Paul Klebnikov

Paul Klebnikov is presented as both a close family presence and a tenacious investigative journalist whose work traced the creation of great Russian fortunes. His murder gives that reporting a grim place in the book’s account of post-Soviet wealth and power: the investigation into his death, like that into Anna Politkovskaya’s, had failed to identify anyone responsible.

Family and personal ties

Klebnikov and Emmanuel Carrère were the same age and had known each other since childhood, despite living on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Their grandparents had both fled the Russian Revolution of 1917, but the family paths diverged: Klebnikov’s went to the United States, making him American, while Carrère’s went to France. Klebnikov spoke Russian better than Carrère, a difference that would matter when his work took him to Moscow.

Carrère describes a genuine affection that extended beyond the cousins themselves. He liked Klebnikov, and his sons adored him, seeing in him the image of a great reporter. The portrait is physical as well as familial: handsome and strong, with an honest smile and a firm handshake, Klebnikov seemed to the children like Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously. The comparison presents him through their admiring eyes, before the narrative turns from the family hero to the risks of his profession.

Reporting in Moscow

Forbes sent Klebnikov to Moscow in 1994 to investigate economic crime. He arrived with a date book full of appointments, but more than one contact was killed before he could meet them. The killings affected him so profoundly that, rather than treating the assignment as a brief visit, he stayed and became Forbes’s permanent correspondent in Moscow.

The decision placed him inside a society in which violence accompanied the scramble for property and influence. The book describes large players slaughtering one another over industrial combines and mineral deposits, while smaller businesses depended on protection providers that could become extortion rackets. Against this background, Klebnikov’s reporting was not an abstract study of wealth: he was pursuing people and mechanisms in a world where sources and prospective contacts could disappear before an interview took place.

Investigating the origins of wealth

Klebnikov wrote a book explaining in detail how some of Russia’s largest fortunes were created under Boris Yeltsin. He used Boris Berezovsky as an example, examining the formation of wealth in the new economic order rather than treating the fortunes as simply the result of business success. His work connected individual oligarchs to the conditions under which state assets and private money were brought together.

One such mechanism was the loans-for-shares scheme. Banks lent money to an impoverished state, with shares in valuable, not-yet-privatized industries—including natural gas and petroleum—as collateral. If the state failed to repay the loans, the lenders could take the shares. The arrangement made political power and private enrichment difficult to separate: the timing of repayment placed the transfer of economic assets after the presidential election, making the election’s outcome important to those who stood to benefit. Klebnikov’s account of Berezovsky offered a way to understand how these fortunes were made within that larger system.

Political analysis and uncertainty

Before his murder, Klebnikov proposed an explanation for why Russian military leaders might want a major conflict in Chechnya. Carrère emphasizes that he was not given to conspiracy theories. Klebnikov’s argument distinguished the existence of organized crime in Chechnya from the motives for intervention: Russia itself continued to benefit from the illegal economy, so the generals’ interest, he thought, lay elsewhere. They had sold large quantities of weapons, ammunition, and tanks on the black market, and a war could allow that missing matériel to be officially recorded as destroyed, concealing corruption in the military high command.

The book presents this as Klebnikov’s theory, not as a proven account of the war’s causes. It also places him among four people who publicly advanced a different, still-disputed theory: that the 1999 apartment bombings blamed on Chechen terrorists had in fact been carried out by the Federal Security Service. The other named proponents were General Alexander Lebed, journalist Artyom Borovik, and former security officer Alexander Litvinenko. All four later died violent deaths, but that sequence does not establish the truth of the theory. Carrère calls it both paranoid and not entirely implausible, and notes that it remained widespread among Russians even as many continued to vote for Vladimir Putin.

Murder and narrative significance

Klebnikov was gunned down with a Kalashnikov at the entrance to his building. The book likens the manner of his killing to that of Anna Politkovskaya, another journalist murdered in Russia. In both cases, the parallel sharpens the contrast between investigative work and the danger surrounding it; it does not identify a connection between the killings. The inquiry into Klebnikov’s murder had, at the time of the book’s account, turned up nothing.

His role in the narrative therefore extends beyond that of Carrère’s cousin or a source on oligarchic fortunes. The family portrait makes his later absence personal, while his reporting supplies a concrete account of how wealth and political influence were formed. His death leaves that work suspended between what it could document and what the unresolved investigation could not establish.