I Saw a Man, Once Upon a Time in Russia and How to See the World

Once Upon a Time in Russia: The Rise of the Oligarchs and the Greatest Wealth in History

The old cliché goes that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but in my experience, in most cases you can't go far wrong with that, and sometimes you don't need to judge — some books confess. So the cover of Once Upon A Time In Russia appears to depict the Reservoir Dogs characters walking away from the Kremlin.

On to the author. Ben Mezrich is an ex-Harvard lad who seems to have built a career from books mainly about money and power. Once Upon A Time In Russia is the story of Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich – their climb, and the former's fall from power during the Yeltsin and Putin years.

The books opens at a meeting of oligarchs at a dacha outside Moscow: "The air in the room was as tight as a coiled snake".

The first problem is that Ben Mezrich tries to keep his audience in suspense, but without any particular talent for it. Any reader with a little background knowledge can work out, many paragraphs before Mr Mezrich's prose stops dropping hints, that the dacha in question used to belong to Stalin and that the man they are to meet is Vladimir Putin.

We are then taken back to the birth of the oligarchs during the Yeltsin years, Boris Berezovsky was a Lada salesman who made a mint by putting deposits on cars at prices that would soon become next to worthless due to inflation and the collapsing rouble.

He sees an opportunity to corner the Russian oil market and strikes up a deal with Roman Abramovich who started in business manufacturing rubber ducks, but now manages oil production in Siberia.

Boris seems to have a sense of his own destiny: "If having energy is my main crime, I will be remembered well when this is eventually written about in the history books."

It soon becomes apparent that this is history rewritten as a gangster novel, stylistically crass with an omniscient narration that can read the last thoughts of dying men. "The last thing he did, before he closed his eyes was whisper one last time".

So died Dmitri in the submarine Kursk, the identity of which is badly concealed behind more paragraphs of unnecessary tension building. And when we get on to the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in London, we zoom into the microscopic and see the effects of Polonium on a cellular level: "A fleck of silvery dust no bigger than a grain of sand ... spinning, twirling pirouetting ... Alpha particles, overexciting helium nuclei obscenely swollen by a pair of neutrons and a pair of protons".

Ben Mezrick too often sounds just plain silly, and this is a naturally great true crime story made ridiculous by the author's inept embellishments. There is too little background, no mention of the western economists who trashed the Russian economy and no great mention of the collusion of justice systems, particularly in the UK, which enabled the oligarchs to secrete their wealth.

The story ends with assassination, a mega lawsuit, and suicide. It is an epic tale badly told, and by concentrating on a few key players, Mezrick has missed the convulsions which engulfed the Russian nation and people in recent times.

If you like crap gangster novels, then this is perhaps for you, but if you are really interested in the corruption of Russian life, then Peter Pomerantsev's Nothing is True and Everything is Possible which I recently reviewed, is a much better place to start.

Author Ben Mezrich
Title Once Upon a Time in Russia: The Rise of the Oligarchs and the Greatest Wealth in History
Publisher William Heinemann
Price £18.99 (Hardback), £10.99 (eBook)
More info Publication web site