Once Upon a Time in Russia by Ben Mezrich Read Free Book Online

and even Moscow—and it seemed as though he hadn’t traveled far at all. If it weren’t the middle of December, and the temperature weren’t kissing the mid-eighties, he might have thought he had just stepped into the well-heeled crowd on Tverskaya Street.
    â€œQuite a juxtaposition,” a soft voice chimed at him from his left, and he turned to see a young man—whom he knew, though not well—was now leaning back against the railing just a few feet away, legs crossed as he surveyed the scene. “Have to hand it to Pyotr for arranging this, it’s much nicer than being stuck knee deep in a meter of snow.”
    Berezovsky smiled, taking in the man’s sandy brown hair, two-day stubble, strong jaw, and piercing blue eyes. The man was around half his age, maybe mid-twenties, but he exuded the relaxed confidence of someone much older. He was wearing dark slacks and a white short-sleeved shirt with a polo player above his heart. He was pale, like Berezovsky, but had enough red in his cheeks to show that he had been in the Caribbean for a few days.
    â€œIt’s easy to love the ocean,” Berezovsky responded. “Pyotr has a very nice group of friends. And already I’ve seen a handful of fish—but only one or two whales.”
    The banking magnate Pyotr Aven, who had organized the junket and the boat, was certainly the latter. One of the wealthiest menin Russia, he was also one of the smartest. Like Berezovsky and Gusinsky, he had been born an outsider, but not impoverished, not underprivileged. And when the walls came down, he had parlayed the PhD in economics into a massive fortune.
    The handsome young man next to Berezovsky was most decidedly still a fish, in Berezovsky’s opinion, but maybe had the makings of a whale. Berezovsky knew Roman Abramovich as an entrepreneur from Moscow. They had had a little time to become reacquainted after landing in the island airport, and then again on the way to the yacht’s tender.
    Certainly, Abramovich had been quite familiar with Berezovsky and his accomplishments, even before they first met. Here on the boat, just as at the Presidential Club, Berezovsky drew everyone’s attention. But among the group of businessmen gathered on the junket, the gazes weren’t mocking, they were hungry. The purpose of this junket was business; more specifically, facilitating the sort of business relationships that turned fish into whales. And Berezovsky was rapidly becoming a man of consequence in this arena. Already, news of his impending privatization project involving ORT was swirling through the finance community. Added to his auto and banking interests, his interests in media gave him fingers in many, many pies.
    The fish were hungry, because they knew that a man like Berezovsky, with his connections to the Family, could make things happen that were otherwise impossible. You could certainly become a millionaire in Russia without connections; Berezovsky himself had done so, and so had most of the men on the boat. But Berezovsky and the men who thought like him were no longer interested in making mere millions.
    â€œI know it’s early,” Abramovich said, his voice as easy and confidentas his posture, “but perhaps you have a moment for a proposition?”
    And there it was, direct and without flourish. As Berezovsky had suspected, their meeting hadn’t been the result of happenstance. Roman was in the Caribbean for a purpose, and Berezovsky was a potential means to an end. This thought didn’t bother Berezovsky; quite the contrary, he enjoyed his position as a perceived power broker, and he loved nothing more than to be pursued. But with this young man, there was also something more.
    A nice young man who probably has a commercial venture he wants to pitch me was how he’d first described Abramovich, when he’d called to check in with Badri Patarkatsishvili, his deputy director general at LogoVAZ and closest