

by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
Imagine the history of a bank written by the driver of the getaway car used by a gang of holdup men after their heist.
Then imagine the driver and his gang are religious fundamentalists convinced that what they are doing is God’s mission to reform the banking business by introducing daylight robbery as one of what they call the “underpinnings of capitalism”.
As the car speeds away with the loot, the driver leads the other gangsters in reciting their mantras: “obviously it was the Wild West”; “there’s a ton of money to be made in chaos”; “capitalism in Russia wasn’t born under laboratory conditions. It was born in a vacuum of governance”; “with Goldman Sachs’ analysis backing you , investing in Russia became the closest thing you could get to a no-brainer”.
These lines have been written by a man called Charles Hecker (lead image, right), a reporter for the Moscow Times in the 1990s who turned into a Russia expert for the Control Risks group of London. After that employment ended recently, he has published a book with the title, Zero Sum, The Arc of International Business in Russia.
What’s unusual about this is that in 457 pages, Hecker doesn’t present or analyse the annual reports, financial balance-sheets, Initial Public Offering (IPO) prospectuses, or market regulation filings of a single significant Russian company or business sector. Instead, Hecker reports interviewing 57 individuals who spent time in Russia between 1991 and 2022, working for mostly US and British companies, law firms, accountancies, hotels, and media. Just seven of these sources (12%) were Russian born, but none has lived in Russia for many years. In Hecker’s footnotes, 647 of them in total, there are just seven Russian-language sources; they are texts of official enactments.
The outcome is a heist-and-getaway history in which Hecker reports the impact of economic sanctions against Russia on the say-so of think tanks in Kiev, the State Department, and Yale University; the rise of post-Soviet media on the say-so by Dutchman Derk Sauer whose publications in Russia were financed by secret US agencies, then Mikhail Khodorkovsky; the role of Russian crime and criminals on the say-so of Mark Galeotti, a writer in the Rupert Murdoch stable whose book of 2018 was a fabrication with no Russian criminal for its source; the history of state asset privatization on the say-so of Harvard University consultants; the Russian oil business on the say-so of BP executives dictating to the London press; and the fraud and embezzlement prosecution of Baring Vostok and Michael Calvey on the say-so of the Financial Times.
Say-so doesn’t make so. But this is not as hackneyed and pointless as it may sound. The point is easier to acknowledge now during the semifinal stage of the Battle of the Ukraine than during the war preliminaries: the point is that Hecker is employed in a form of counter-intelligence and information warfare to sustain Anglo-American enthusiasm and cashflow for the war despite the defeat of the Anglo-American side on the battlefield.
What Hecker doesn’t understand (cannot see in the book’s evidence) is that the extraordinary reward-to-risk multiples, ratios of debt to earnings and profit to outlay, speed of payback, and zero rate of taxation which characterized Russian business between 1991 and 2022, were planned weapons of the Anglo-American war to destroy Russia, its economy first, then its military capacity to defend itself, and finally its social cohesion. That war has been hot by degrees since 1917, never cold. Following the corrupt betrayals by Russian leaders themselves between 1991 and 2000, this war almost ended in Russia’s capitulation.
It still may.

Left: Hecker’s book, published on November 28, 2024 – now clearing through Amazon at a 60% discount off the publisher’s price. Right, Ben Noble an academic at Chatham House and the University of London, whom Hecker acknowledges “for supporting this book from its inception”.
Hecker begins and ends with the Special Military Operation (SVO) of February 24, 2022. More than a half-dozen times Hecker repeats that this was a “full-scale invasion” when it was anything but. At the beginning Hecker admits it was a surprise to him and his sources — “no one thought it was in Russia’s best interest to invade Ukraine”.
With sources so well informed, Hecker’s conclusion is that the SVO is the final stage in the Russian plan to steal the assets of peace-loving, democracy-minded, global rules based and free market capitalism introduced by the West in 1991. It was therefore inevitable, he reports, that “employees in more progressive companies around the world, especially in the US [would] clamour for a rapid exit from a country run by a president bent on industrial-scale murder.”
Hecker’s story, his “arc of international business”, is thus a list of corporate entrances and exits from Yandex to Coca Cola and Vogue. For captions of what happened Hecker cites as his sources the Moscow Times, BBC, Financial Times, the Guardian, and his 57 interviewees. “What do business take away from this?” Hecker prompts a board director at the Baring Vostok private equity fund. “And what lessons should they learn? I think it’s an age-old, totally cliché, totally universal lesson, which is there’s a ton of money to be made in chaos… The biggest mistake in the world is to think that that’s going to last forever. So yea, get it. Yeah, make that money. And yeah, get out. And the people who are stupid are the people who didn’t get out.”
If this is the western line of heist-and-getaway capitalism which Hecker endorses, whose criminality is greater when the Anglo-Americans meet their Russian counterparts. Or when when Baring Vostok’s Calvey attempted to steal $39 million from the Russian shareholders of Vostochny Bank, Artem Avetisyan and Shersod Yusupov? Hecker retells the Financial Times’s version; he ignores the Russian version and the prosecution evidence which convicted Calvey. Read more.

In Hecker’s history, Michael Calvey (under arrest, left) and William Browder (under arrest, right) have been the innocent victims of Russia’s turn against capitalism. When Calvey was released and left Russia, Hecker concludes, “”the damage to the country’s reputation remained.” “Browder provokes Putin almost like no other”, Hecker reports, cribbing from The Atlantic magazine.
Hecker spends three-quarters of his pages rehashing from old press files the episodes of the loans-for-shares scheme of 1995-96; the state debt default of 1998; and the 2008 corporate debt collapse. President Vladimir Putin doesn’t appear until final quarter when Hecker introduces him as “Bad News”, quoting one of his interviewees, a man named Richard Prior, for this summing of Putin’s 25-year term. He is the authority for saying: “And so the warning signs were there, but it was later than one realised that the security apparatus [Putin] was something to fear”. Prior adds: “Some western companies were very, very capable of accommodating bad things… In many cases they knew not just where the bodies were buried, but how they got there in the first place”.
Prior’s (right) credentials are disguised by Hecker. In Moscow he worked for the Anglo-American corporate security firm Kroll, and then in 1997 he established in London an agency called The Risk Advisory Group (TRAG). Its board included two British army generals, retired policemen and spies.
Warfighting against Russia was what they meant by their risk advisory business; that’s to say, creating Russia risks to deter and cut off western investment. An interviewee Hecker names as Bryan O’Toole, “a non-resident fellow of the Atlantic Council, is quoted as explaining who the enemy was in their war. “When I started at the CIA a lot of the talk was about Russian organised crime. When I left in 2008 there wasn’t Russian organised crime, there was just the state.”
Hecker’s employer, Control Risks, was and still is the same combination of retired spies, retired soldiers, retired policemen. They are continuing to fight the same war, but getting much paid for it than before. Control Risks has changed also. It began as the agent of insurance companies covering executives who were targets of kidnap and extortion. Part of their business was to anticipate the risks and protect the clientele physically; part of the business was to know the kidnappers well enough to negotiate the ransom. A veteran of the company recalls: “They were always rather decent, moral and unexploitative as a firm. I doubt that holds true today.”
Because Hecker and his Chatham House editor have been on their getaway mission, they have forgotten to look beghind them and check their own sources. Hecker quotes them as paragons of capitalist skill – “I was being paid more money than anyone had ever paid me before” claims “one of the leading [American] investment bankers in Russia”. However, it didn’t occur to Hecker to investigate what he was told, and compare pay and bonus rates for western businessmen in Moscow with their counterparts in London and New York.
The sources were asked to re-read Hecker’s interpretation and clarify how much profit, how much loss they drew from their Russian businesses before they left. The answer, communicated on a background basis by one of them, was that his annual average salary was “much less than half what was earned at [bank outside Russia].” As for investment returns, another of Hecker’s sources itemizes those which “made decent returns” and those in which the source “lost everything”. Net outcome after twenty years, the source has calculated was that “probably got most of my money back”.
This isn’t and can’t be the moral of Hecker’s story. His moral starts and ends with the cliché: “Decades before all this outlandish excess, Russia and Russians were always, without fail, able to have a good time.” As Hecker goes on to rehash stories of the Hungry Duck, Nightflight, and other Moscow pickup joints, boîtes de nuit, and “private clubs”, there was sex with women more beautiful than those at home — women (and boys) whose price came much cheaper. “Sleep came sometinme between breakfast and a late lunch,” Hecker remembered. “Rinse. Repeat”.
This is Hecker turning out to have been just another Good Time Charlie. Left out is what the Russian women the Charlies took to bed thought of them. In independent interviews they say they felt sorry for Americans whose penis size was smaller than Russian men. They felt grateful that American men didn’t beat them up as often or as badly as the Russians.
In exchange for Hecker’s promotion of the Financial Times’ version of the war against Russia, the newspaper has reciprocated with a log-rolling review by Andrew Cowley (right), who graduated from writing as the Economist correspondent in Moscow to running a Russian securities brokerage, then a senior bankers for Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Allianz, Macquarie, and now a London real estate investment trust.
“You could see history being made before your eyes,” Cowley gasps, “and it appeared to be heading in a better direction, towards some form of democracy and more individual freedom.”
“What went wrong this time?” he asks.
His answer is the Anglo-American warfighter’s mantra. The Russians started the war, the westerners are their victims. “Underneath was a system with its origins deeply rooted in the dysfunction of the Soviet economy”. But according to Cowley, it has always been like this – in Tsarist times, in Stalin’s time. Cowley can’t help getting wistful about the sex appeal: “after dark, wild rides in gypsy cabs led to wilder nights at places such as Night Flight,, the bar with the worst reputation in Moscow, and The Hungry Duck where the strip shows combined performers and enthusiastic patrons (not that I ever went there).”
Mark Ames, who with Matt Taibbi in The Exile, made fun of the professional incompetence of journalists like Cowley, and also their small penises, comments skeptically. “It’s strange how Russia’s economy has turned around under the guy who destroyed business in Russia versus the guy who was so great for business.”
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