that it didn’t matter. Jude Shao was looming large in my mind now.

10:45. I really began to panic.

10:51. How could I have been so stupid? Why would an average guy from the South Side of Chicago think he could get away with taking down one Russian oligarch after another?

10:58. Stupid, stupid, stupid! ARROGANT AND STUPID, BILL! ARROGANT AND JUST PLAIN STUPID!

11:02. I’m going to a Russian prison. I’m going to a Russian prison. I’m going to a Russian prison.

11:05. Two jackbooted officers stormed into the room and made a beeline for me. They grabbed my arms and gathered my stuff and pulled me from the detention room. They took me out, through the halls, up a flight of stairs. This was it. I was going to be thrown into a paddy wagon and taken away.

But then they kicked open a door and we were in the departures terminal and moving fast. My heart lifted as we passed gates and gawking passengers. Then we were at the gate for the 11:15 London flight, and I was being ushered down the Jetway and onto the plane and hustled through business class and deposited in a middle seat in coach. The officers didn’t say a word. They put my bag in the overhead compartment. They didn’t give me my passport. They left.

People on the plane tried hard not to stare, but how could they not? I ignored them. I was not going to a Russian prison.

I texted Elena that I was on my way home and that I would see her soon enough. I texted her that I loved her.

We took off. As the wheels thumped into the fuselage, I experienced the biggest sense of relief I have ever felt in my life. Making and losing money by the hundreds of millions of dollars didn’t compare.

We reached cruising altitude and the meal service came around. I hadn’t eaten for more than twenty-four hours. Lunch that day was some kind of awful beef Stroganoff, but it was the best thing I had ever eaten. I took three extra rolls. I drank four bottles of water. And then I passed out.

I didn’t wake until the plane hit the runway in England. As we taxied, I made a mental catalog of all the things I was going to have to deal with. First and foremost was working my way through British customs without a passport. But that would be easy enough. England was my home and, ever since I had taken British citizenship in 1998, my adopted country. The bigger picture had to do with Russia. How was I going to get out of this mess? Who was responsible for it? Whom could I call in Russia? Whom in the West?

The plane stopped, the public address system chimed, and the seat belts all came off. When it was my turn, I walked down the aisle to the exit. I was totally preoccupied. I got closer to the exit and didn’t notice the pilot at the front watching the passengers deplane. When I reached him, he interrupted my thoughts by holding out a hand. I looked at it. In it was my British passport. I took it without saying a word.

Customs took five minutes. I got in a cab and went to my apartment in London. When I arrived, I gave Elena a long hug. I’d never felt so thankful for the embrace of another person.

I told her how much I loved her. She gave me a big, doe-eyed smile. We spoke about my predicament as we made our way, hand in hand, to our shared home office. We sat at our desks. We turned on the computers and picked up the phones and got to work.

I had to figure out how I was going to return to Russia.

If you heard me speaking right now, you would probably ask, «How did this guy with an American accent and a British passport become the largest foreign investor in Russia only to get kicked out?»

It’s a long story, and one that indeed started in America, in an unusual American family. My grandfather, Earl Browder, was a labor union organizer from Wichita, Kansas. He was so good at his job that he was spotted by the Communists and invited to come to the Soviet Union in 1926. Not long after he got there, he did what most red-blooded American men do in Moscow: he met a good-looking Russian girl. Her name was Raisa Berkman. They fell in love and got married. They would have three boys; the first was my father, Felix, who was born in the Russian capital in July 1927.

In 1932, Earl returned to the United States, moving his family to Yonkers, New York, to head the American Communist Party. He ran for president twice on the Communist ticket, in 1936 and 1940. Even though he’d garnered only about eighty thousand votes in each race, Earl’s candidacy focused Depression-era America on the failings of mainstream capitalism and caused all the political players to revise their policies leftward. He was so effective that he even appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1938, with the caption «Comrade Earl Browder».

This same effectiveness also drew the ire of President Roosevelt. In 1941, after my grandfather was arrested and convicted for «passport violations», he began serving four years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in Georgia. Fortunately, due to the Second World War alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, Earl was pardoned one year later.

After the war ended, Earl spent the next few years in the political wilderness — until Senator Joseph McCarthy started his infamous witch-hunt, trying to rid the country of every last communist. The 1950s were a paranoid time in America, and it didn’t matter if you were a good communist or a bad communist, you were still a communist. Earl was subpoenaed and interrogated for months by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

My grandfather’s political persecution and beliefs weighed heavily on the rest of the family. My grandmother was a Russian Jewish intellectual and had no desire for any of her sons to go into the dirty business of politics. For her, the highest calling was academia, specifically in science or mathematics. Felix, my father, dutifully lived up to and exceeded her expectations, attending MIT at the age of sixteen. Remarkably, he received his bachelor’s degree in only two years, enrolled in Princeton’s math program, and had his PhD by the age of twenty.