The Story of Mirax

2020

The story of the rise and fall of the construction company Mirax is swaddled in rumor and gossip. For the past decade, as it happens, it has had only one narrator: Polonsky. The public knows only his versions of the corporation’s success and collapse—versions that often contradict one another.

Polonsky’s other partners—once a close-knit team of like-minded men: Adikaev, Temnikov, Lutsenko, and I, the author of these lines—kept an icy silence.

I must confess, though, that the idea of writing “the whole truth” had been visiting me since 2009. Anger, resentment, and a sense of injustice filled every corner of my diaries from that time whenever I mentioned a partner’s surname or the name of the company we had built together. But with the years the pain subsided, giving way to revulsion and fastidious disgust, which in turn gave way to complete indifference. Like an eraser rubbing out pencil marks, it erased not only the desire to write memoirs about Mirax and Polonsky, but even the will to hold any thought of them in my head.

Existence denied. The end.

The year 2020 will be remembered by many for the altered tonality of life’s ordinary current; and many, having left this world, will never know just how fragile everything proved to be.

Covid, pandemic, lockdown—these are the defining words of the double twenties.

People plunged into virtual space, not knowing what to do with themselves offline.

Digital trash multiplied exponentially, like the spores of some new and still more dreadful virus. My former partner, infected by a brood of content-void, spat out a long YouTube interview in May with the blogger Rybakov.

It should be said here that Rybakov is not exactly a blogger, though he calls himself one. A seller of construction materials who crowned himself a billionaire on the air of the Russian edition of Forbes, he is a walking advertisement for insatiable ambition. Reporting to the Motherland on the virtual asset figures of the supernova Russians, he never publishes the figures for their liabilities and obligations, so as not to offend his billionaire advertisers with such excessive candor.

Today Rybakov resembles Polonsky ten years ago. The infamous billion, the groundless provincial certainty that no one knows better than he how to do business.

But construction is not quantum physics, nor is it bioengineering in the service of vaccine development. It is simply one of the oldest professions of cave urbanism, a relic skill of biological species.

Forgetting this simple postulate, builders in the heyday of social media fancied themselves business coaches and philosophers, unaware that they were merely craftsmen erecting columbaria to petty-bourgeois ambition, their worldview bounded by the dimensions of a bank safe-deposit box.

Google informed me that the interview had appeared—a smirk of artificial intelligence deciding I might find it interesting. My surname appeared in the video description, so I turned up the volume and went on with my business.

It seemed Google had deceived me: two monologues by rival info-hucksters were utterly uninteresting—until Polonsky uttered the phrase:

“I am absolutely honest with myself. I am absolutely ready to talk to anyone, in any language, and I will certainly never look away from anyone. That is the most important thing respected people in various systems have taught me: if you can look a person in the eye... live in such a way that you can look anyone in the eye. Unfortunately, people run away from me, while I still... I hope to live my whole life this way.”

I stared at the monitor in disbelief, checking that these words had indeed been spoken by Polonsky—the man who had stolen several million American dollars from me.

The phrase reminded me of Randle Patrick McMurphy’s monologue in Ken Kesey’s novel *One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest*. As if slipping into the role of a patient from Kesey’s asylum, PSY—one of the nicknames of the Chieftain of Real Estate Development of the 2000s, derived from his initials—once again, like a well-rehearsed mantra, just as he had ten years earlier, accused me of ruining the company and committing treason. Nor did he stop at me: he branded as guilty of the firm’s collapse every partner who had once helped him build what was then the finest construction company in the country. Everyone around him was to blame—everyone except, of course, the majority shareholder who, by 2009, controlled nearly eighty percent of the corporation’s stock.

What brought an unpleasantly fresh note to Polonsky’s tired performance—“everyone is a thief, while I, in my own person, embody the Holy Unmercenary Saints Cosmas and Damian, gazing straight ahead”—was the editing of this YouTube “masterpiece” by the blogger Rybakov. Without so much as asking the “accused” for comment, the Hardware Merchant spliced into the video photographs and fact sheets listing the milestones of the “villains,” as if to underline the truth of the lie.

My irritation at Rybakov’s video—in which a bankrupt developer drones on that “everyone is a crook,” while the blogger serves it up to viewers in the packaging of truth—gradually hardened into genuine fury.

My conviction that “if you don’t touch shit, it won’t stink” dissolved in that anger as if in hydrochloric acid, transforming into a compelling reason to tell my own version of the Mirax story.

A reader may object that anger is not a reason, but a contrived pretext born of a thirst for revenge. Where money is involved, there is no truth, no good or evil. To preserve objectivity, one must remain even-tempered toward the people and events one intends to describe, the reader will say—and will undoubtedly be right.

It will indeed be hard for me, while working on this book, to ignore the fact that ten years ago Polonsky destroyed my tomorrow in a single day. But I will try to accept that anger is merely the catalyst that has made me begin writing, and that the decade that has passed since those events is an excellent refrigerator in which to cool my emotions.

I shall begin by telling how we managed to build such an extraordinary company, and why it was destroyed.

In the end, a person knows only what he has managed to learn. And the book I am now beginning to write will merely add to what people know about what happened to Mirax.

Polonsky’s vile interview put the final pieces of the puzzle in place, making it clear that the time had come to open the archives and tell my own story of the Mirax universe.

The first chapter is daunting because of its date: the year 2000, the millennium, events that took place twenty years ago. It is frightening to think that Polonsky and I have known each other ever since, for nearly half our lives—or, at any rate, for the whole of our conscious lives. What were we like then, at the turn of the millennium?

I am sitting in my study; outside the window is the strange year of the double twenties, yet in my mind I am back at the start of the noughties, and the wind of the Caucasus Mountains is beating against the face of my younger self as I glide down a snow-covered slope on a snowboard.

2000–2004

“Maxim… Privezentsev?” the pleasant young woman at Vnukovo Airport asked, routinely checking my boarding pass against my passport as my snowboarder friends and I prepared to fly to Prielbrusye.

I smiled and nodded. She handed back my documents and pressed the button to release the turnstile. Beyond it were a two-hour flight and another two hundred kilometers from Mineralnye Vody airport to our final destination, the village of Terskol, where we traditionally gathered to open the snowboarding season.

The tradition went like this: when the November holidays came around—officially commemorating the triumph of the proletarian revolution—we went to the Caucasus Mountains. The holiday itself had long since been abolished, but the habit of taking a short break around those dates lasted well into the year 2000.

Unfortunately, early November in Prielbrusye rarely meant reliable snow, and that year was no exception. But where else was a freerider supposed to go in the early noughties? Flying to European glaciers had not yet become the norm, and Terskol felt like a small capital of extreme leisure.

It should be said that our crowd back then had another amusing pastime besides snowboarding: the party game Mafia. Preference had more or less died out, poker had not yet become the mainstream embodiment of gambling fever, and Mafia easily took hold of our imaginations—a fine mental workout built on detecting verbal traps and reading body language.

That year, proper snow cover began only at Mir station, 3,500 meters up, and we had to hike there—the lift was closed for reasons unknown to us—from where a snowcat shuttle would haul us higher still, to the charred remains of Priut 11, which had burned down in ’98, at the 4,000-meter mark. Not every rider was ready for such feats, but the reward was worth it: untouched slopes and not a soul around—isn’t that a snowboarder’s paradise? On the first day, we had energy to spare and rode until dusk.

After nightfall, thoroughly worn out, our group settled into a local café to play Mafia, washing the games down with local brandy that smelled of bedbugs—Terskol bedbugs which, to judge by the taste, had been steeping in the nearby glaciers for several million years. The café itself seemed permanently stranded in limbo between the Soviet era and the present: beneath modern photo wallpaper, portraits of shepherds by an unknown hand showed through, while a cheap Euro-style renovation strained to conceal the building’s general decrepitude from the drunken eyes of its guests.

A round was in full swing when the front door flew open and a noisy crowd spilled in, led by a towering fellow with a mop of curly hair, who was loudly holding forth about something, his eyes bulging and his hands waving wildly. When he spotted us, he broke into a grin.

“Hey, everyone!”

Cutting short our heated argument over which of us was the mafioso, we turned toward the newcomers—young, cheerful, and, by the look of it, fellow involuntary connoisseurs of Terskol brandy.

Catching our looks, the big guy immediately introduced himself: “We’re from Piter. I’m Seryoga. This”—he pointed to a dark-haired guy who barely reached his shoulder—“is Artur, my partner and friend. And this is Lyonya; he’s the only Muscovite in our bunch… Have you been here in Terskol long?”

The guy called Lyonya, almost as tall as the curly-haired merrymaker, smiled amiably. His face was covered with three days’ worth of blond stubble.

“Nah, we got in last night for the season opener,” I answered for the group. “And actually, even though there’s no snow down below, we got in some decent runs today from Priut 11 down to Mir.”

“Awesome! We just got off the plane ourselves. We snowboard too—only Lyonya here skis.” Sergei slapped his friend on the shoulder, hard enough to make him stumble. “Old school, so to speak. And I see you’re playing Mafia?”

“Yeah, we started about an hour ago. Want in?”

“You bet!” Sergei said eagerly.

Between the game and the brandy, we didn’t notice dawn breaking outside the windows. Those were good times: nobody shrank from strangers or worried about unfamiliar company. Besides, Mafia and brandy did a fine job of loosening tongues. Over the course of the game, I learned that Sergei and Artur’s company, Stroymontazh, was building successfully in St. Petersburg, and that this year, 2000, they had decided to move into Moscow—to conquer new heights.

“Well, to be precise, I’m the one who moved to Moscow,” Sergei clarified, “while Artur stayed in Piter. We have an excellent relationship with the new St. Petersburg governor, Yakovlev, so the prospects opening up in the northern capital are positively dizzying.”

“And what about Lyonya?”

“Lyonya’s with Barkli, a Moscow developer; he’s helping me get settled in Belokamennaya. Were you born in Moscow yourself?”

“No, I’m from Sakhalin.”

“Ah, so you, too, came flocking to the ‘Port of Five Seas,’” Sergei chuckled. “Artur and I are from Gorlovka. What year were you born?”

“’71.”

“I’m ’72. Tell me, wasn’t our generation lucky to live in exactly these times—the USSR, perestroika, the ‘Royal Spirit’ nineties, the new NEP... A great generation, full of promise.”

“The real go-getters were still the ones born in the sixties, though. They climbed the Party and Komsomol ladders straight into privatization and voucher auctions, while for us, God willing, it’s enough to remain steady cooperators alongside the new ‘Guarantor of the Constitution from the committee of hot hearts and cool heads.’”

We laughed, drank, and turned back to the game.

That stormy evening cost our friends their morning: in the end, only Lyonya and I made it to the mountain. When we returned to the café toward evening, we found our merry company still deep in a game of Mafia and thoroughly tipsy.

“It’s like you never left,” Lyonya chuckled, looking at their flushed faces.

“Well, why would we leave?” Sergei cried cheerfully. “We’re having a great time in the mountains! And hiking is beneath royal dignity. Hey, everyone! I know for a fact that Andrei is mafia! Look at him—pale as Elbrus, and he hasn’t said a word the whole time!”

After dumping our gear in our rooms, we joined the game and spent another night until daybreak rooting out the “black” players—or becoming them ourselves, depending on the cards.

For the next couple of days, Lyonya and I rode the slopes without fail, while the guys played Mafia with equal dedication.

“I honestly don’t know who has more stamina,” I said as we trudged back from the slope yet again. “Them or us.”

“Them, obviously,” Lyonya snorted. “Drinking brandy isn’t like storming peaks. That takes real endurance...”

On our last evening, Sergei and I got to talking at the bar. He told me about his work as a developer, and I told him about the restaurant business.

“Look, if things ever go seriously sideways, give me a call—we’ll find a place for you,” Polonsky said with a smile after hearing me out.

“Thanks. Same to you—if you ever need anything, give me a call. I’ll hire you as a waiter.”

“Now that’s tempting!” Sergei laughed. “All right, I’ll keep it in mind.”

After that we talked for another couple of hours about everything under the sun, from plans to conquer Everest to survival stories from the nineties. Sergei turned out to be a captivating conversationalist: he listened without interrupting and told his own stories vividly, without ever making them all about himself. It felt as if we could go on talking like this forever, like old friends reunited after years apart.

The next day we all scattered back to our homes and routines, but a few weeks later Polonsky called and invited me to his birthday on December 1. The party was held at Sergei’s new Moscow apartment in the Zolotye Klyuchi-1 residential complex—a two-story penthouse pierced clean through by a stripper pole, like a spear. The pole went unused that evening, but the detail stayed with me.

“Come in,” said a grim, fit man of about forty-five, meeting me at the door.

Judging by his bearing, I took him for Sergei’s personal bodyguard—a relic of the nineties that had become a status symbol in the 2000s. Handing my gift to the man at the door, I plunged into the atmosphere of luxury and glamour as Sergei Polonsky understood it.

There was a sea of guests; clearly, after moving to Moscow, the birthday boy had wasted no time and, in just a few months, had managed to build connections at the very highest levels. Deputies, officials, businessmen—everywhere you looked, there were familiar faces: people I knew personally and others I had only seen in the media. Guests laughed, drank, danced, and mingled. Soon I spotted Sergei himself. Dressed in an expensive suit, a glass of something strong in hand, he was moving through the crowd, loudly talking up his new Korona project and assuring everyone that soon he would begin construction on Zolotye Klyuchi-2, right beside the building he now called home. Two men trailed after him—a dark-haired one and a blond, both roughly our age. They simply smiled at the guests and offered restrained greetings.

“Oh, Max!” Sergei exclaimed with a grin when he saw me. “Glad you came!”

He came over, and we shook hands.

“Happy birthday,” I said to the host.

“Yeah, thanks... By the way, let me introduce you.” Sergei gestured toward the dark-haired man. “This is Alexei Adikaev. He used to run casinos in Piter.”

“Seryoga was always hanging around there, that’s how we met,” Alexei chuckled.

“Hanging around... I just stopped by a couple of times!” Sergei brushed it off.

He put an arm around his other companion’s shoulders.

“And this is your namesake, Max. Temnikov. He’s...”

“A businessman in retail,” Temnikov finished for him.

“And this is Max Privezentsev.” Seryoga nodded toward me. “He’s in the restaurant business. I told you about him.”

“You did,” Temnikov confirmed.

“All right then, don’t get bored, I’ve got to go... the deputy mayor just arrived...” Sergei announced, and instantly dissolved into the crowd.

“Seryoga being Seryoga,” Adikaev snorted.

“A one-man festival,” I echoed with a smile.

“You skied together on Elbrus, didn’t you?”

“We did, back in November.”

“Shame I couldn’t make it. I love freeriding...”

We talked for about half an hour—mostly about mountains, Moscow, restaurants, and other interesting places. Temnikov chimed in now and then, but he seemed somewhat weighed down by our company.

“What exactly is his business, if you don’t mind my asking?” I asked Adikaev once Maxim had been spirited away by another guest.

“He runs a chain of kiosks in Piter. Supplies the population with the essentials: booze, cigarettes, and Snickers bars.”

I never did manage to have a proper conversation with Sergei that evening. He was too busy collecting new friends and contacts.

Before long, it began to pay off: Stroymontazh started winning major Moscow projects, and the business took off. In 2001, Sergei and I even launched a joint PR campaign: one of my restaurants, Balaganchik, gave customers who bought an apartment from Polonsky a voucher for a complimentary dinner for two. It worked for everyone: Sergei got extra advertising, and I got new clients. At another restaurant of mine, Castle Mephisto, we played Mafia almost every week. Even there, Sergei never missed a chance to make new business connections; the game seemed to be one more way for him to establish himself in the capital.

It was during one of those Mafia games that I first heard from Polonsky that he was about to start building a skyscraper in Moscow City. Business, it seemed, was thriving, and I was genuinely happy for Sergei. We moved along parallel tracks—he in construction, I in restaurants—crossing paths now and then in the mountains, over Mafia, or at parties, of which there seemed to be more in Moscow back then than there were hours in the day to attend them.

In February 2004, Sergei called and asked me to come by the Stroymontazh office. At the time, the office was on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, across from Take, the famous Japanese restaurant of the period, and over the previous four years I’d dropped in many times for all kinds of reasons, such as discussing and planning our next mountain trips. When I asked my usual question—was there something specific, or were we just going to talk?—he answered vaguely:

“Just come over. We’ll figure it out.”

When I arrived, his assistant, a lovely young woman named Lada, told me the boss was in yet another important meeting and asked me to wait a minute. That “minute” stretched into an hour and a half, during which Lada explained every fifteen minutes that this was a very important construction meeting and offered me coffee. Passing the time with the fragrant drink and leafing through Stroymontazh brochures promising the best apartments in Moscow, I watched the commotion in Polonsky’s reception area. Like an air traffic controller, Lada rerouted incoming visitors to different offices and sorted delivered papers into countless folders, never once letting her polite smile slip. From time to time, shouts came through the closed door of Sergei’s office. I had no doubt it was the man himself raging inside.

At last the doors opened, and a procession of five or six men with hangdog faces filed out, passing me in silence. Sergei appeared right behind them. He, by contrast, instantly broke into a broad grin, threw his arms around me, and pulled me into his office, apologizing all the while for making me wait.

Sergei’s office, incidentally, was completely ordinary—the kind any mid-level bureaucrat might have had: two desks covered with documents and blueprints and arranged in a T shape, an armchair against the far wall, several cheap office chairs, and a computer monitor facing the armchair. The only thing that set it apart from a government official’s office was a respectable globe-shaped bar.

“Care for a drink?” Sergei asked casually.

“No, thanks.”

“Well, I’ll have one.”

He poured himself a measure of XO cognac, took a sip, sank into the armchair, and went quiet for a moment. As I lowered myself onto one of the chairs, Sergei said wearily:

“I’m so fucking tired of all this. Twenty-hour workdays. I practically sleep in this office… And these guys—” He waved his glass toward the door, almost spilling cognac onto the desk. “They’re dragging their feet! The scale keeps growing, projects are multiplying like crazy, and they can’t keep up—either they’ve gone lazy or I don’t know what! It drives me insane. Endless fuss, zero result, one screw-up after another… Sometimes I feel like I’m running a crew plastering stairwells… in the middle of an earthquake!”

“Well, maybe it’s just growing pains? People need time—to get some experience under their belts…”

“‘Need time’…” Sergei grumbled. “That’s the whole problem—I don’t have time to ease into anything! Moscow projects are a Klondike right now; City Hall says, ‘Take as much as you can handle’… and I can’t handle as much as I need to. We have to deliver the Korona complex, and over there we’re knee-deep in shit, buried under paperwork! And that skyscraper in Moscow City I’m designing? That’s pure outer space. Nobody in the city believes in it yet except the Turks, but we’ve got a real chance to build the tallest tower in Europe!”

As he said this, he gestured toward a scale model on the windowsill—two towers shaped like sails pulled taut by the wind.

“…And meanwhile we’re also building Zolotye Klyuchi and selling apartments like mad.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen the billboards with all those girls plastered across Moscow.”

“Pretty slick, right?” Polonsky beamed. “My idea! Simple psychology. Who pays for square meters? Men. And men are always thinking about beautiful young girls, so they’ll remember our ads right away…”

“Creative, no question. So sales are booming, then?”

“Oh yes, booming all right… Sales are booming, but there’s no one to actually build the damn thing.”

Polonsky breathed out heavily, finished his cognac, set the glass down hard on the table, and looked at me again.

“Here’s why I asked you to come,” he said, lowering his voice. “We’ve known each other a long time, people speak very highly of you… Your karma, basically, is extremely positive.”

I nodded slowly, remembering that Polonsky was serious about Castaneda’s teachings.

“Well, I suppose it’s easier to keep your karma clean in restaurants than in development,” Sergei went on. “At least I don’t always manage it. Any plot of land is already somebody else’s pie, and then it’s a lottery: if the owner’s reasonable, everything’s kosher; if he isn’t, but the location is prime, you have to pull all kinds of strings to get a result. Bottom line, roughly speaking, I manage to keep my karma intact about fifty percent of the time,” Sergei said gravely, then fell silent again.

I turned the phrase “karma in development” over in my mind and waited for him to continue.

“I know about your business too. Great restaurants… but I hear you’re getting out?” Sergei broke the silence, looking me straight in the eye.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said, nodding. “When you’re juggling restaurants, food-service combines, and a fast-food chain, life turns into déjà vu: you put your own money into a place, grind away until it breaks even, it breaks even—so you start a new project; that one pays off—so you start another one… and on it goes, ad infinitum. My partners didn’t want to bring in outside investors, so we ended up with plenty of businesses but no visible cash—just endless reinvestment. That worked fine in the early nineties, but now, with our old-school approach, the Novikovs and Delloses will push us out of the market in no time. In the end, my partners and I disagreed on how to grow and decided to go our separate ways. But why do you ask?”

“Oh, nothing… damn, I’ve got another meeting in half an hour,” Polonsky sighed, glancing at his watch. “We still can’t get the sewer line connected to Korona. Anyway, long story short: I want to put together a new team of sharp, up-and-coming guys, and I’m offering you a place on it.”

That brought our conversation full circle—back to a joke from three years earlier, when we’d promised to hire each other if either of our businesses went under. As things stood, Polonsky had come out better on that bet: imagining him working as a waiter in a restaurant today was impossible, while my restaurant era was clearly coming to an end.

The vagueness of Sergei’s proposal didn’t surprise me; it was entirely in keeping with the man I knew. In a developer’s mind, millions of ideas are born every second, most of them dying off like microbes under antibiotics, but he couldn’t have cared less. He sincerely believed that if even one brilliant idea survived and came off, he’d be the champion.

“That sounds promising,” I said with a smile, “but what exactly are you proposing I do on this new team of yours? And who else is in?”

“Oh, there’ll be enough work for everyone! For starters, we need to build a property-management service from scratch, so residents get service at the level of a five-star hotel, and then we’ll see. You’re from the restaurant business, which means you know about hospi… tality… God, what a word they came up with, try saying it! Anyway, you know more about hospitality than I do. As for the rest of the team… Well, there’s Alexei Adikaev—remember, we went riding together recently? I’ll introduce you to Dima Lutsenko, he handles finance… I also want to bring in Max, Temnikov, but he’s run up serious debts with his St. Petersburg business; if I can sort things out with his creditors, I’ll poach him. So that leaves you with operations and all the non-core assets.”

“A minute ago it was just operations. What do you mean by non-core?”

“Well, telecoms, leasing out our commercial space, and a bunch of side ventures that’ll grow out of construction. All that needs to be managed too, so it brings in money.”

“Sounds like a plan for world domination!”

“That’s exactly what it is—you’ve got it right. I want to create the coolest, most efficient development company in the country… maybe even the world, we’ll see how it goes… but first and foremost, for that you need people—a team of like-minded individuals. And I think you’d fit right in.”

“And what are the terms for the astronauts piloting this starship to new planets?” I asked.

“Well, with you it’s pretty straightforward…” Sergei glanced across the table and pulled a sheet of paper covered in notes toward him. “Right now you’re making about eight grand a month. Plus you’re selling your stake to your partners and getting out of the business.”

I looked from Sergei to the scrap of paper in his hand, startled. It wasn’t that I made a secret of my income, but there is something profoundly uncomfortable about having your personal accounts laid out in front of you in the middle of negotiations.

“So here’s my offer: ten thousand a month, plus equity in the future management company,” Sergei concluded, casually tossing the paper back onto the table and fixing me with an expectant look.

“You’ve done your homework,” I said. “And there you were saying you had no time.”

“The security service has time. Grachev, their chief, has been watching my back from day one. Black belt in karate, by the way.”

“Martial arts aren’t really my thing, you know that. I’m more into extreme sports,” I said, smiling. “So how do you see my equity stake?”

“You name it,” Sergei said, looking me straight in the eye.

I paused to think. I had my answer ready, but negotiations required the theatrical ritual to be observed.

“Look,” I began. “We’re talking about a management company that doesn’t exist yet. Even a hundred percent of zero is still zero. You’re handing over Korona, but when will it be ready for occupancy? When will it start bringing in revenue?”

“In a month,” Polonsky blurted.

“And realistically?”

A pause.

“Six months.”

“Okay. Then there’s Zolotye Klyuchi—that’s another couple of years. As for new sites, I’d say… let’s assume three years before they’re operational. So, in effect, we’re looking at a couple of years of grinding away for deferred income. That’s why I think a fair split between partners would be fifty-fifty.”

Sergei sank back into thought. The next few minutes became a little pantomime. Polonsky topped up his glass with XO and took small sips. He held the pause, glancing at me now and then. Perhaps he was even remembering our many rounds of Mafia.

“All right,” Sergei said. “Let’s do it this way: 51 percent is mine, 49 percent is yours—if you agree right now, no ‘let me go and think it over.’”

That caught me off guard. To be honest, I hadn’t expected us to get to an actual offer today. On the other hand, there was really nothing left tying me to the restaurant business. I had my doubts, of course: Polonsky’s drive and daring came bundled with disorganization and a gift for scattering himself across everything from sewage systems to outer space. But his success in St. Petersburg and the two projects already underway in Moscow suggested that the man did have a head for business, and I was prepared to take the risk.

“One more question.”

“I’m listening.”

“I understand what you mean about non-core assets, but you also said you want to build the coolest construction company around, with a team you’re inviting me to join… so what’s the motivation structure on this starship?”

“Come on, didn’t you just say yourself that a percentage of zero is still zero?” Sergei laughed. “I don’t have a concrete proposal yet, but I’m thinking something like 25 percent for the team—later, once we’ve nailed down the objectives and milestones.”

“In surveying, a benchmark is a zero point, not a growth target,” I said, smiling.

“And here I thought you only knew restaurants! Don’t get clever—you know what I mean. All in good time.”

"Okay, jokes aside, I'm ready to say yes—as long as we put our agreement in writing. For now, it can be a gentlemen's agreement; later, if we want, we can draw up proper legal documents. The main thing is to fix the terms from the start so nothing gets forgotten later."

"I won't forget, trust me. I've got a good memory. Want me to sign a blank sheet and let you fill in the details yourself?"

"No thanks," I snorted. "A blank check to bearer comes with obligations, and someone might decide to collect. Better if I draft something in your reception area, and we'll sign it after the meeting."

Sergei looked at me again. I held his gaze, and he said slowly:

"Deal. When do you start? Tomorrow?"

He was clearly expecting me to hesitate again, at least for a moment, but I answered calmly:

"I'll start in a week."

Two hours later, Sergei and I signed our first agreement, sealed the deal with XO, and went our separate ways. And that was how I ended up at Stroymontazh... or rather, by then, at Mirax.

2020

I couldn’t help smiling as I remembered the story of how Stroymontazh became Mirax. According to the old hands, the idea had been in the air since 2002, long before I joined the company. It had first been put forward by Sasha Baburin, who ran marketing until 2003. Sasha’s point was that advertising Stroymontazh meant promoting Artur’s St. Petersburg operation—and, in effect, the entire construction industry—rather than Sergei’s own company. But apparently no one got around to making the change back then. A year later, when we took on a project in Moscow City, the subject of rebranding came up again. Ruslan Makarov, who had replaced Baburin, brought in several well-known advertising people, including old hands like Artemy Lebedev and Vladimir Tsessler, but Polonsky rejected every proposal. He insisted on the name Mirax and refused to consider anything else. He never explained where it had come from, though at the time there were only two products in the world called Mirax: Asian condoms and a psychotropic drug from the same region. Whether Polonsky had tried either one is unknown, but when the association was raised in the early discussions, he wasn’t surprised. He simply asked that the argument not be mentioned again.

I tried to remember: had we ever argued with him about the name? No, I don’t think so. We just shrugged and moved on. To be honest, we didn’t give a damn. Self-taught—that was the essential skill set of businessmen in the noughties. Easy money went to our heads, and no one thought about long-term strategies; no one even knew what they were. Our planning horizon ran from one windfall project to the next. Risk analysis came down to instinct and a sense of what our “roof” could take. So, Mirax. So, condoms. So what? The association didn’t frighten us because our “branding strategy” amounted to two phrases: “that’s cool” and “I like it.” If we had been in India at the time and someone had suggested a name associated with “fucking cows,” we would have thought it was brilliant.

“And then Mirax started building Federation Tower...”

I leaned back in my chair, looked out the window, lit a cigar, and opened a collection of articles about what was probably our company’s flagship project. The name Federation Tower, for the City development, had been suggested by Adikaev Sr. In fact, it was thanks to him that the City project ended up in the company’s portfolio at all. Alexei’s father, Vladimir Anverovich, had known Polonsky since their St. Petersburg days and later introduced his son to him—and that was how the whole thing began.

Doing business with friends worked well in the nineties, until those friends started killing one another or putting one another in prison. In the 2000s, the businessmen who had survived began edging closer to law enforcement and the authorities, surrounding themselves with managers—engineers and humanities graduates alike—who gradually became real experts. Vladimir Anverovich was one of them: an experienced, first-rate specialist, intellectual and shrewd in equal measure.

At the time, another major developer, Shalva Chigirinsky, was discussing the idea of building Russia Tower in Moscow City with Moscow mayor Luzhkov. Adikaev Sr. proposed Federation Tower as the most fitting name for our flagship project, perfectly in tune with the pompous naming habits of federal and city officials eager to immortalize the new Russia in stone. He laid out the virtues of the name in the grandiose style of New Vasyuki, insisting that federal ministries and agencies would eventually move into our tower and turn the project into a modern alternative to the Moscow Kremlin.

Strangely enough, we all expected the same thing. We were charging ahead together toward a shared dream: to become the top construction company in Russia and make real money. And everything was falling into place: there was no shortage of capital for expansion, square meters were selling the moment they hit the market, banks were eager to provide project financing, and all we had to do was build. The problem was that as the company’s turnover grew, Sergei grew more and more detached from actually running it. He began surrounding himself with every imaginable kind of assistant, consultant, and adviser, people who had little to do with construction—mostly esoteric types, shrinks, and the first “oligafriends” (Polonsky’s joking term for an oligarch’s entourage). They consumed his time and occupied his mind, making him forget the real business—Kolya Bogus being a case in point. It is hard to believe now, but I was the one who introduced him to Polonsky in the autumn of 2005, originally so Kolya could sell him kitesurfing and snowboarding gear. Instead, he became Polonsky’s personal “pharmacy” (Moscow club slang for dealers in substances banned under anti-drug laws), and before long, his personal adviser.

Such was the pivot of fate.

To this day, Kolya’s Facebook profile still says: “Advisor to the CEO at Mirax Group.” And in the photographs from those years he is everywhere: curly-haired, with that permanently half-witted grin, his face slightly crooked, his eyes glazed, yet dressed in an expensive suit and polished shoes. An adviser, no less! But back in 2005, none of us gave it a second thought. There was no sudden collapse in Polonsky’s personality to make us worry about his well-being or the company’s future. It all happened very gradually. We were too busy working and building. None of us imagined that the harder and better we worked, the more convinced Polonsky became that all this success was the product of his genius alone, while the team was nothing but a crowd of grunts, easily replaced and with no consequences. The Mirax spaceship was gaining altitude, and its captain looked down from on high, thinking, “I’m pretty damn good.”

From the distance of years, it seems obvious that all of it was happening inside his head. But back then Polonsky still seemed like one of us, through and through. Once, on a weekend, he called me at seven in the morning, worry thick in his voice.

“Max, where are you? Why isn’t anyone meeting the camel?”

Half-asleep, I began asking: What camel? Where? What’s going on? He swore he’d told me the week before: they were sending a white camel from Uzbekistan. In any case, there was no time to get into it now—it was already being unloaded at the Zolotye Klyuchi checkpoint, and I had to get over there immediately and arrange for it to be transferred to the zoo. I threw on some clothes and ran over, only to find a sleepy guard at the checkpoint and no camel whatsoever. I raced to the second checkpoint. Same story. I called Polonsky back.

“Seryoga, something’s wrong. There’s nobody here.”

And he says, “Good man. Fast on your feet. Happy April Fools’, buddy.”

It sounds absurd now: Uzbekistan, a camel. But back then, the camaraderie, the ease that came with success, and our absolute trust in one another made pranks that outrageous entirely possible. Alas, money corrupted us quietly but steadily, and little by little we turned from entrepreneurs into full-blown sybarites. We might, for instance, sit over breakfast in Nice and casually buy a Porsche 911 Turbo over the phone from the States, because the Russian allocation had been sold out a year in advance and cutting the line wasn’t kosher. Or we might hop on a private jet to Venice just to pick up a Bottega Veneta crocodile briefcase—one of only fifty ever made, each costing as much as a decent motorcycle. There were yachts, jets... the usual fixtures and fancies of success-drunk men who had suddenly struck gold.

The women were a separate matter. Some had acquired a harem of forty houris; others had traded in their wives because the old ones no longer matched their new status—in looks or in age...

So a camel from Uzbekistan was nothing by comparison. I swallowed the story whole. The only thing I couldn’t quite believe was that he could simply forget about the delivery—and even then, Polonsky managed to talk me into it...

In short, we were a living illustration of the old saying: “God forbid a pig should get horns, or a peasant lordly airs.”

Thirty is the perfect age to ruin everything: youth is the ideal fuel for reckless courage. Gray hair resets your chances of wrecking it all. Time runs out, and you have to learn to live patiently, making do with whatever you have already mangled.

I took a drag on my cigar and exhaled toward the office ceiling. Outside, it was unnervingly quiet: the city lay safely swaddled in an acoustic blanket of paranoia over some foreign virus whose means of transmission remained a closely guarded secret, so the most terrified preferred serving time in the prison of their own apartments to risking death.

“I wonder—if doctors announced that cigars were excellent protection against colds, would tobacco prices go through the roof?”

I turned back to my laptop screen and opened yet another draft file, tentatively titled “The Crack,” devoted to the pivotal events of 2005–2007.

Toward the autumn of 2005, when the Federation project was already gearing up to start construction on its second tower, Polonsky appointed me vice president. By then there were five of us with that title, and my appointment seemed like a logical continuation of our partnership arrangement: under cover of these new titles, Sergei gradually loaded more and more responsibility onto me, while I treated each new burden as another challenge and kept working toward the stake in the company laid out in our partnership agreement. It was a classic Russian business story of the period: to motivate a top executive, the owner gives him a share in the company, and the executive works himself to the bone, mistakenly believing he is building a common enterprise. The little carrot did its job. Who could have imagined then that when a minority shareholder wanted to leave and asked to be paid out, he would be shown the middle finger and thrown out the door—and if he tried to stand up for his rights, he would either be threatened with prison or actually put there?

It was probably then, in 2005, that the changes in Polonsky became so fundamental that only a blind man could fail to notice them. Except that I, like everyone else, wrote these metamorphoses off as natural growing pains that would pass, blaming them in part on illicit substances and booze—the best friends of businessmen in the noughties. There is no counting how many lives and businesses were snorted and drunk away in those years, but for some reason I thought it was all fixable nonsense, that Polonsky simply needed to come to his senses after being suddenly crushed by the weight of money and fame, and everything would settle down. Besides, we were all drinking pretty hard back then. When I think back on those years, I can only marvel at the endurance of my liver: cognac and whiskey went down like coffee, just to keep moving; evening negotiations, restaurant meetings... And this alcohol marathon ran without a break. We cured the morning shakes and puffiness with saunas and the gym. I didn’t think much about health then: the drinking ritual seemed an inseparable part of successful business.

But then came the first truly serious warning sign involving Polonsky.

It was the very beginning of 2006; we had just celebrated the New Year in our usual wild fashion, with another record profit behind us, and were preparing to pour the foundation for Vostok Tower, one of the two towers that make up the Federation Tower complex...

2006

When senior management and the technical team gathered for yet another meeting in January 2006, Polonsky, sitting at the head of the table, skipped the preliminaries and announced:

“We have to pour the foundation slab for Vostok Tower by March first.”

The room fell silent. Pouring a concrete slab of that sheer volume in January or February was not just risky—it was dangerously so. In subzero temperatures, the water in concrete freezes, creating the risk of cracks; and this slab was meant to carry what would then be the tallest building in Moscow, a ninety-six-story giant.

“But pouring the foundation for a skyscraper in freezing weather is impossible,” ventured one of the specialists present—Turner, the fifty-year-old chief engineer from our American construction consultant. He had a slight stammer and, as usual, delivered his cautious objection while peering over his glasses with small black eyes from under gray eyebrows. “It’s sheer nonsense.”

“That doesn’t mean it can’t be done,” Polonsky replied. “‘Making the Impossible Possible’—that’s the slogan on our brochures.”

“Yes, but if we simply waited…” Turner persisted.

“There’s no time to wait,” Sergei cut him off, his voice rising. “This is Moscow City—you have to move fast here. If we haven’t built anything today, then tomorrow we’re already behind.”

“And if we rush today and botch the job, there won’t be any tomorrow for us,” I said.

It should be said that, at construction meetings in those days, an unwritten law applied: every argument had to be met with an equally weighty counterargument. In saying that haste could lead to failure, I was not claiming disaster was inevitable; I was merely pointing out one possible scenario that had to be taken into account.

Polonsky looked at me steadily, no doubt weighing my words. Having recognized that the specter of failure required an answer, he asked:

“And why would we botch it? Have we ever failed before? I’m not proposing we cut corners—only that we keep up the pace. Let’s hold a tender among contractors and go through all the risks. The Turks are building Zapad, and they’re managing perfectly well.”

“I also think we can’t count on anyone but Ant Yapi,” Aleksandrov chimed in. He was Adikaev Sr.’s former deputy, whom Polonsky had appointed project director for Federation Tower after dismissing Vladimir Anverovich.

Temnikov nodded in agreement.

“Then let the Turks prepare a proposal for Vostok,” Polonsky said, waving a hand. “We’ll review it. Who else can you suggest as an alternative?”

Naming someone off the top of our heads was, of course, a problem. We were talking, after all, about the largest continuous pour of a foundation slab in the history of Russian civil engineering, and there simply were no domestic contractors capable of pulling it off. So Aleksandrov took it upon himself to draft an inquiry and send it to the Turks. A few days later, Ant Yapi came back with a preliminary offer: they were prepared to take on the foundation pour, but at a monopolistically high price—nearly five million dollars, against the four and a half million in the budget. What’s more, the Turks flatly refused to work in freezing temperatures. That didn’t sit well with Polonsky, so Lutsenko and I suggested opening talks with China State Construction Engineering Corporation. Mirax already had experience working with Chinese companies: Yuanda was fabricating and installing the skyscraper’s façade, and we were completely satisfied with their prices, schedule, and quality.

Polonsky gave the go-ahead, and soon an alternative bid came in. The Chinese were willing to take on the pour for $4.4 million—half a million less than Ant Yapi. But there was a catch: they, too, considered concreting the slab in freezing weather too risky and proposed starting closer to April.

Polonsky was furious. It looked as though we wouldn’t finish the foundation by March 1. But Sergei was not the type to back down easily.

“Have them submit formal proposals by January 20,” he said. “But we need to put a condition in the tender: the pour must be completed before spring!”

“If we put that condition in the tender, we’ll end up with no contractors,” I said. “You can’t buy reputation with money.”

“How would their reputation suffer?” Polonsky frowned. “A project like this? On the contrary, it’s all upside.”

“The problem is the frost, Seryoga,” Lutsenko said. “They’re not saying they won’t pour in the cold for no reason. It means it’s risky.”

“Oh, nonsense,” Polonsky brushed him off. “Of course there are risks, but I’m sure they’re not that serious. What do you think, Artur?”

He turned to Aleksandrov, who, eyes fixed on his papers, shrugged and said uncertainly, “I think we should include the condition and wait for the formal bids. If someone agrees in the end, then it can’t be that terrifying.”

“And if they refuse?” I asked.

“If they refuse, it means we’ll still have time to run another tender once it gets warmer.”

“Let’s not start with the negativity,” Polonsky grimaced. “‘We’ll have time,’ ‘another tender’... Contractors always want better terms and longer deadlines. Let them adjust if they want the money, and let them pour in winter!”

“I agree,” Temnikov put in. “Max is right, it’s a question of reputation. But that cuts both ways: if they deliver quality work at that scale, in the frost, it’s a huge plus for them. They’ll be in demand afterward.”

“So it’s decided.” Polonsky slapped his palm down on the table. “Let them prepare formal proposals. We’ll review them on the 20th.”

A week later, the tender committee, made up of our company’s senior management, opened both envelopes. Suddenly it emerged that the Turks had changed their minds and were willing to pour the foundation in freezing weather after all, while the Chinese refused point-blank. Judging by the satisfied looks on Temnikov’s and Aleksandrov’s faces, a bit of friendly back-channel work had not been absent. Still, Polonsky was delighted, and even the half-million-dollar difference did not bother him in the slightest: in this case, he believed, time mattered more than money. When I stopped by his office after the tender, he was sitting in his chair, sipping cognac and looking out the window with an expression of complete contentment.

“Well?” he chuckled. “I told you we could pour in the cold if the will was there. Just a little more expensive...”

“It’s still not clear how this will turn out,” I said, shaking my head. “If they’ve taken it on, they must be sure they can manage it, but let’s not celebrate too soon.”

“All right, we won’t rush things,” Sergei agreed readily, even rapping his knuckles on the desk for good measure. “But the Turks did well. I’m pleased. As for the Chinese, I suspected from the beginning they’d refuse. It’s not in their nature. They’re too... methodical. Too rational. They don’t like taking risks.”

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said. “Why March 1, specifically? Why are we so hung up on that date? March 1 doesn’t appear anywhere in the original construction schedule.”

Polonsky looked at me for a long moment, took a sip of cognac, and smiled.

“It’s a matter of image, Max. Yours, mine, and Mirax’s. That notorious reputation we’ve built for ourselves. I’m flying to Courchevel for the March holidays, and I want everyone to know who poured the biggest, thickest foundation slab. Let it sink in over there that we pour in any weather, that we couldn’t care less about the forecast—we decide when to pour and when not to. That’s what matters, not some... half a million.”

His answer did not particularly surprise me. I had suspected from the start that this was mostly about bravado: when you’re boarding a private jet at Vnukovo-3 bound for Courchevel, already savoring the moment when you’ll casually mention the world’s thickest foundation over a glass of Liber Pater at Le Chabichou, it is very hard to force yourself to think about the risks of pouring concrete for a skyscraper in the depths of a February frost.

The next day, we officially accepted the Turks’ bid. Polonsky insisted that heavy penalties for missed deadlines be written into the contract and issued a formal notice to the technical supervisors stating that he was assuming all risks himself.

From that day on, the weather forecast became the most popular reading in the office.

The meteorologists offered no comfort: by late February, the average daily temperature was hovering around −10°C, and the rebar had frozen through. The Turks put up a polyethylene sarcophagus and packed it with heat guns, but even that was barely enough to keep the temperature inside just above freezing. The specialists cautiously suggested postponing the pour, but Polonsky ignored them, and on February 24 our contractors got to work.

The batching plants and the Turks performed flawlessly, and by February 26 the slab had been completely poured.

That same day, at Polonsky’s initiative, our press office issued a statement:

“Today, Mirax Group has completed the foundation mat pour for Tower A of the Federation Tower complex. The technical requirements for placing heavy concrete at low temperatures prohibit pouring onto frozen ground. Accordingly, the pour was preceded by several days of thorough preheating of the base. The continuous pour lasted 61 hours. In all, 14,000 cubic meters of concrete were placed. A single continuous pour of a concrete slab of this volume is unprecedented anywhere in the world. The foundation pour for Tower A of the Federation complex has been entered into Guinness World Records. Craig Glenday, Editor-in-Chief of Guinness World Records, presented the official record-holder certificate to Artur Aleksandrov, Construction Director of the Federation complex.”

On February 28, Sergei Polonsky, the jubilant co-author of the record, flew off to Courchevel; and on March 1, the temperature dropped to −17°C—and disaster struck.

The slab was covered with thermal blankets and heated electrically, but given its monstrous volume, it simply could not be warmed through properly. Nevertheless, two weeks later—without waiting for the foundation to gain sufficient strength, or for test results confirming the quality of the work—the Turks set up a crane on the slab and began the scheduled reinforcement of the first basement level. Needless to say, the contractors were being driven on by the contractual penalties for missing the deadline.

By mid-April it was clear: the slab had cracked and could not bear the load of ninety-six stories. The reputations of many people hung in the balance. Building on such a foundation was out of the question; somehow the mistake had to be corrected—but no one knew how.

For the next three months, work came to a halt. Under the pretext that “the slab hasn’t reached full strength yet,” it was hidden from prying eyes, fenced off, and put under guard; no one but insiders was allowed anywhere near it. The entire top brass of Mirax, along with their specialists, racked their brains over the eternal question: “What do we do?”

“Damn it, what kind of luck is this?” Polonsky muttered, shaking his head. “Who could’ve imagined we’d get minus seventeen in early March, huh?”

The verdict from the experts who investigated the crack was devastating: construction could continue only if, instead of a single basement level, they poured a new slab directly on top of the defective one. Polonsky resisted to the bitter end, but he had no cards left to play. Otherwise, they would have been forced to publish the inspection reports and expert findings, bringing construction of the Tower to a complete stop—a move that would have buried us right there beneath that very slab.

In the end, having tried to save three months, we lost half a year, roughly $23 million, and the Grand Hyatt hotel—the last because we had to eliminate the banquet halls originally planned for that missing floor. By late summer, without any fanfare, the Chinese poured the new slab and resumed construction on Vostok Tower, taking over from the Turks, who were left to carry on with Zapad. Everyone kept quiet about the real reasons for the change of contractor, just as they kept quiet about the condition of the first slab. No one had any interest in opening their mouth. The engineers said nothing because the second foundation slab more than solved the problem of structural integrity, and admitting that the work had been done in violation of building codes would have amounted to shooting themselves in the foot. The Chinese had no intention of picking a fight with the client, and the Turks, not being suicidal, were naturally in no hurry to confess to having poured a substandard slab. Aleksandrov lost his job and kept his mouth shut as well: he needed a clean record and a decent reputation if he was going to find another position.

The price of all that bravado was sobering even for Polonsky, and although he never managed to admit as much to his partners, it seemed clear that fiascos like this would not happen again. The saga, however, had one side effect. The crack in the foundation opened a crack in Polonsky’s trust in people. Terrified that the story might leak to the press before the Chinese had time to fix everything, Sergei became positively obsessed with security and confidentiality.

By the mid-2000s, this attitude was already considered normal: businessmen had stopped trusting first one another, and then their own employees. Wiretaps, polygraphs, dossiers packed with dirt... Every company grew its own private KGB, complete with agents and informers.

Swept up in this general suspicion, Sergei changed from a smiling simpleton into a full-blown paranoiac. From then on, anyone who wanted to join us in any position above courier had to be interviewed not only by security, but by Polonsky personally.

“They’re going to be working for me, after all,” Sergei explained. “And one glance is enough for me to know whether a person fits or not.”

But it did not stop there. In early December, apparently while thinking about New Year’s gifts, Polonsky took the initiative and decided to install dedicated communication phones in his partners’ personal cars, on the grounds that ordinary mobiles were unsafe and easily tapped. The installation procedure was unusually elaborate. The driver had to bring the car at a specified time to a specified address and could collect it only twenty-four hours later. The address was given out personally by the head of security, Grachev—a gloomy giant with a wind-battered face and a gaze like a scanner.

It was a very strange business. The phone turned out to be an ordinary car-mounted Nokia, which, incidentally, had irreversibly spoiled the carefully designed interior that Japanese engineers had created for an otherwise excellent automobile. More importantly, it was completely unclear how this Finnish contraption was supposed to ensure any confidentiality of communication.

Out of curiosity, I turned to friends whose line of work gave me hope of an expert explanation. Having heard the story, my friends sent me—or rather, my car—to their specialists.

The answer turned out to be nasty, and it had nothing to do with the Finnish mobile phone.

“It’s there,” announced one of the specialists, Artem—a wiry, dark-haired mechanic of about thirty—as he climbed out of the cabin. “They were listening to you, all right. State-of-the-art equipment, professionally installed. You can’t fault the workmanship.”

How can I describe my astonishment at that moment? It was like waking up on a Sunday morning, reaching down out of habit to scratch your balls... and discovering you had five of them.

Artem’s partner, a large man in his forties, was sitting on an old plastic chair in front of a small TV, flicking through channels with the remote.

“...I believe Mirax Group Corporation owes us an explanation...” I caught out of the corner of my ear.

I turned and stared at the screen. Deputy Lebedev was staring back at me, confidently declaring:

“What Guinness World Records can we even be talking about when the foundation of Federation Tower has cracked...”

I was utterly stunned. I just stood there, mouth open, staring at the screen. Where had Lebedev got this information?

“Shall we remove the bug?” Artem called over to me.

Still reeling from the shock of my partner’s “gift” and Lebedev’s performance, I glanced at my Lexus. On the one hand, driving around in a bugged car was unpleasant. On the other...

“Let’s leave it. Let the paranoid bastard think he’s in control.”

Artem nodded, and I turned back to the television. Lebedev’s statement was clearly a retaliatory strike from Capital Group, whom we’d gone to war with at Polonsky’s instigation.

The dispute over a plot in Moscow City—where Polonsky had a verbal agreement with the mayor’s office to build parking for Federation Tower, while Capital Group held a perfectly valid investment contract for development—had escalated into a public mud-slinging match. And we had started the war ourselves, instead of negotiating and looking for compromises.

At a meeting in the mayor’s office, Polonsky staged a public scandal, accused fellow developers and city officials of breaking agreements, slipped into personal insults, and stormed out, slamming the door behind him. The very next day, he launched a smear campaign against Capital Group. The guys were surprised, took offense, and dumped a bucket of shit right back on Mirax—including, apparently, buying a little inside information about the crack from someone.

Sergei was living in the past and didn’t understand that reneging on commitments was the primary secret of business success in the 2000s. First people got screwed on verbal agreements; then even legal documents stopped meaning anything: sign whatever you have to in order to make money here and now, pay off the courts later, and sort it all out somehow. Business in Russia was doomed. At the time, I couldn’t have imagined that just a few years later Polonsky would not only accept these rules of the game, but become their undisputed champion.

For now, though, he had turned into the sort of person who smiles when he meets you and calls you a partner, while secretly planting a bug in your car and listening in on every conversation you have.

2020

When I first set out to write this book, I had no idea where the story would take me. I simply began to describe what had happened to me and to Mirax. But without a plot, without forward motion, the text collapses into memoir—and grows tedious. “Let’s make some noise, bitches!” the host screams at the St. Petersburg rap battles, working himself and the crowd into a frenzy, pumping energy into the two MCs locked in their verbal duel.

Perhaps that was the association that flashed through my mind when I decided to post drafts of the future novel once a month on my website, maximprivezentsev.com. Minimum literary decoration, maximum facts: I was waiting for a reaction from the people involved in those events, hoping it would become the engine of a new storyline.

The first draft (see Draft No. 1 in Notes) was about Mirax’s dubious purchases of “overseas projects.” But, naturally, there are no falls without rises, and the peak we conquered was arguably the colossal revenue of 2007 and, as a result, Polonsky’s appearance on the Forbes list—which, by all accounts, completed his break with reality.

An astonishing metamorphosis: less than a year earlier, Polonsky had been counting the losses from the risky but flamboyantly defiant decision to pour the foundation of the Vostok Tower in freezing weather; later, frightened of everything under the sun, he had our cars bugged; yet by late February 2008, he felt like the king of the world. Or at least its viceroy. A place on the Forbes list is a cherished dream for developers like Polonsky and merchants like Rybakov alike. It is an honorable distinction, though few stop to consider the curious fact that Forbes publishes not actual cash holdings, but merely the paper value of assets declared by the candidates themselves, with liabilities and obligations left out. But does any newly minted billionaire think about such trifles in his hour of triumph?

“Anyone who doesn’t have a billion can go fuck themselves.” Many people know PSYU by this phrase, but few know the context. He did indeed say it at MIPIM 2008—the international exhibition of commercial real estate and innovative projects held in Cannes—but not from a stage. He said it at the entrance to a club where Mirax was throwing a “glamour party.” The bouncers were supposed to decide which guests qualified as “super-glamour” and which did not, but they were not doing a very good job: French face control could not quite tell one Russian from another, so a drunk Polonsky decided to filter the guests himself. When you have a generous dose of Cristal sloshing around inside you and several hundred people outside the club clamoring to get into your party, it is easy to lose all sense of proportion. And that was the trap Sergei fell into.

I don’t know why the press blew this Freudian slip of a phrase so wildly out of proportion—whether they simply wanted to whip up a scandal after stuffing themselves with caviar and sipping champagne at that very party (which, incidentally, was the hottest event of the entire exhibition), or whether they were offended that Polonsky, acting as his own bouncer, had failed to detect enough glamour in them. As far as I recall, Kommersant was the first to send the story out into the world, so I suspect it was a paid hit commissioned by competitors. By 2008, PSYU had developed a phenomenal gift for making enemies at breakneck speed, and at Mirax they already numbered in the dozens—a sharp contrast to the early days, just after he arrived in Moscow, when he had amassed friends with the same inimitable ease.

Yet to my mind, Polonsky’s state of mind at the time was captured far better not by his billion-dollar quip, but by a LiveJournal post from March 19, 2008, in which Sergei reflected on the crisis. It read as though he had written it while already orbiting the Earth, occasionally adjusting the crown of a future Nobel laureate as it slipped down over his forehead.

“A year ago, when we acquired a project in Miami, we carried out a thorough study of the American market and consulted investment bankers and other experts. Even then, the situation there was critical, and we anticipated that a crisis might occur. Now it has spread to other countries. It will take at least three years to come out of it.

If in America up to 95 percent of transactions involve mortgage financing, in Russia that figure—for now, at least—is around 10 to 15 percent. That is why Russia has been the least affected by the mortgage crisis. London has been hit very hard, and Europe has felt it too. In my opinion, the U.S. dollar has completely lost its hold as the world’s reserve currency, and it may well fall not by 1.7, as the experts predict, but by 2.5 or even 3. What is more, this is actually good for America itself, since its external debt would immediately be reduced threefold.

As for the global financial situation, I believe that moving from the dollar zone into the eurozone is just as much of a dead end as pivoting toward Asia. I think that, in the end, all the world’s financial institutions will be forced to gather and devise some unified financial system, perhaps even a single global currency. And if the crisis drags on gradually, that is a very bad scenario; it would be better for the situation to go into a steep tailspin—only then will a trend toward rapid recovery emerge.

Why are we confident that we will become the number one developer in Europe? Because we understand how to operate in a crisis—we genuinely enjoy it, and we have absolutely no appetite for working in a stable market.

A crisis is, in essence, a system of overproduction. In our country, there has not yet been any overproduction, and practically none of the companies in the industry has gone bankrupt or left the market—even though, worldwide, this happens all the time because of fierce competition. In a growing market, there is no point racking your brains over cost efficiency, quality, construction schedules, innovative architecture, and so on. There is demand for everything.

Furthermore, we analyzed our project portfolio—both in Moscow and abroad—and came to the conclusion that, in international markets, we had virtually no competitors worth mentioning. That gives us the right to set ourselves the goal of becoming the number-one development company in the world. We simply haven’t yet decided by what year—2015 or 2017. Had there been no crisis, achieving that would have been practically impossible. We were waiting for this crisis; we were ready for it. The biggest money is made in wars and crises.”

At the time, Polonsky sincerely believed Soros, who maintained that the biggest money is made in wars and crises. He forgot, however, that in Russia, without inside information and government contracts, you won’t make a dime—not in a crisis, not on the stock market. Analysts kept warning him that a total disaster was approaching, but he let it go in one ear and out the other. With a crack already spreading through the foundation of Federation Tower, luck abandoned him—but even that blow did not stop the company from posting a staggering net profit of $1.3 billion for the year. The sheer number of zeros in the sums that kept appearing in his accounts only to disappear again seemed to make Sergei dizzy—and alcohol and “stuff” only intensified the effect.

A new chapter, I won’t hide it, was difficult for me to write, since it touched on events connected with Kursky Railway Station—memories that are, to put it mildly, far from pleasant. Though back then, in 2008, my feelings were entirely different, of course.

Back then, I was fired up by the prospects opening before us.

Almost immediately after returning from an international forum in Cannes, I revived an idea I had come up with the year before and had been promoting ever since: a project to modernize Russian Railways transport hubs, beginning with the redevelopment of Kursky Station. The idea was simple, but enormously promising: the railway authorities had plenty of unused land around their stations, and we planned to gradually build a strategy for developing these transport hubs—first, station modernization; then, trust management of the station complex and higher profitability for station infrastructure. The next stage—and the one most interesting to us—was to use the airspace above the tracks and the surrounding land to launch joint development projects with Russian Railways: hotels, offices, shopping malls… even residential buildings. In Europe, Deutsche Bahn, the German rail operator, was already actively pursuing this model: in Stuttgart, for example, plans were under way to build an entire new district directly above the railway lines as part of a station renovation.

In scale and capital expenditure, of course, we were nowhere near Germany. But you eat an elephant one bite at a time, so we decided to give it a try. Russian Railways itself suggested Kursky as the toughest case—essentially saying: if you can handle this one, we’ll talk about further development. It was a pilot project: if it worked, there would be enough work to keep us busy for years.

The Moscow city authorities and the management of Russian Railways liked the idea. Polonsky, for his part, was drawn by the sheer scale of it and by the direct access it gave him to the leadership of both the capital and Russian Railways. Besides, it made straightforward business sense: for what was, by our standards, a relatively modest investment — around 900 million rubles — we could earn it back through trust management of the station, with a payback period of about five years. More importantly, we were gaining access to an enormous development site of 500,000 square meters. Set those nine hundred million against the cost of acquiring a plot of Moscow land near the Garden Ring with the potential for that kind of construction volume, and the site was effectively free. And we weren’t just getting the land; we were also recovering our initial investment.

In short, the idea was as close to a sure thing as it gets.

The modernization of the station instantly lifted Mirax into a different league. One day we were merely builders; the next, a technology company that didn’t just make money selling square meters to private buyers, but was capable of taking on infrastructure challenges at the state level. Of course, later, during the Olympic construction boom, it became painfully clear that where the state is involved, prison and bankruptcy tend to follow. But back then, everyone believed that “public-private partnership” was the road to new heights — and people were genuinely fired up by the idea.

When I presented the project to Russian Railways executives at a meeting earlier that year, Polonsky made it perfectly clear, with his whole manner, that infrastructure projects of this scale were child’s play for Mirax — no more difficult than building a cottage. That attitude clearly strengthened our proposal, and we sealed the deal with a handshake.

True, the first disagreements appeared almost immediately. Out of old habit, Sergei had no wish to burden himself with paperwork, even though he had already been burned by that very negligence quite recently — with the parking spaces at the Federation Tower complex that had been snatched right out from under his nose. He thought that if we began by signing contracts, the whole thing would drag on forever; better simply to move in and start building at once, especially since our deadline was Moscow City Day in September, which left us, to put it mildly, very little time. But as the managing shareholder, I understood how difficult, vast, and at the same time promising this project was, and I wanted to do things properly, with bureaucratic backing secured from the start.

What I had failed to take into account was the inertia and sheer unwillingness to work that defined Russian Railways’ middle management. Sabotage and doing absolutely nothing were their trademark.

“I shudder to think…”

By mid-February 2008, the necessary agreements still hadn’t materialized, while the September deadline remained firmly in place. Polonsky struck up his familiar tune: “We break ground on March 1.” I was seized by an acute sense of déjà vu—memories of the scramble to pour the foundation before March 1, 2006—and tried to explain that without signed agreements we had no legal footing whatsoever; they would simply tell us to get lost. But PSY wouldn’t budge: to hell with the agreements, he said, the main thing was to plunge into construction, and we’d sort out the rest later. Meanwhile, I knew perfectly well that the minute we showed up, anyone at the station with a stake in the place or a side racket would call their patrons, and without the proper documents we would, at best, be escorted out by the elbows—or, at worst, be planted face-first in the asphalt by the transport police and prosecutors working in tandem.

Unlike me, however, Polonsky had no real sense of the balance of power at the station. So I had no choice but to put my head down and somehow, urgently, force through all the necessary paperwork.

“And what is our most powerful rocket fuel when it comes to fast-tracking deals with state agencies? Corruption, of course. There’s a reason we’re among the ten most corrupt countries in the world.”

Once the money started flowing, the layabouts at Russian Railways suddenly became much more willing to cooperate, and by early March I had the full set of required contracts and agreements in my hands. Ironically, the start of the Kursky Station renovation coincided with Medvedev’s election as president—an event that, for a brief moment, stirred hope across the board for a new historical turn in the country’s development.

At the time, though, I had no time to celebrate the new president. Ahead of me lay a truly formidable task: to turn Kursky Station into something respectable—a place that, over two decades of post-Soviet Russia, had become the gold standard of shadow commerce, from narcotics and weapons trafficking through the left-luggage offices to a pay toilet that brought its owner tens of thousands of dollars a month. The parking lot out front, the porter mafia, the food-service syndicate… There wasn’t a single part of the station’s operations where modernization wouldn’t smash someone’s illicit cash cow. The whole place stank—and I mean that in every possible sense of the word.

But there was no turning back, the prospects were dazzling, and so I threw myself headlong into the fight.

Different problems called for different methods. Inspections by the transport prosecutor’s office and the transport police, “sit-downs” with the “protection” behind every greasy spoon and peeling newsstand... For six months, from March to September, I moved around in two cars with four bodyguards, armed with a letter signed by Russian Railways chief Yakunin and Mayor Luzhkov stating that I was carrying out a project of critical importance to the city. That very document, worn thin by September, was what I showed to both the bandits and the cops. Most of them began by flexing their muscles, but I played the fool, and in answer to questions like “What about us?” and “Let’s work something out,” I sent my interlocutors straight to the signatories of my protection letter. At that point, the “protection” usually vanished into thin air.

Alas, it proved impossible to defeat the mafia with a single sheet of paper. In the end, three stubborn “business structures” remained: the patty sellers under the prosecutor’s protection, the left-luggage office overseen by watchers ranging from local crime bosses to a transport police major, and the parking attendants, backed by cover just as unimaginable. As for these three, I received a simple instruction from the Russian Railways leadership: “They stay. Just come up with a new format for them.”

I did, though it took some thought. With the food outlets, by modernizing the retail space and holding an open tender, I signed lease agreements on commercial terms twenty times better than what Russian Railways had had before. In the left-luggage offices, a fire “unexpectedly” broke out, and overnight they were all demolished, freeing up space for commercial use. As for new luggage storage, under the concept of counterterrorism security, there was simply no room for it in the station. The parking lot remained under some unknown roof, but I introduced a turnstile system and terminal payments routed somewhere—probably to Cyprus. More importantly, I got rid of the parking chaos and the hustlers who used to collect the fees. Visually, everything became more than civilized, and even though all the revenue bypassed Russian Railways, I didn’t lose sleep over it: that wasn’t my level of decision-making, and I had long since learned to listen to my elders.

Naturally, it was impossible to manage without outside help, so I hired a number of consultants. German professionals from Deutsche Bahn, as leaders in European station modernization. A retired general from the committee of warm hearts and cool heads, serving as an analyst on various “roofs.” He was a cheerful old boy with a red face, slightly puffed up from good whiskey. The general had been forced into retirement over a small incident involving a large-scale embezzlement of material supplies, but he did not seem especially upset by it. There was also a Caucasian “consultant” named Abdul, who helped me navigate the criminal intricacies of the station’s tangled stakeholders. Abdul was a man without a beard, which in his profession was a veritable act of Caucasian avant-garde, lending him a certain theological ambiguity; as a result, he looked more like a Sicilian mafioso. He spoke elegantly, but handled obscenities with virtuoso skill.

The only person who removed himself from the project entirely was Polonsky.

While I fought the station mafia in all its manifestations, he drifted further and further away from development. It truly began to seem to me that he knew about our business only from Temnikov’s retellings—Temnikov, who was always hovering around Sergei together with Bogus. And while the latter had not yet fully grasped the sheer scale of the opportunities opening up before him, Temnikov was already making full use of Polonsky’s trust.

Their first, and perhaps most notorious, escapade was the purchase of the Sungate hotel in Turkey, in the summer of 2007—almost a year before we moved into Kursky. In early July, at yet another board meeting, Polonsky brought up Temnikov’s proposal to buy a hotel in Turkey. Lutsenko and I voted against it; Adikaev abstained. Polonsky said, “Fine, let’s move on. It’s no longer relevant.” So we moved on. We forgot about the hotel. Then in August, Polonsky mentioned, almost in passing, that he and Temnikov had bought it. To our astonishment—not the eyebrow-raising kind, but the kind where your legs go out from under you, your body sinks, and your eyebrows stay exactly where they are—Polonsky announced that since he and Temnikov were in favor, and Adikaev had later given his consent as well, Lutsenko and I were in the minority, and formal board approval was not required. In other words, seeing that we opposed it, Polonsky had simply pressed pause, quietly worked on Adikaev separately, and bought the hotel, presenting Dima and me with a fait accompli.

“For three hundred and forty million dollars, for fuck’s sake!”

I remember Polonsky’s announcement left me completely stunned. No one in his right mind would pay that much for a Turkish hotel, even if it were built of solid gold. I had even shown him ads in Turkish newspapers where a bank was offering Sungate for 150 million to cover the debts, but Polonsky brushed them off, saying there was no point reading the gutter press: that figure was bait for idiots, and the hotel was worth every cent of its $340 million. Still, the price was not even the main problem. We simply saw no reason to buy a hotel at all. Why would we, builders, need a finished building—especially at such a wildly inflated price?

At the time, we wrote it off as just another whim… one of the hundreds already piled up beyond measure. Worse, against a backdrop of office drinking sprees and drunken antics, Sergei’s bouts of aggression became more frequent—episodes that did not merely make him look ridiculous, but wrecked his ties, his friendships, his family. Kirilenko, a former partner and trusted comrade, became inconvenient, so Polonsky dropped him without a second thought. “It’s business; there are no friends in business.” He split with his wife, Natasha, too. To this day the internet is full of articles about how he did not pay her a single kopeck in the divorce. The rest of us hardly recognized him anymore: one moment he was all smiles, the next he was glaring like a wolf…

I decided to speak my mind plainly about the company’s direction in August 2007, when Polonsky dragged us all to Sungate for Builder’s Day, to celebrate the recent acquisition. Sergei and his new girlfriend, his future wife Yulia, settled into one of the two villas; Temnikov took the other; and the rest of us checked into ordinary rooms.

When I arrived at the villa that first evening, Polonsky was in an altogether benevolent mood—stretched out on a lounger, smoking a cigar, sipping cognac, and gazing, somewhat glassy-eyed, at the sea and the Riviera at night. He even seemed more or less coherent; at any rate, the look he gave me was not entirely vacant. And yet it all ended in a furious row. I insisted that the hotel purchase be kept separate from the company’s acquisitions: I had no intention of accepting that Polonsky and Temnikov had, without my consent, taken $8.5 million of my share from the retained earnings of previous years. Polonsky would not hear my reasoning and began to shout. To be fair, he raged only until I said I wanted out of the business. As I understood it then, for him such a turn of events meant the prospect of multimillion-dollar payouts and unwelcome damage to his reputation: “Partner Leaves After Turkish Hotel Purchase” would hardly make a flattering magazine headline. So he promptly threw the car into reverse, urging me not to make any hasty decisions... In short, we both cooled down and decided to go home and return to the matter there, in a calm, businesslike setting.

Once we were back, Sergei reduced the whole affair to a Turkish misunderstanding and suggested that, for the purposes of our informal accounting, we treat my profit as if it had played no part in the hotel purchase.

But the Turkish hotel was only the beginning. In 2008, Polonsky and Temnikov slipped the leash, buying up one dubious “Western asset” after another. Switzerland, London, Montenegro... The same pattern repeated itself again and again. Polonsky insisted that all these purchases were being made outside the company’s equity, but those were purely notional calculations. In reality, money was pouring out of the company in a torrent, and we had no access to what we had earned; in effect, we had gone from being shareholders of Mirax to being its creditors.

After August 2007, the question of my leaving the company was never raised again, either by Polonsky or by me, but words once spoken are not easily forgotten. Polonsky more and more often betrayed his irritation over trifles, making it abundantly clear that the old warmth between us was gone. To make matters worse, he began surrounding himself with new and highly dubious adviser-partners—notably the U.S. citizen Felix Sater, who had previously been involved both in arms trafficking and in the murky dealings of developer Donald Trump. Standing somewhat apart was a Georgian ex-convict, Vakhtang Laliashvili, also known as Sergei Yefimtsev or Vakha the Little—a criminal boss and thief who, after serving eight years for fraud at the Tula distillery, had been released early and slipped seamlessly into real estate development, attaching himself to Polonsky and Mirax.

Bringing criminal elements into the company’s management was frankly alarming, but I told myself that a bad peace is better than a good quarrel. Besides, the Russian Railways project really was promising: it offered a chance to spin the division off into a separate business, with RZhD as a shareholder—a structure in which Polonsky, without a controlling stake, would no longer be able to wreck everything through sheer reckless voluntarism. Still, I soon began to sense—intuitively, and from the behavior of Polonsky and Temnikov, who barely bothered to conceal their growing hostility—that our conversation had not passed without consequences. My “partners” had begun looking for a way to squeeze me out of the company and leave me with nothing. First Sergei removed me from the board; then he reduced all communication between us to ten minutes a day. He would simply listen to my status updates on the project, say dryly, “I hear you,” and say goodbye. In essence, from that moment on a chess match began: a struggle over which of us would have the stronger position when the endgame came—the inevitable split that, after our “international expansion,” had become only a matter of time. In that game, Kursky seemed to me like an invincible queen: prospective projects with RZhD stretched years into the future, and even the unhinged Polonsky would not want to destroy that.

In the end, we delivered the station on schedule, by September, and I was proud and happy: in barely half a year, we had literally turned the city’s most run-down railway station into a modern transport hub. Yakunin and Luzhkov came to the opening, and Polonsky himself led the tour. He did not introduce me to Luzhkov, nor did he mention me in his presentation. Predictable, but unpleasant, to be honest. Yakunin spotted me behind the wall of bodyguards, smiled, came over, and shook my hand, saying, “Thank you for your work!” At the sight of this, Polonsky flushed red, the muscles in his jaw twitching.

At the end of the visit, RZhD and Mirax signed all the documents needed to begin design work on an office, retail, and hotel complex of several hundred thousand square meters. A model of the future project was already on display, along with an approved concept complete with technical and economic parameters. In short, RZhD was satisfied and ready to continue the partnership.

This could only please me. True, as summer approached, beyond its loans and revenues, the company still held roughly $100 million in undistributed shareholder profits from 2006–2007—mine, Adikaev’s, Lutsenko’s, and others’—which, under Polonsky’s scheme, remained inside the company, earning interest at five percent a year. It seemed the money was working for us, but my subsequent divorce from Natalia, Polonsky’s refusal to pay child support for his own son, and his bitter falling-out with Adikaev made me question his integrity.

And, as became clear soon afterward, with good reason.

2020

The new draft of the book I posted online (see Draft No. 6) dealt with my encounters with mind-benders and schizo-esoterics. Even back in St. Petersburg, Polonsky had developed a taste for Castaneda; he was obsessed with transcendental theories, and from a certain point on, spiritual gurus were never out of our office.

Fortunately, they did not appear at once. From 2005 to 2008, everything was still being done properly: we understood that our own knowledge was not enough to reach our ambitious goals, so we brought in the best people in business education—Savkin, Gandapas, Molokanov, Maxim Kotkov, Gerasichev, John Schooul... The training sessions ran almost without a break, and they produced excellent results. But Polonsky, like any lucky fool who has won the lottery and is sitting on a pile of cash, decided it was all thanks to his extraordinary instinct, and that from then on the business would run by itself, like a money-printing machine. This delusion lay at the heart of virtually all entrepreneurship in the 2000s, which is why competent consultants, teachers, risk managers, and even half-decent financiers were pushed aside and replaced by astrologers, metaphysicians, and psychics. Business mentors gave way to charlatan mind-benders peddling schizo-esoteric practices, and Polonsky no longer had to work his way through weighty volumes on business analysis or any other discipline.

From then on, he managed by “stream of consciousness.”

The first mind-bender Polonsky put on the payroll was Andrei Monakhov. Bogus introduced them. Monakhov was not really a trainer at all, just an ordinary self-serving windbag who lobbied inside the company for the interests of the people who had brought him to the trough: Bogus and Temnikov. A professional manipulator, he quickly took over the company’s entire HR department, introduced a secret personnel assessment system based on Avtandil Anuashvili’s pseudoscientific method of “Video-Computer Psychodiagnostics and Psychocorrection,” and convinced Polonsky that business trainers were unnecessary. As a result, from 2008 on, Polonsky made not a single appointment at Mirax without the blessing of this “master of Daoist practices,” so I would not be exaggerating if I said that Monakhov made a significant contribution to the degradation of corporate governance. A viable organization divides roles in two ways: by competence and by authority. Polonsky and Monakhov invented an organization in which roles were divided according to some esoteric compatibility.

A little later, in 2008, Monakhov—in his capacity as “master of Daoist practices”—introduced Sergei to an even more formidable charlatan: Bronislav Vinogrodsky. Bronislav quickly found the key to Polonsky’s schizo-esoteric bent. It began with Qigong breathing exercises, then came the “I Ching Game” project, intended to “directly influence the formation of ideas and mindsets in Russian society.” Vinogrodsky became Polonsky’s personal “teacher” and, according to his own recent claims on Instagram, still sends Sergei “messages from outer space” every day. This self-styled “Master of Time and Space” played a major part in dismantling Polonsky’s personality, replacing the humanistic principles of social life with those same messages from outer space—all so he could brazenly exploit his “parishioner.” In the end, most such “spiritual gurus” are not interested in the growth of knowledge or competence. They are interested only in money.

Meanwhile, we kept marching toward the Great Goal: to use ambitious Western projects to fashion the image of an international construction corporation. But since we had neither experience nor any real understanding of the Western market, and Polonsky had by then decided that business consultants were all crooks, we operated on the principle of “jump first, figure it out later.” Predictably, that approach produced catastrophic decisions on the international stage. After the hotel in Turkey came Switzerland—the Aminona-East ski resort: we had barely printed the brochures before environmentalists shut the whole thing down and forced the construction site to close. Then came London—a 120-story skyscraper and the renovation of villas in a historic district; right after London, Montenegro, with the Zavala peninsula, where the plan was to build a second Monte Carlo...

In the end, we built nothing.

To this day, I remain convinced that all that money didn’t simply vanish into thin air, but was somehow elegantly and discreetly “diluted,” settling in offshore accounts. And, naturally, I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

Adikaev was the first to head for the exit: in December 2008, he announced his departure and asked Polonsky to buy out his stake in Mirax and return the undistributed profits from the previous couple of years. Realizing that Sergei had no intention of paying, Alexei tried to take control of the Kutuzovskaya Mile project and Kyiv Plaza for himself.

Polonsky, of course, refused to give ground. Both sides dumped kompromat on each other and, to the boundless delight of lawyers and cops, leaked every last bit of inside information straight to them. Later, this case became Polonsky’s calling card. Everyone knew the routine: if PSY starts screaming about someone, “He’s a thief, he robbed me!” it simply means someone is trying to collect a debt from Polonsky for work or services, while the curly-haired cosmonaut himself has no intention of paying up.

Generally speaking, in the 2000s, criminal cases under economic statutes in Russia were usually opened on the basis of denunciations from competitors or disgruntled colleagues from the business leprosarium. The merchants created the demand, and the oprichniki perfected the supply. On a subconscious level, the “New Russians” were imitating their ancestors, who in the 1930s wrote denunciations against “enemies of the people” living next door just to get their apartments, or their places in the state hierarchy—and this was considered normal. In the end, they kept knocking so persistently that today the oprichniki themselves get to decide whose turn it is to be dekulakized.

“What can you do—it’s the expression of a severe national hereditary trauma... Snitch and serve time.”

Polonsky went after Adikaev with ostentatious brutality, making it clear to the other partners that things would go exactly as he decided, and that neither legal agreements nor unwritten codes meant a damn thing. What’s more, Sergei did it Jesuitically, through someone else’s hands—the hands of Temnikov, who “officially” remained Adikaev’s friend; after all, it was Alexei who, back in the early 2000s, had introduced “Tema” to PSY and lobbied to bring him onto the Mirax team. Outwardly, Temnikov tried hard not to show that he was destroying his old friend, and Polonsky covered for him, but every now and then he forgot himself—and phrases like, “Tema, why hasn’t the prosecutor sorted out the Adikaev issue yet?” carelessly tossed off by Sergei at yet another board meeting, turned the secret into an open one.

Tema and Polonsky had connections to spare. Sergei handled government relations—or at least he was forever taking company cash for GR. Nor did they neglect Polonsky’s favorite pastime, “creating hype in the public sphere”: the press was full of negative stories calling Adikaev a thief and a fraudster. Temnikov, meanwhile, dealt with the security services. And we are talking about people at the very top—Kozlov, the deputy prosecutor of Moscow, the deputy prosecutor general of the Russian Federation... Temnikov called these men his friends, and through them, as well as through the OBEP and the DEB, he claimed he could “resolve” delicate matters.

That same winter of 2008, I first heard the name of the notorious Colonel Zakharchenko, a demonic figure said to be able to settle sensitive problems for businessmen of any rank. I even went to a meeting with him at the Kupol restaurant. Temnikov brought me along to show me the depth of his connections and to warn me against trying to walk away “with my share,” as Alexei had done—as if to say: don’t even think about it, we’ll crush you like a bug. At that meeting with Zakharchenko, they discussed what to do about Adikaev. They planned to launch an ORM operation against him to put pressure on him, giving themselves legal grounds to tap his phones, put him under surveillance, enter his home covertly, and take other similar measures. Polonsky and Temnikov’s interest was simple: use law-enforcement pressure to make Adikaev come to his senses and merge his assets with Kutuzovskaya Mile and Kyiv Plaza.

Zakharchenko said he would help. After that little gathering, however, I met with Alexei and warned him that the DEB had opened hunting season on him. Adikaev was not surprised; he thanked me for the tip from inside and said he had connections of his own to neutralize the raid. Alas, as later events showed, Alexei did not have the resources, and eventually he withdrew from the projects. But that came later.

Meanwhile, Mirax was steadily heading for the bottom. By spring, we were four hundred million dollars in the red, largely because of those very foreign projects. In June, I was scheduled to address the company about the crisis, but Polonsky unexpectedly failed to appear. The entire staff waited for thirty minutes before he sent me a text more or less saying: “You’re a big boy, run the meeting without me, I have things to do.” At the time, I thought he was simply distancing himself from bad news, but later it became clear that this was part of a plan. He knew exactly what I was going to say, and I had not been made the speaker by accident. Sergei wanted to drive up the tension between us, and he needed a pretext to go on the attack. I, for my part, was not expecting an offensive. After the Adikaev affair, my lawyers had been auditing the contracts and agreements with Polonsky, checking what needed to be put in order before we reached the “point of no return”—that is, before we handed over Kursky. Back then, I still believed we would remain partners. Polonsky would take his profits from the RZD projects without interfering in management, while I would concentrate on developing transport hubs, making no claim to equity or shares in Mirax—provided, of course, that my debts were repaid.

But Polonsky struck first, staging yet another scandal. He yelled that I should have presented the lack of funds and the mountain of debt to company management more delicately. People needed to believe everything would be fine, he insisted, while I was allegedly painting too grim a picture and frightening them with talk of layoffs and project-wide budget cuts.

“People need faith that everything will work out! They don’t need to know how bad things really are!” the Cosmonaut raged, foaming at the mouth. “They have to believe I’ve got a magic button that can get us out of any shitstorm!”

The scandal ended exactly the way it had been designed to end: Polonsky demanded that I return my shares in Mirax Group Corporation to the company—if I was so worried about its future—and promised that once we had sorted things out, he would give everything back. A classic dare of an ultimatum. I couldn’t afford to escalate the conflict at that moment, so by mutual agreement I handed over 2.5% of the group’s shares to him, worth roughly ten million greenbacks at the time. That secured my loyalty to the firm, but under the same agreement, once the company pulled out of its nosedive, Polonsky was supposed to return my stake along with the accrued profits.

In time, I realized that three people inside the company had a vested interest in poisoning our relationship and squeezing me out of my share. Polonsky got his 2.5% through an agreement he never intended to honor. Temnikov got me off the board of directors, stripping me of any chance to push back or audit the Western projects that were lining his pockets.

As for Bogus, he gained real prospects for career advancement, since I had consistently opposed Polonsky’s attempts to install him in any respectable management position—given his drug-related background and the fact that this “purveyor of potions” lacked even the most basic competence or knowledge.

Everything was going according to the trio’s plan until Alpha Group suddenly appeared on the horizon. The company bought up Mirax’s debt from Credit Suisse and became our largest creditor—we now owed them around three hundred million bucks. It was a black swan for all of us, but also our first and last chance to save the company from collapse.

2009

On the eve of the Alfa deal, an oppressive silence hung over Polonsky’s office.

“Have they decided to screw us completely?” Sergei fumed. “Why the hell do we need their man in management?”

“Fridman said that point is non-negotiable,” Lutsenko replied wearily. “There will be a man, and he’ll oversee the finances, since Alfa is taking over the settlement of all debt obligations and the financing of all current projects after an audit and analysis of the financials.”

Polonsky rolled his eyes, exhaled loudly, and muttered through clenched teeth:

“Bastards... Fine. So be it. Go on.”

I glanced at the clock on the wall. The board meeting had been going on for nearly six hours. The negotiations with Alfa were not going well for us, but by the end of July we seemed to have reached a number of preliminary agreements. In particular, in addition to the aforementioned placement of an Alfa representative in our management, a controlling stake in Mirax was to go to Fridman’s company, which meant that all shareholders would have to give up 51 percent of their holdings. Unfortunately, we were hardly in a position to flex our muscles.

At last, Lutsenko reached the end of the clauses in the draft agreement with Alfa and fell silent. A hush settled over the room. Polonsky remained slumped in his chair, staring straight ahead, black as a thundercloud.

“This is still the best option available, and they expect an answer today. We have to sign everything tomorrow,” Lutsenko said.

“The best they’re willing to offer, you mean,” Roman Trotsenko said grimly.

I shot him a sidelong glance. When Polonsky had commented on Roman’s arrival at the company a couple of months earlier, he had assured us with great fervor:

“Roman is our closest friend and selfless ally!”

Trotsenko had nodded solemnly at the time, confirming the fact, though surely everyone present at that board meeting knew the man was a bona fide shark and one of the most ruthless raiders in Russian business.

Everyone, apparently, except Polonsky himself.

Sergei didn’t trust rumors, but he did trust Temnikov—so much so that, on his recommendation, he bought hundreds of hectares of agricultural land in Khimki from Trotsenko under the guise of a mega-project: land on which nothing could legally be built. Only someone profoundly detached from reality would make purchases like that during a crisis... and that was exactly what Polonsky was then. Roman found a way in and, thanks to Temnikov’s patronage, soon installed himself firmly in Polonsky’s office as a supposed crisis consultant.

“Do we even have a choice?” I asked.

“There’s always a choice,” Temnikov replied.

“Let’s just vote,” Polonsky said quietly. “Do we accept the terms or not?”

Lutsenko and I voted in favor. Only Temnikov and Trotsenko abstained—the latter had no official vote, but his entire demeanor made it abundantly clear that he was against the deal. Polonsky hesitated, then waved his hand in resignation:

“To hell with it! We have to save our own skins somehow!”

After sending Alfa a letter confirming that we were ready to accept their terms the next day, Lutsenko and I headed home. Temnikov, Polonsky, and Trotsenko stayed behind.

The next day I arrived at Alfa’s offices to sign the agreement and found a pale Lutsenko outside the conference room, where a silent security guard had escorted me. Dima was pacing back and forth, listening to the long ring of his mobile. For some reason, I knew at once who he was trying to reach.

“Kucher’s gone missing?” I asked, too quickly.

Lutsenko paused for a few seconds, then nodded. He took another couple of steps, swore under his breath, shoved the phone into his pocket, and came over to me.

“He hasn’t answered since morning,” he said quietly. “God knows what they were drinking yesterday, Max, or what they were talking about, but he’s gone, and he’s not picking up. And we’re out of time.”

I tried calling Kucher from my phone.

Nothing. Polonsky had vanished into thin air. Temnikov’s mobile wasn’t answering either.

Friedman arrived soon after with his lawyers.

“And where is your boss?” he asked after the greetings, running a grim look over me first, then over Lutsenko.

“I hope he’s on his way,” Dmitry replied, barely audibly.

Friedman gave a meaningful grunt and, shaking his head, was the first to go into the office. We followed the owner of Alfa Group, with his retinue of attorneys behind us.

An agonizing wait began, during which Lutsenko and I took turns trying to reach Polonsky.

“Is he even alive over there?” Friedman demanded irritably.

“It seems to be ringing,” Lutsenko replied, unsure.

“Well, let’s wait…” the head of Alfa Group sighed heavily.

About an hour later, Lutsenko’s phone suddenly beeped: a message had come in. Dmitry looked at the screen and went pale, then glanced sideways at Friedman.

“What is it? Has Sergei been found?” Friedman asked gloomily.

Lutsenko nodded slowly and muttered:

“He sent… a message.”

“What does it say?”

Lutsenko cleared his throat and read aloud:

“I won’t sign. Gone wakeboarding.”

At that, I was genuinely stunned. My eyes darted from Lutsenko to Friedman: he was staring at the wall ahead of him, the muscles in his jaw working furiously.

Needless to say, the head of Alfa Group was livid.

“Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me,” Friedman said at last, “I have no quarrel with you personally, but this is where it ends. You may tell your wakeboarder exactly that.”

With that, he stood and shook hands with Lutsenko and me, making it clear it was time for us to leave. The secretary walked us out. Outside, Lutsenko and I stood in silence for a while.

“‘This is where it ends’ means ‘we’re fucked,’” Dmitry said finally.

I turned without a word and walked toward the car.

As I made my way to the parking lot, I thought about Polonsky’s brazen no-show. What the hell had he been counting on when he decided to simply spit on the deal and not turn up? Then again, he probably hadn’t been counting on anything and hadn’t decided anything—he was just “catching the flow,” “changing the world” by doing absolutely nothing.

Only years later did it become clear that all of Polonsky’s antics had been provoked by his “friends”—Temnikov, Bogus, and others of their kind—just as they had been in the case of Alfa. Each of these “oligofriends” was pursuing his own narrow interest, one that had little to do with the interests of the company, or of PSY himself. Their tactic of “treating him for imaginary illnesses” worked flawlessly: all they had to do was convince Polonsky that someone—usually a person utterly loyal to Mirax—was in fact his hidden enemy. No details were needed, just a vivid image and constant reminders of the “black sheep.” Thanks to the paranoia he had acquired in the 2000s, which metastasized during the saga of the crack in the Federation Tower foundation, Polonsky would instantly go to war against a phantom enemy, who then promptly became real, while his “advisory friends” quietly advanced toward their true objective: enriching themselves at Mirax’s expense.

Exactly the same thing happened with Alfa.

Friedman’s retaliation was swift.

First, he obtained an injunction through the Moscow Arbitration Court freezing the accounts and assets of Mirax subsidiaries, arguing that without such measures the debtor might try to siphon off what assets remained. The total debt had already reached roughly $750 million, more than 40 percent of it owed to Alfa—the very company whose meeting Polonsky had so arrogantly and defiantly skipped.

After the court ruling, Friedman pulled every lever of pressure at once, and without mercy. Alfa Group applied that pressure with technical precision and strictly within the bounds of the law, but their objective was obvious: strip the company of its assets, sell off whatever they could, and recover their money. A cross had been drawn over the fate of both Mirax and Polonsky.

The situation worsened by the day. Reports from the courts, like dispatches from the front, grew steadily darker...

On September 3, Polonsky called another board meeting. Sergei looked not merely frightened; he seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It appeared that only now was he beginning to grasp the depth of the abyss into which Alfa Group was trying to push us.

“Anyway, I called Friedman,” Polonsky announced abruptly, avoiding everyone’s eyes, “and he sent me a new draft agreement. I’ve made copies for you—take a look...”

We opened our folders and buried ourselves in the text. From the very first lines it was clear that Friedman was driven by a desire to punish Polonsky for his insolence: this was not a contract but outright bondage. The new terms only increased the debt burden and offered no path whatsoever to reviving the company.

“We can’t sign this,” Lutsenko said at last.

“They’ll simply bury us,” I added.

“We’ll have to sign it,” Polonsky said emphatically, still refusing to look at either me or Lutsenko.

“Why?” Dmitry asked.

“Friedman said this is the final offer,” Sergei explained grimly, finally glancing in his direction. “There won’t be another.”

A fierce argument broke out: Lutsenko and I tried to explain that signing this agreement was unquestionably worse than breaking up the company. Splitting it up would at least preserve some assets and allow us to start over almost from scratch. But accepting Alfa’s terms, given the personal guarantees on the loans, would make any recovery impossible.

A couple of hours later, evidently worn down by the drawn-out debate, Polonsky got ready to go home.

“I’ll think it over a little more,” he assured us. “Today, tomorrow, with a clear head... and then I’ll decide.”

He left, with Trotsenko, Temnikov, and the others trailing after him. Watching from the window as they got into their cars, I realized Polonsky had already surrendered inwardly. More precisely, he had once again passed the decision on to his “favorites,” who were, of course, acting purely in their own interests and had little concern for what would become of Mirax tomorrow.

It was then that I first thought about what now seemed obvious: since 2006, everyone had been warning me that money and megalomania had driven Polonsky off the rails. But I had ignored those warnings, convincing myself that his “eccentricities” had nothing to do with me—they certainly weren’t harming the company’s growth or the figures in my bank account. Besides, none of us is perfect. By the time I finally realized that Kucher’s idiocy had trapped both me and Mirax directly, it was already too late. The same fate befell everyone who had been there at the company’s origins, rather than climbing aboard the rising starship later. Those who began working with PSYU after 2008 considered themselves smarter and more cunning than the businessman from Horlivka; they hoped to profit by indulging his sociopathic nature. Yet, with every new cycle triggered by the arrival of another “friend,” “partner,” or “brilliant top manager,” each of them was swept away by the storm of Kucher’s savage irrationality.

The next day, Lutsenko called me.

“Well?” I asked, lifting the phone to my ear.

“He signed it,” Dmitry said, his voice resigned.

I said nothing, but there was no need: we both already understood that from that moment on, Mirax’s death was only a matter of time.

2020

In early November, shortly after I posted the sixth draft of my forthcoming book, The Story of Mirax Construction, on my website, an email landed in my inbox from someone calling himself Gringo. He wrote, word for word:

"Hi there, Maxim!!!

I absolutely love your posts about the Mirax construction company—I can’t stop reading them!!! Thanks! I used to imagine Polonsky completely differently: I always thought he was... a real dev machine with a powerful processor, calculating his moves several steps ahead. But from what you’re saying, it sounds like even then he had no idea what was going on and was constantly under the influence of various... potions.

I’ve been following Polonsky online for ages, but somehow I always assumed the opposite—that he only started using stuff later, after his business began falling apart. Turns out it was the other way around. %) Believing in some kind of ‘gut feeling’ that’s supposed to let you hit the jackpot without any proper analysis—that’s really something!!! :) Anyway, it only occurred to me recently: his main problem was that he only accepted information he liked hearing, and that was exactly what his new ‘not-greedy friends’—or whatever he called them, ‘oligofriends’?—kept feeding him. I don’t quite remember...

Funny, by the way, that you haven’t written anything about Alfa, considering how much he wrote even on LiveJournal about those epic showdowns. :) Here’s a post of his about their raiding tactics, dated August 20, 2009. Does it ring any bells?"

Below was a screenshot of Polonsky’s post:

"Dear investors, partners, and friends,

For eleven months now, our team has been fighting through the raging storm of the economic crisis. We have managed to withstand the gale, save the Mirax Group ship, and keep our crew together.

But it turns out the shore is still far away, and the storm is only growing stronger... If we are destined to go down, we will go down with our heads held high, fighting for the life of this vessel and defending your interests until the very last minute. I personally remain ‘on watch’ and ‘at the helm’ of the Corporation, doing everything humanly possible to keep us moving forward!

The entire team understands your concern over Alpha Group’s recent hostile actions. Rest assured, I am doing everything I can to resolve this situation, which arose unexpectedly just a few weeks ago, as quickly as possible. We were not prepared for this sudden turn of events and underestimated the difficulties involved in negotiating and unravelling the restructuring of our Western loan with Alpha Group, but I believe common sense will prevail and that, in the near future, we will all find a way out of this difficult situation.

Regrettably, I must acknowledge that the completion dates for our projects will most likely be revised and pushed back. This is primarily because over the past year we have not managed to secure a single bank loan for construction, and in the last month alone we have not sold a single square meter of real estate or collected a single installment payment on properties already purchased from us. This makes it impossible to continue financing our construction sites.

I remain convinced that even if we fail to reach a restructuring agreement with Alpha Group, and Mirax Group Corporation consequently acquires a new owner, Alpha Group will finance and complete all of the Corporation’s projects, and everyone who has invested in our developments will receive their finished square meters on time and in full.

Should the restructuring with Alfa Group prove successful, Mirax will acquire a new and reliable partner, allowing Europe’s finest developer to scale new heights and become the best in the world.

I give you my word that your interests will be protected and that this situation will be successfully resolved in the near future.

Respectfully yours, Sergei Polonsky Head of Mirax Group Corporation”

The second screenshot contained a later text, written after the deal had already been struck:

“Our colleagues at Alfa-Bank approached this difficult situation with understanding and a comprehensive strategy, showing the flexibility needed to restructure our debt through a range of instruments, including cash and real estate assets. I am personally grateful to Mikhail Maratovich for his decisive leadership in guiding the Alfa-Bank team to a successful outcome in these negotiations.”

And just below it was a postscript from Gringo:

“P.S. Can’t wait for the next blog post! It’s a real mystery where all that Mirax money went!!! No offense, but I personally think you’re the one who… made off with it—otherwise how did you manage to dodge prison so easily back in ’11??? Anyway, good luck!!! I’ll be reading!”

The letter had been perfectly ordinary up to the point where an anonymous commenter floated the bizarre theory that I was the one who had pocketed Mirax’s money. There wasn’t much logic to it—if I really had pulled off a score like that, why would I drag the whole story back into the light ten years later?—but it suddenly occurred to me that, to anyone unfamiliar with the inner workings of property development, my version of events carried no more weight than Polonsky’s. And that such an opinion had every right to exist.

Staring at the message from the mysterious Gringo, I began to remember my final days at Mirax. By mid-September 2009, it was already clear that Polonsky intended to go on shedding partners, and that I had to prepare my own exit. Yet for some reason I still naïvely believed that, since the Russian Railways project had not fallen within Alfa’s sphere of interest, we would keep to the original plan and, under the terms of our agreement, transfer fifty percent of the Kursky Station management company directly to the Directorate of Railway Stations…

But Polonsky saw it differently.

Formally, I controlled the management company. But with Mirax hovering on the brink of bankruptcy and the Alfa saga still dragging on, Sergei began all but demanding that I abandon our obligations to Russian Railways. For some reason, he had convinced himself that since I had finished the construction and signed all the agreements, nothing could stop him from backing out of the share transfer to RZD—and, more importantly, from cutting me loose. “Have you eaten a lion’s heart or something?” I asked him. And he replied: “What are they going to do? The papers are signed—I’ll raise such hell in the press they won’t know what hit them.” Clearly, by then he had lost all sense of objective reality. The catalyst was undoubtedly the events of that spring: in March, just as the Kursky reconstruction was getting underway, a top-secret project codenamed “Vozdvizhenka” surfaced inside Mirax.

A separate project team was put together, reporting directly to Polonsky, with funding routed through a classified budget line called “Vozdvizhenka.” Despite what the name might imply, this had nothing to do with building a missile silo in central Moscow. It concerned a mansion at 9 Vozdvizhenka Street—the Volkonsky House—owned by a nonprofit called the Center for the Development of Interpersonal Communications.

A piquant detail: in September 2006, Rossiyskaya Gazeta named Lyudmila Putina as its patron.

Naturally, Sergei immediately began claiming he had a direct line to the tsar himself, though subsequent events showed that, as in so many other cases, he had been lying to inflate his own importance in the eyes of his partners. Or perhaps he had simply invented something that did not exist, and then come to believe it himself. The one indisputable fact was that Polonsky really did communicate directly with the wife of the country’s top leader, who at the time was serving as prime minister: that summer I personally witnessed one of their meetings, and their relationship looked genuinely friendly.

For any rational person, this would hardly have been grounds to believe he could win a battle against Russian Railways. Kucher saw it differently: “I’m doing a project for the family, which means I am family.” Add to that his friendship with President Medvedev’s inner circle and his tenuous grip on reality—all those Vinogradovsky-style “streams of consciousness”—and it becomes entirely plausible that he convinced himself he could easily sort things out with RZD. That was why he came down on me so hard.

I found myself caught between two fires, destined to be the fall guy however things played out: either RZD would turn on me, or my former partner would.

My final conversation with Polonsky, on September 21, 2009, was sheer hell. I tried to reason with him, to explain that fifty percent and an ongoing partnership with RZD was far better than one hundred percent, a war with RZD, and a development project with a state-owned company frozen dead in its tracks... but in response he started screaming:

“Fuck off! I’m handing the project over to Temnikov! You’re fired! Try anything funny and you’ll end up in a cage! This conversation is over!” Without waiting for my reply, he called security, and I was escorted out of the office without even being allowed to collect my personal belongings. From that day on, I never set foot in Mirax again. Although I had mentally prepared myself for that outcome, the manner of my departure surpassed my worst expectations. I was furious... but fury is a poor adviser, so I began methodically carrying out Plan B: “Polonsky is unwilling to negotiate.” My first stop was RZD, where I laid out the problem that had arisen. Having explained the situation, I proposed transferring all management rights for Kursky Station to RZD structures, giving them full control. They could then decide for themselves whether to take Polonsky on as a partner, while I would exit the project. RZD received the proposal with regret. It was obvious to Yakunin, Abramov, and the others that this marked the end of the grand station modernization program: money matters, but people decide everything, and without someone willing to wade through the shit, traveling from station to station with a security detail in tow, all their initiatives would come to nothing.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened. Alas, I had no other choice. Had I not pulled out of the project, Polonsky would have accused me of corporate raiding. But as later events showed, facts were never arguments as far as Kucher was concerned: he launched a full-scale media campaign, accusing both Russian Railways and me of stealing Kursky Station from him. It sounds absurd, and yet many people readily swallowed this brazen lie.

And so, in the autumn of 2009, I found myself out of work: driven out of Mirax, deprived of millions of dollars in unpaid debts, voluntarily stripped of the right to manage the stations, still on good terms with Russian Railways, and standing on the threshold of a long war with an unhinged former partner—a conflict that would eventually give rise to a series of criminal cases against me.

And after all that, someone actually believes I pocketed the money and deftly escaped prosecution?

Rereading Gringo’s letter once again, I understood that I had to answer his question somehow—not in a personal letter, but in another draft.

I decided to speak openly about the criminal prosecution against me, to dot the i’s and cross the t’s once and for all.

If only for my own sake; as for everyone else, let them decide for themselves whom to believe.

2020

When you are thirty-seven and convinced you have life entirely figured out, the color can drain from your days, leaving everything gray and leading you down a dark, silent corridor. There, on the peeling plaster, instead of the familiar words “success” and “happiness,” you find “war” and “absurdity” scratched into the wall.

My faith that my antagonist’s logic and common sense would compel him to follow my script played a cruel trick on me. Wars are often ignited by the self-assurance of fools, each driven by the desire for what is best for himself. I charged the barricades armed with my truth, only to discover, to my surprise, that there are many truths, and that everyone has a different idea of what is best.

For me, it was about launching a new project and uncoupling the Mirax train from an engineer who, in my view, had lost his grip.

For the “engineer,” it was about remaining the supreme authority, about refusing to set a precedent in which partners could successfully leave his spaceship, whatever the damage. By then, that ship had become a burning capsule, its pilot frantically flipping switches and shouting, “Everything is fine, everything is going according to plan!” instead of making a cool-headed landing.

Parting ways with Adikaev taught Polonsky that victory required not agreements or contracts, but brute force. The media, hooligans, and personal enforcers became his preferred weapons in settling disputes.

Nothing makes a businessman in Russia more compliant than a criminal case opened against him—one that will be quietly closed if the victim knows when to take the hint.

This axiom became Polonsky’s cardinal rule of business.

But he overlooked one crucial detail: counterparties were one thing; a partner running the corporation, whose every action and decision was inseparably tied to the interests of Polonsky, Temnikov, and the other shareholders, was quite another. The complexity—and the irony—of the situation lay in setting up a partner without injuring oneself. A year spent hunting for my weak spots, while trying not to damage Polonsky’s and Temnikov’s interests, produced nothing.

No theft, no forgery, no abuse of power, no kickback sting... Even the Kursky Station deal led nowhere: Polonsky seized on that opportunity like a lifeline, trying to accuse me of corporate raiding, although my withdrawal from the project in fact showed that I was acting not in my own interest, but in the interest of a state-owned company. In the end, the noise Kucher made in the press, together with his personal insults against the executives headed by Yakunin, merely turned Sergei into persona non grata at Russian Railways, and negotiations over his share in managing the Kursky project never even began.

I knew they were digging for dirt on me, but I mistakenly assumed that since I was not stealing and was acting in Mirax’s best interests, all their efforts would come to nothing. It seemed I only had to wait for the railway station project to conclude, then lay my cards on the table for a final conversation. I was wrong.

Polonsky believed he had found the perfect trump card to force me to retreat.

At Mirax, in addition to corporate governance, I was responsible for all non-core assets, including Mirax Service, a company Polonsky and I had founded together in 2004. Curiously, this was the only business in Kucher’s entire universe of companies in which the partnership was almost equal: 51 percent for PSY and 49 percent for me. With that split, he could hardly call me a junior partner, as he liked to describe us to the powers that be. He never forgave me, by the way, for that unfavorable outcome in the negotiations over the creation of Mirax Service.

Later, in 2010, Polonsky simply and brazenly stole the company: on his own authority, he replaced its management by shareholder resolution, after which the money disappeared into thin air. Not one of the complaints I filed with the Moscow courts over the illegality of these asset-stripping actions was even accepted for consideration. As far as I know, Snorex Bank assisted in this expropriation and made handsome profits from Mirax in those years. One of the bank’s partners, Alyakin, even announced that he was acquiring the company, only to later, allegedly, change his mind.

In any case, throughout the 2000s, Mirax Service handled the operation and management of the company’s completed properties, including residential buildings. The Housing Code of the Russian Federation, adopted in 2004, introduced the concept of “homeowners’ associations,” granting these very owners unprecedented rights; yet their sheer incompetence made this a genuine headache for anyone managing residential complexes. On one side was the developer’s desire to retain control of the building for at least five years in order to fulfill warranty obligations. On the other were the owners, who took it as self-evident that utility charges were too high and the service was poor. And whenever influential people appeared among the HOA activists, the situation escalated into open warfare. We were no exception: various “initiative groups” would periodically spring up at our properties, trying, from populist positions, to push out the management company. Such a group also emerged at the Golden Keys-2 complex, and they frayed our nerves considerably. To be fair, we sometimes gave them reasons ourselves. Take, for example, Polonsky’s ban on old Soviet and Russian cars entering the grounds of the complex. Sergei simply did not want the image of elite housing spoiled by vehicles unworthy of its status, but we paid for that snobbery for a long time afterward... All this “activist” turmoil consumed a great deal of energy and time, but until my dismissal in 2009 I managed to keep the situation under control.

That was where my vulnerability lay—a weak spot that did not threaten the interests of either Polonsky or Temnikov—and my partners immediately struck it with crushing force.

Since I remained at the head of Mirax Service, Polonsky and Temnikov decided to use the most aggressive of all the initiative groups—the one from Golden Keys-2—to put pressure on me through law enforcement. At the core of this group were Zinovkina and Borisova. The latter was the wife of Chasov, a Mirax Service employee whom, notably, Polonsky would later install as director of Mirax Service precisely in order to steal my assets. Soon a third woman joined them: Zinovkina’s neighbor, Shkolova, the wife of none other than the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation.

Moreover, Polonsky made use of her without her realizing it, acting through Chasov and Borisova. Kucher could hardly have done otherwise: the deputy minister’s family had everything they needed and could not have cared less about some HOA or its chairman. Not so the other players involved: Chasov, for one, stood to gain control of Mirax Service if things went well, while Borisova and Zinovkina had their sights set on the HOA. But Polonsky benefited most of all, walking away with a royal flush played with someone else’s cards once I had been forced out.

Borisova and Zinovkina carried out the assignment brilliantly: Shkolova railed and fumed about alleged monstrous abuses in the building’s management, while her deputy minister husband, most likely just to be rid of his wife’s shrill complaints, ordered his subordinates to “restore order.”

Ironically, on September 18, Zinovichkina and Borisova filed a report with the Main Directorate for Economic Security of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, accusing me in a fabricated case of electricity theft. That very same day, GEB officers Agarkov and Cherkashchenko, acting with authorization from Zakharchenko and Khorev, opened a criminal case against me—meaning it happened even before my falling-out with Polonsky. In other words, when Kucher provoked the September 21 scandal with me, staging a fight with his own partner in order to push me out of the company and avoid paying the bills, he already knew a criminal case was hanging over me. My only chance of staying out of prison was to accept an exit deal strictly on the Cosmonaut’s terms.

2009

On October 1, at exactly seven in the morning, someone began knocking hard at the door of my Moscow apartment.

“Are we expecting anyone?” my wife asked, bewildered.

We were drinking tea in the kitchen. The children were still asleep, and we were enjoying the quiet.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. I got up and reluctantly went into the hallway.

By the time I reached the entryway, they were already pounding on the door with their fists and, it seemed, even their boots.

I looked through the peephole.

The landing was crowded with men. Those nearest the door had assault rifles and were in full SOBR gear: helmets, body armor, the lot.

All that’s missing is the dogs... Though maybe they’re just out of sight.

The moment I opened the door, five masked operatives filed in, one after another. I barely had time to step back; otherwise they would have knocked me down. It all happened too fast. The first one in gave me a contemptuous once-over. A second later, from behind him appeared a wiry civilian in his thirties, with a gaunt, earth-colored face marked by the unmistakable signs of hard drinking.

With an insolent smirk, looking me straight in the eye, he delivered the standard line:

“Privetzentsev Maxim Vyacheslavovich?” He waited for my nod, then introduced himself. “Investigator Agarkov. And this is Investigator Cherkashchenko.”

Agarkov gestured toward a short, round man of about the same age standing in the doorway, also in civilian clothes. Cherkashchenko had the build of a former bodybuilder who had traded the gym and steroids for a dusty office and an alcohol-based diet. Both investigators were wearing black leather jackets. Agarkov had a brown leather briefcase tucked under his arm; Cherkashchenko casually swung a black clutch bag of the kind favored by gangsters in the nineties.

“We have a warrant to search your apartment,” Agarkov announced in a bored voice, handing me a crumpled sheet of paper. “The attesting witnesses are over there.”

Only then did I notice two more civilians peering out from behind the operatives’ backs: sullen men in their early forties. Where had they found them at such an ungodly hour? Hardly among the neighbors... Of course, I didn’t know everyone in the building by sight, but their faces gave them away as colleagues.

“And which apartment are you from?” I asked, looking the strangers over.

“We’re not from this building,” one of the witnesses muttered.

I nodded and, turning back to Agarkov, said, “My lawyer warned me to expect visitors and asked me to contact her immediately if anyone came.”

“That’s your right, but we’re not waiting for anyone. Don’t obstruct the investigation,” Agarkov said grimly. “Come on, Artem.”

The investigators split up and went into different rooms. The witnesses stayed in the hallway, while the SOBR team, realizing that the shock-and-awe effect of their masquerade had failed, withdrew outside, announcing:

“We’ll have a smoke in the stairwell!”

Then again, after a moment’s thought, one of the men with a rifle came back in and took up position by the front door—apparently to make sure I didn’t get too relaxed.

I called my lawyer, Svetlana, whom a consultant of mine, a retired general, had recommended back when I was working at Kursky Railway Station. I read the warrant to her over the phone. She listened, told me not to worry, and promised to arrive within two hours.

While I was on the call, my wife woke the children and drove them to kindergarten and school—earlier than usual, but anything was better than keeping them at home in that atmosphere. Still half-asleep, they were a little stunned, but they behaved with bewildered politeness: we had warned them that uninvited guests might come, that it would be unpleasant but not dangerous—just Daddy having a disagreement with bad people who were now trying to get even with him.

It was obvious at a glance that the search had no system to it. The shelves and cabinets were being inspected more for form’s sake than in any real expectation of finding anything. After an hour of aimless wandering from room to room, Agarkov called me into my eldest son’s bedroom, supposedly to explain his vinyl collection and whether documents might be hidden among the records. For appearances’ sake, he even pulled out a couple of sleeves and checked their contents—when Chernkashchenko’s voice rang out from my study:

“Well, well. What have we got here?”

Genuinely puzzled as to what he could possibly have found in there, I headed toward the study. Agarkov put the records back on the shelf and followed me.

When I entered, I saw Chernkashchenko holding some document in a clear plastic sleeve.

“What have we got, Artem?” Agarkov asked, coming in right behind me.

He went over to his colleague and frowned—first at the sheet of paper, then at me.

“You’re not very good at hiding evidence, Maxim Vyacheslavovich,” he said.

“And what exactly is that?” I asked, genuinely surprised by the sight of an unfamiliar document.

“You tell us. It’s your office,” Chernkashchenko replied sternly.

“Exactly—my office. And I know perfectly well there are no documents here, especially not in plastic sleeves, because in anticipation of your visit I managed to give the place a proper spring cleaning.”

“Getting clever, are we, Maxim Vyacheslavovich?” Agarkov hissed, barely concealing his irritation. “If you cleaned up so thoroughly, where did this document come from?”

“How should I know if I can’t even see what it is? Maybe it fell out of the investigator’s briefcase…”

Agarkov’s face flushed crimson, but he said nothing. He simply snatched the document from Chernkashchenko, stepped closer, and showed it to me.

It was a mysterious, clearly hastily cobbled-together certificate allegedly proving that I had consented to an illegal connection to the building’s electrical panel. My signature, for all its apparent simplicity, hadn’t even been copied properly; the squiggle on the “certificate” would have told a blind man it was a cheap forgery.

“It’s a fake,” I said with a smirk after glancing over the page. “No such document ever existed, and the signature on this piece of nonsense has absolutely nothing to do with me. Why plant nonexistent documents so clumsily?”

“‘Nonexistent’… That’s what they all say,” Chernkashchenko snapped.

“The investigation will determine what’s fake and what isn’t,” Agarkov cut in coldly. “I’m adding it to the search record.”

He handed the forged certificate back to his colleague and left the study.

I said nothing. Once again, I had no illusions about the bogus document that had “miraculously” appeared in my office: it had plainly been planted either by Chernkashchenko, who had “found” it, or by one of the civilian witnesses a few moments earlier. I tried to look calm, though I doubt I succeeded. It was, after all, my first search, and the whole business had badly shaken me.

While Chernkashchenko was drawing up the record, my lawyer, Svetlana, arrived. I briefly told her what had happened. The investigators’ methods did not surprise her in the least; she calmly explained how I should record the planted document in the search report and warned the DEB representatives that we would be filing a complaint.

This, however, neither surprised nor upset them. Perhaps they simply thought I failed to understand the seriousness of my situation; more likely, they simply did not care. They were just doing their “job,” carrying out orders from above.

Their arrogance kept them from imagining that I might have taken precautions, so they did not even bother to be careful. And I had prepared: I wanted to protect myself and my family. For example, once I learned that a criminal case had been opened against me, I did more than give the house a thorough spring cleaning—I also installed a hidden video surveillance system.

When the search was over and the investigators and enforcement officers had left, I told Svetlana about the cameras. Together we watched the footage from the one in my study and, naturally, had no trouble finding the moment of the plant: Cherkashchenko entered the room, pulled the fake evidence from his shoulder bag, put it on the desk, called in the attesting witness, and immediately exclaimed, “Well, well, what do we have here?”

It was so crude, so brazen, so undisguised that for a moment I was at a loss. On the other hand, I had no idea what a proper frame-up was supposed to look like. I suppose Copperfield-style illusions would have seemed even stranger.

“Just bear in mind: this trump card has to be played very carefully,” Svetlana warned me. “I’ll think about how to take all their patrons into account, but for now let’s simply file a complaint about the planting of fabricated evidence and demand a handwriting analysis.”

“As you say.”

She left to draft the complaints, while I transferred the video to my phone and called a retired general from the ministry of hot hearts to arrange a meeting.

Around noon, I walked into the Coffeemania on Barrikadnaya Street, located in the two-story Tchaikovsky Cultural Center. After ordering coffee, the general and I took seats at a round oak table in the corner. It was a cozy, quiet place, with warm lighting and cream-colored walls—the café’s interior seemed entirely unsuited to the conversation we were about to have, though perhaps stories like this demand silence. When our order arrived, I showed the general the little film of the plant. He watched it without expression and, handing me back my phone, said:

“Clowns. Explain it to me again—what exactly is at the root of this conflict?”

I recounted the history between Polonsky and me. The general listened, thoughtfully chewing his lower lip, then asked:

“Who’s involved on their side?”

I named the names. The general heard me out without much reaction; only when I mentioned Khorev and Shkolov did I notice brief flickers pass over his face, and that was all. When I finished, he paused for a moment and said:

“I need time to think and talk to a few people. The charges are flimsy as hell, but they’ve got you in a tight grip—names like that, ranks like that… They may be leaning on you to make you sing about Polonsky’s dealings, or there may be a dozen other reasons, less obvious ones. We need to watch, ask around, think it through. Send me that video—I’ll show it to the boys. Sit tight; I’ll get in touch when there’s news.”

And with that, we parted. There was some hope in the general’s connections, but judging from his thoughts on the various theories behind the shakedown, it was fragile enough. Stress, of course, is a poor adviser, yet a drowning man often has only his own hands to save him, and so I found myself thinking through other ways out. My search for other consultants and advisers went nowhere: the name Shkolov, along with the rest, worked like a spell. The moment they heard it, eager candidates turned grave, suddenly remembered urgent business elsewhere, and some simply disappeared or stopped answering their phones. Friends behaved much the same way: they spread their hands and wished me luck. No one wanted to enter an unequal war against the top brass of the MVD corporation.

So I decided to clutch at a straw and write a letter to Medvedev.

2020

Such a move may seem strange now, but in 2009 things were different. I don’t know what illusions set it off, but Russian businessmen were seized by a euphoria of change associated with Medvedev’s presidency. It is obvious now that there was no basis for such optimism, but at the time everyone you spoke to believed this was a new NEP, and that at last we would be free.

Years later, of course, it is clear that the wind of change was blowing up our asses, not in our faces. Then again, in hindsight, many things look simple and obvious.

The greatest irony is that Polonsky referred to members of Medvedev’s team—Natalia Timakova and Arkady Dvorkovich—as his “close circle of friends.” Of course, that was not entirely accurate: friendship implies common interests and trust, whereas this was more of a transactional arrangement. For Polonsky, it meant political cover; for those in power, a convenient way to deal with personal matters while saving money. Symbiosis. And let’s be honest: Polonsky and Dvorkovich were not discussing chess matches, nor was he debating political journalism with Timakova. On top of that, Arkady’s brother Mikhail later joined Mirax as an adviser.

Some “trusted confidants,” to put it mildly.

Still, if they had any role in the company’s collapse, it was only an indirect one—serving mainly as fuel for yet another phantasmagorical structure in Polonsky’s mind as he tried to measure the scale of his own influence. Names like theirs, only one handshake away from Medvedev! In his head, that automatically meant he could resolve matters directly with the president himself. A complete substitution of reality. And frankly, if their direct numbers had not been saved in his phone, I suspect he would have judged the risks far more soberly.

I don’t know whether that atmosphere affected me too, but I confess: I also succumbed to that idiotic Medvedev euphoria. I decided that if I was being squeezed unfairly, all I had to do was write to the president, and he would surely sort everything out and help... so I wrote. For reasons that are utterly baffling to me now, I laid it all out without holding anything back, listing every name involved—including representatives of the Department of Economic Security, with Shkolov specifically mentioned—and asked that justice be restored.

At the time, I believed that only total candor could produce results. I sent the letter to Medvedev on October 23, 2009, and about a week later, in early November, the general called and suggested we meet that afternoon at the same Coffeemania where we had met before.

2009

The General arrived as he always did, flushed and a little puffy in the face, accompanied by two comrades—solid, fit men with open faces. They smiled, but their eyes, sharp and attentive to every detail, gave them away as active intelligence officers.

“This is Maxim,” the General said. “And these are the people who can help you with your situation.”

We sat down at the table, and one of the men from the hot-hearts department, about fifty, in a shirt and jacket, trim, with a face kinder than my own father’s, began:

“We’ve reviewed the video and checked the background on your case. The pressure is serious, no question.”

“But we think it’s worth trying to work with him,” said Kind Face’s partner, a lean man of about the same age.

He was far more striking than his companion: a clean-shaven head, a face cut through with deep lines, and a scar near his right temple—a face you would remember. For some reason I decided it was a combat wound, though I had no idea what a combat wound was supposed to look like. Scar was dressed in jeans, a gray jacket, and a black turtleneck.

One detail caught my attention: neither of my new acquaintances wore a watch. A departmental fashion, I assumed. Back then it was fashionable to wear a watch on the right wrist, a kind of “Putin touch”—as if to say, we’re just like him.

“And we are indeed prepared to help you, but on one condition,” Scar added.

I assumed he meant money and immediately began taking inventory of my available resources. I even had time to regret wearing a Breguet to the meeting instead of a Swatch, when Scar continued:

“We want you to act, so to speak, as our bait in an operation targeting officers from the Economic Crimes Department. For our part, we will provide whatever protection we can. But under no circumstances are you to mention that people from our agency are covering you.”

“Not even to close family?”

“To no one. At all. If this information leaks anywhere, we shut the operation down immediately, and you’re on your own. We need to say that clearly and agree on it now, so there are no misunderstandings later.”

“They don’t have any real dirt on you,” the first officer cut in. “Just forged and fabricated documents, plus a heap of leaked materials and testimony from Polonsky and people at Mirax. Their whole strategy is based on frightening you into handing everything over voluntarily.”

“But couldn’t they put me away on the basis of those fake proofs?” I asked.

“They could. And they will. Everything is coordinated over there; they have their own people, and no one is going to get into a fight with the Ministry of Internal Affairs. But they want to get everything quickly, so they’re squeezing you to make you give it all back yourself and spare them the bother of prosecutors and courts. They clearly don’t like to share. Make your decision. Even with us, your chances are slim, frankly. Without us, you have none at all.”

It was hard to argue with that. The lawyers and friends had fallen away, and I was left alone against Polonsky and Temnikov, with Shkolov, Khorev, Zakharchenko, and other less visible but still influential figures behind them.

“Well, I don’t have much choice,” I said with a sigh. “Let’s get to work. Any support is better than none. It’s just that I wrote a letter a week ago…”

“What letter?” Scar frowned, and his face became unbearably frightening.

“To Medvedev.”

“You mean about your case?” his amiable partner clarified, raising an eyebrow.

“Well, yes. I described the situation, listed all the names, and asked for help.”

“You asked Medvedev for help? To help you in a case against a Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs?”

“Well… yes,” I said, suddenly unsure. “Was that… the wrong thing to do?”

Now I began to doubt myself as well—had I been too quick to write anything at all?

The operatives exchanged glances. Scar snorted dismissively, while his partner looked at me again and said with a mild smile:

“You see, it’s not that there’s anything particularly wrong with it… it’s just pointless. In practice, your complaint will be sent for review to the very people you’re accusing of abuse of power and other shady dealings. And as for Medvedev…”

He let the sentence hang.

“But don’t worry,” Scar said. “We’ll find out what’s happening with your appeal.”

“What am I supposed to do now?” I asked.

“Nothing,” the friendly one said with a shrug. “Sit tight, wait, and watch how they play their hand. Keep us informed, and we’ll discuss the next steps together. Don’t do anything rash.”

“And if anything develops on our end, we’ll let you know, of course,” Scar assured me. “But be careful with communications. Better to meet in person if there’s a real reason. Your phone is tapped, but they won’t bother with physical surveillance.”

“And above all, don’t say a word about us to anyone,” the second operative reminded me.

I returned to my anxious vigil. All through November—not a word, only excruciating suspense. There is nothing worse than uncertainty. In situations like this, the brain starts writing, all on its own, the most terrifying horror film imaginable.

On December 3, Temnikov called and suggested meeting at a Starbucks in Moscow City.

“What for?” I asked sharply. “Have you and Polonsky decided we can come to an agreement?”

“You could put it that way.”

We agreed on two o’clock. Temnikov arrived twenty minutes late and, dropping into the seat across from me, announced without preamble:

“Here’s the situation, Maxim: if you want to settle with us now, then on top of what you owe Kursky, you’ll also have to transfer all your assets to Sergei.”

“What?” I frowned.

Polonsky’s previous terms had already sounded like the ravings of a greedy madman, but this new demand broke every record for absurdity. Perfectly aware that he owed me more than twelve million dollars, Sergei was demanding that I hand over everything I had earned—while refusing to pay his own debts.

“You can keep the apartment you live in,” Temnikov said with a soft, fake smile. “We’re not cannibals, after all. But the expenses incurred on your behalf have to be recovered. I understand you no longer care what happens to Mirax, but you should understand that our friends’ services don’t come cheap. So? What do you say? Need more time to think, or has reality finally sunk in?”

Staring at the cup of coffee in front of me, I said:

“I’ll tell you this: ‘go fuck yourself’ is written with an exclamation mark.”

“Then you’re completely fucked,” Temnikov replied with a shrug, and, getting up, headed for the exit.

Judging by this latest offer, Polonsky had become utterly convinced of his success and decided to force the issue. Whether this was due to an extra line of coke or to assurances from the top that everything was sewn up, I didn’t know, but the sudden surge in appetite made one thing unmistakably clear: the real show was still ahead.

On December 13, 2009, at around nine in the morning, Temnikov called again. I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear.

“Was I not clear?”

“Don’t get cocky. You’re getting a present today,” Temnikov said caustically. “Happy birthday, and Happy New Year in advance. No need to thank me.”

Short beeps sounded in the receiver. The “present” turned out to be a written undertaking not to leave the country. According to my new guardians from the “clean hands agency,” this was standard practice: the undertaking was meant to make it clear that leaving the country was no longer an option. Of course, with enough money, escape routes could be found, but it would be a one-way ticket, guaranteeing a conviction in absentia and an international arrest warrant. Once you signed, you had two choices left: either beg for mercy and accept the client’s terms, or brace yourself for the next gift—pretrial detention.

When I told my aides what had happened at our next meeting, they only threw up their hands.

“Everything is going according to plan,” Shram said, “but it’s necessary within the framework of... let’s call it an ‘operational game.’”

“So I should be expecting a second gift?”

The Federal looked at me from under his brows and grunted.

“Time will tell,” he said. “But don’t worry.”

I nodded, though if I’m honest, I wasn’t just worried—I was shitting bricks. How else is anyone supposed to feel when they can be thrown in prison for absolutely nothing, simply because they decided to walk away from a business they had poured so much time and energy into? To make matters worse, it was deeply unsettling to realize that, thanks to Temnikov and Polonsky, the DEB had information on every one of my accounts and assets. I was completely exposed, and my entire defense, or so it seemed at the time, came down to three short words from my “guardian”:

“Don’t worry.”

Right then and there, I made up my mind: if I ever got out of this mess, I would never again try to build a business in Russia. The risks are too high, the chances too great that at some point the state, or some other big shot, will simply throw you out into the street and either lock you up or force you to hand over everything you’ve earned—and then demand a little extra on top.

In Russia, right is not might; might belongs to whoever has the most powerful friends and the most cash. As for the courts, well, as the investigator told me during my interrogation, that’s just “where the dogs piss.”

2009–2010

Every time my lawyer Svetlana and I walked into the Moscow Main Investigative Directorate, the air smelled of office paper and coffee.

“Who are you here to see?” the duty officer would ask, barely looking up. “Let’s see your documents…”

We would hand over our passports, opened to the first page.

“Investigator Peredereev. Questioning.”

“Ah, right. Not your first time…”

“We’re here every week. Like coming to work.”

And that was the simple truth. Before New Year’s, Polonsky had burst into action like Father Christmas; presents from him and Temnikov came showering down one after another. First Kucher sent a letter to my mother, confidentially informing her that her son was a thief and a criminal who would soon be behind bars; it sent her to the hospital with a stroke. Then, closer to the holidays, he favored me with my first summons. On January 13, I was expected at the Moscow Main Investigative Directorate for a meeting with Investigator Peredereev. Since then, Svetlana and I had already been to four interrogations, and each time Peredereev asked the same “clarifying” questions:

“Tell me, during the period from such-and-such to such-and-such, did you in fact work at Mirax?”

“Please specify exactly what your duties were.”

“Did you have access to finances?”

“Were you able to dispose of funds allocated to your departments at your own discretion, without written approval from Sergei Yuryevich Polonsky?”

“Or perhaps you could, after all?”

And so on and so forth. Day after day, walking into the Main Investigative Directorate, I felt like the hero of that old film Groundhog Day: everything repeated itself with frightening precision, and at times I had an unconscious fear that I was trapped forever in this dreary day, waking up each morning only to answer the same tedious questions over and over again. I quickly understood that they were simply keeping me on edge, constantly reminding me that I was on the hook and had nowhere to go, and, naturally, waiting for me to finally break under the pressure and give in.

Remembering the support from Scar and Good Guy, I patiently made my way through this endless loop, returning to the starting point again and again, over and over…

And again…

One bright spot was my mother’s discharge from the hospital. Her return home gave me reason for optimism: first we had beaten cancer, now a stroke; all that remained was to beat Polonsky.

Meanwhile, the interrogations in his case continued until mid-March. On the tenth, on the eve of yet another visit to the Main Investigative Directorate, we met again with my benefactors at the now-familiar Coffeemania.

“Well, Maxim, another confrontation tomorrow?” Good Guy asked sympathetically. “Mentally prepared?”

“I’m exhausted, of course,” I replied with a strained smile. “But all in all, I’m ready. Why do you ask?”

“Polonsky has paid to have you put in pre-trial detention,” Scar said bluntly, as straightforward as ever. “Tomorrow you’ll be charged under Article 165 of the Criminal Code: causing property damage by deception or abuse of trust.”

“That’s not exactly great news… to put it mildly,” I said, leaning back in my chair.

“Now, don’t worry—we’re working on it,” Scar assured me. “But just in case, prepare yourself mentally for the possibility of doing time. Polonsky has gone all in… he’s cranked up the pressure and brought in everyone he possibly could to get you arrested. We can’t show our hand yet, so let’s plan for the worst and take it from there.”

I think he said something else after that, but at some point I stopped listening and withdrew into myself. Easy for them to say, “Don’t worry.” How was I supposed to react? How was I supposed to explain to my family that after the next interrogation I might not come home until the trial—that I might simply disappear from their lives for several months? Should I not tell them it was even possible? No, that would be worse. If they did lock me up, I wouldn’t even have a chance to say goodbye properly.

That morning, I got ready as if I had already been sentenced: I packed everything I might need, hugged my children, and kissed my wife.

“Don’t make things up,” she said. “You’ll go in, and you’ll come back.”

I smiled and promised, “That’s exactly what I’ll do: go in and come back.”

But on the way to the Main Investigation Directorate, I couldn’t shake the feeling that arrest was imminent. For some reason, it seemed inevitable. The stress I’d been living under for almost half a year was probably catching up with me.

“Please, have a seat,” Pederedeyev said when I knocked and looked into his office. “Just a moment, let me get a few things sorted…”

Svetlana and I sat down in the chairs in front of his desk, which was buried under papers. Documents were scattered everywhere, stacked in piles on top of a computer monitor the size of a trunk. Pederedeyev was looking for something—perhaps the folder with my case. Squinting, he glanced at the safe in the corner, then gave me a sidelong look and said:

“I must inform you that, in light of new circumstances uncovered during the investigation of your case, a new criminal case has been opened under Article 165 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation…”

I listened to his monotonous droning and could barely stop myself from fidgeting in my chair. At last Pederedeyev found a file with some papers in it and, with the hint of a smile, handed it to my lawyer.

“I ask that you and Maxim Vyacheslavovich review the charges brought against him and sign wherever you see a checkmark.”

Svetlana took the file from the investigator and began reading. Watching her, I couldn’t help feeling a stab of guilt: unaware of Dobryak and Shram’s help, she was fighting for me like a lioness, while I couldn’t so much as hint that the situation was far more complicated than she imagined.

After we had reviewed everything, Pederedeyev helped us fill out the paperwork and, strangely enough, was unusually polite that day. Even more astonishingly, I wasn’t arrested after all. What a strange mixture of feelings it was—to be devastated at being accused of something I hadn’t done, facing three to five years, and at the same time relieved that I hadn’t been thrown into a cell before trial. When I came home after the interrogation, they greeted me as if I had already served the whole sentence.

“What made you think they were going to lock you up?” my wife asked over dinner.

I hesitated. I never did learn how to handle moments like that. I hated lying, especially to my family, but the terms of my arrangement with Shram and Dobryak required absolute secrecy. So I answered vaguely:

“People from Mirax gave me a heads-up.”

“Oh, those people at Mirax,” my wife sighed, shaking her head. “They wound everyone up for nothing.”

I nodded, though of course, when you’re being kept in the dark, it’s better to brace yourself than to run headlong into the ugliest surprise of all: being arrested when all you’ve done is show up for questioning.

Meanwhile, as my wife, children, and I were celebrating our small victory, my letter to Medvedev—which I had practically forgotten—was performing an interesting pirouette through the bureaucratic machinery and eventually landed in the Prosecutor General’s Office, where, according to Temnikov, Polonsky had everything arranged, if not “perfectly,” then certainly “very well.” I did not learn immediately, however—and not directly—that the letter had ended up there.

“I have news for you, Maxim Vyacheslavovich,” Peredereev announced when Svetlana and I came in for another interrogation on March 30.

The investigator looked at me through his Ed Hardy glasses with a faint half-smile, one eye slightly narrowed—the mocking pose of a man relishing his own power, or at least of someone in possession of valuable information still unavailable to his interlocutor, though of considerable interest to him. From time to time, Peredereev allowed himself the pleasure of playing cat and mouse, showing off the leverage he had over me.

“We’re listening,” Svetlana said grimly, drawing the fire onto herself.

“I hereby inform you that Case No. 255771 against Maxim Vyacheslavovich has been closed due to the absence of corpus delicti,” Peredereev intoned in a flat drone. “Our meetings, however, will continue in connection with the charge under Article 165 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation... And here, have a look.”

He placed an official letterhead on the table in front of Svetlana, bearing the seal of the Prosecutor General’s Office and dated March 19, 2010. I ran my eyes over the page and barely held back a nervous laugh. Just as Scar and Do-Gooder had warned, the Prosecutor General’s Office, acting on Medvedev’s instruction, had reviewed my appeal and found no evidence of wrongdoing by the individuals named in my letter. Thus, in the prosecution’s view, Shkolov and company had acted within the law, which meant there was no help to be expected.

“Go on, don’t be shy,” Peredereev said with a smile. “You can frame it at home as a keepsake.”

“How very kind of you,” Svetlana replied dryly.

I silently put the Prosecutor General’s response into my backpack. The investigator and I went through another round of the same tired questions and answers, though now, with one case closed, there were a few fewer pointless clarifications. A tiny positive development, perhaps, but I was in no hurry to celebrate. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this letter would come back to haunt me—surely Shkolov and the others would not simply swallow an attempt to compromise them in the eyes of the country’s top leadership?

My instincts did not fail me: on April 2, during an interrogation, Peredereev presented me with a new charge—under Article 306.

“What is this now?” Svetlana asked grimly.

I stared sullenly at the sheet lying on the table.

“A criminal case has been opened against your client, classified by the investigation as ‘knowingly false denunciation,’” the investigator replied, his arms crossed over his chest.

“I know what Article 306 is,” Svetlana said coldly. “I want to understand the grounds for opening the case.”

“Read it,” Peredereev said pointedly, sliding the open folder toward her before pecking at the keyboard with two fingers.

We buried ourselves in the file. Before us lay a document at once engrossing, hilarious, and terrifying. A true tragicomedy of the absurd, an unbelievable grin of fate: a citizen who had appealed to the guarantor of the Constitution had been charged under the Criminal Code. Neither Svetlana, nor Scar and Do-gooder, nor the retired general—and certainly not I—could have imagined that a letter to Medvedev would produce such a staggering result.

According to the papers in the folder, on March 19, 2010, Deputy Interior Minister Shkolov, having received the Prosecutor General’s conclusions confirming that there had been no abuse on his part, filed a statement with Moscow Police Chief Kolokoltsev requesting that I be held criminally liable under Article 306.

Kolokoltsev, in turn, forwarded Shkolov’s statement on March 23, 2010, to the Main Investigation Directorate for the City of Moscow, with a note attached: “To I. A. Glukhov. Conduct an inquiry and issue a decision pursuant to Articles 144–145 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation.” Date, signature—everything in order.

On March 31, a week later—apparently spent checking up on my modest person—my old acquaintance, Investigator Peredereev, submitted a report to Glukhov regarding Shkolov’s complaint, stating that the very fact of my appeal to the President contained elements of a crime under Article 306 of the Criminal Code. Moreover, according to Peredereev’s conclusion, my actions might even be interpreted as a violation of Article 41 of the Constitution!..

And so, on April 2, a new case was opened against me.

Now I had to sign the notice acknowledging it.

I read those lines again and again, unsure whether to laugh or cry. In five months, my appeal to the President about abuses within the Ministry of Internal Affairs and unlawful criminal prosecution had produced nothing but a new criminal case against me. Deputy Minister Shkolov needed just two weeks to turn my letter into evidence in a case alleging violations of the Civil and Criminal Codes, and even Article 41 of the Constitution!..

“The law is like a cart shaft...” I muttered, leafing through the file.

“Finished reading?” Peredereev asked languidly, without looking at me. “Sign here...”

I glanced at Svetlana; she gave a curt nod, her face grim.

My hand was trembling with agitation. Handing the document and pen back to Peredereev, I asked:

“So you already knew about this charge on March 30, didn’t you?”

The investigator finally tore himself away from his screen, looked at me, sighed, and said:

“I understand how it looks from where you’re standing... but try looking at it from mine. They told me to check—I checked. They told me to put this in the report and leave that out—so that’s what I did. Nothing personal, Maxim Vyacheslavovich.”

I nodded, got up, and left his office. Once I was out of the department and in my car, the first thing I did was call my “helpers” to arrange a meeting.

“You know, I assume?” I asked when we were once again sitting around a café table.

“About the knowingly false denunciation?” Scar clarified. “Of course we know. You acted prematurely, to put it mildly. Although... that was before we met, wasn’t it?”

“Well, yes... the general told me to wait, but I was nervous, so I wrote it...”

“Your feelings are understandable,” Good Guy said with a sigh. “It’s hard to sit on your hands in a situation like that. At least this way there’s the appearance of action—as if you did everything you could. But of course they’ve made a mountain out of it.” He looked at his partner and shook his head. “A denunciation... For crying out loud. They’re clutching at it like a drowning man at a straw.”

“So what do we do now?” I asked.

“Endure it,” Scar said with a shrug. “We’ll try to help, but... I don’t even know how you’re supposed to challenge such absurdity. It’s been spun out of nothing, literally. They’re putting pressure on you, hoping you’ll break.”

I nodded. There was absolutely nothing I could do to influence the situation. Good Guy and Scar went on using me as “bait” for their own purposes, without much concern for my fate. Their priority was to gather compromising material on the police through my case, and without unnecessary publicity. For the first time, I realized that my “helpers” did not entirely believe in my innocence. Most likely, they assumed I had simply covered my tracks well, and that while I might be better than Polonsky, I was not innocent enough to count as a victim. And losing someone who is not an “innocent victim” does not weigh quite so heavily on the conscience.

Article 306 is a specific matter, and in my case—criminal prosecution for an appeal to the President—it was also political. Svetlana advised me to hire another lawyer, someone familiar with the legal nuances of that borderland between “denunciation” and “appeal.” Today, any lawyer would probably run from a “President-citizen-Constitution” case like the plague, but back then, people willing to defend me appeared quickly, and practically pro bono.

“This is a dissertation ready-made!” Vyacheslav told me—a young lawyer recommended by friends.

We ended up striking a deal with him. However, afraid he might not be able to handle such a case on his own, Vyacheslav immediately said he would work in tandem with Alexei Pavlovich, the chairman of the bar association, who had agreed to take part in the proceedings pro bono.

And so, thanks to this new charge, an entire law firm materialized in my life.

When Svetlana, Vyacheslav, and I arrived a week later, on April 10, for yet another interrogation, we were unexpectedly sent to Investigator Drotiev. He turned out to be a grim, shaven-headed hulk, slightly younger than Peredereev—a veritable machine with a stone face, glaring sullenly at visitors through murky, fish-like eyes. When he saw us, Drotiev asked:

“You’re Privezentsev?”

I nodded. Drotiev shifted his gaze to my lawyers.

“And you?”

My lawyers introduced themselves. The investigator paused briefly, then nodded.

“Understood. Come in, take a seat.”

He gestured toward the empty chairs opposite his desk and looked back at his computer screen.

“What happened to your colleague, Colonel Peredereev?” Svetlana asked as she settled into her chair.

“Investigator Peredereev has been removed from the case. I’ll be handling it now,” Drotiev announced in a mechanical tone.

I saw the difference at once: unlike Peredereev, our new executioner showed no empathy at all; worse, he rejected all our motions and left entire paragraphs of our explanations out of the interrogation records.

Clearly, they really had decided to wear me down.

On June 1, 2010, those suspicions were confirmed yet again, when, at Drotiev’s insistence, my lawyers and I began examining the criminal case file on the fabricated charges under Articles 165(3) and 306(2) of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.

The file alone ran to thirty-two volumes.

2020

The idea was simple: the more paperwork, the easier it would be to bury the absurdity of the charges. My opponents were sure no lawyer could cut through that thicket of documents. My legal team and I spent until mid-August poring over the thirty-two volumes of the case file; we read everything a hundred times and seemed to know it by heart. The things they accused me of... Reality and fiction were tangled together like something out of a cheap sci-fi novel. And when lies are skillfully seasoned with truth, they quickly acquire the sheen of plausibility.

After we finished studying the investigators’ remake of Kafka’s The Trial in early August, the case was sent to the Moscow City Prosecutor’s Office. Exactly one month later, on September 20, 2010, Deputy Moscow Prosecutor Kozlov approved the indictment and forwarded the case to Moscow’s Dorogomilovsky District Court.

My lawyers discovered that—whether out of haste or because Mirax’s “judicial roof” had already laid down a well-trodden path—the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office, in the person of Kozlov, had violated the rules of jurisdiction in my case, and they filed a complaint. The Dorogomilovsky Court was forced to return the case to the prosecutor’s office, which then rerouted it to the Nikulinsky Court, thereby dismantling the proceedings that had been “arranged” for me. That small maneuver cost them three months.

Still, the Nikulinsky judicial performance turned out to be a spectacle in its own right—if only because Shkolov appeared in person to testify and demanded that I be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Khorev showed up as well, along with my old acquaintances, investigators Agarkov and Cherkashchenko, who assured the court that no pressure had been put on me and no violations had been committed by officers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. If I had not been sitting in the dock, I probably would have burst out laughing when Cherkashchenko, with an utterly straight face, spoke of the impartiality of justice. At once an October scene flashed before my eyes, and his shout rang in my ears: “Opa! And what little document do we have here?”

If an outsider—even one with no particular knowledge of the law—were to pick up the case file, he would be astonished that the prosecutor’s office had touched it at all, much less that it was being heard in court in earnest. To top it off, as soon as the hearings began, Shram and Dobryak wished me luck and stepped aside. The courts were not my handlers’ territory: their only interest was in the Ministry of Internal Affairs officers, so I had no one to rely on but my lawyers.

Fortunately, even the Nikulinsky Court, plainly “motivated” against me, was forced to acknowledge that the charges under Article 165 were groundless. On May 16, 2011, I was acquitted on that count, but—in a fine irony—found guilty under Article 306 for a citizen’s appeal to the Guarantor of the Constitution and ordered to pay a fine of 150,000 rubles.

My lawyers advised me to accept it, but I wasn’t prepared to swallow that kind of injustice. Later, after paying the fine, I deliberately went through every level of cassation and appeal, and in 2012 succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to declare the conviction under Article 306 unlawful and send the case back to the Nikulinsky Court for retrial. There, they dragged their feet for a year before reaffirming the verdict. I didn’t back down: I launched a second round of cassations and appeals, and in 2015 the Supreme Court again ruled the sentence unlawful and returned the case to the Nikulinsky Court yet again. At that point, Yegorova, the head of the Moscow court system, realized I was not going to give up, that I would keep after them until I got my way, and quashed the verdict. The prosecutor’s office offered me a verbal apology... but never refunded the fine.

The cherry on top was the complaint I filed in 2015 with the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights, demanding one euro in compensation from the Russian government. The case is still gathering dust in the bureaucratic corridors of Strasbourg. And no wonder: I’m not fighting the regime, there’s no publicity to be squeezed out of my story, so nobody is in any hurry to take it up.

To be honest, I never did figure out why Polonsky didn’t finish me off back then. At first, I thought he had simply run out of money—at least the kind of money it took to bring people like Kozlov into the game. Then it occurred to me that Kucher may have been counting on Shkolov, whom he had dragged into this mess practically blind, to finally crush me out of some personal vendetta.

Fortunately for me, in those years the police did not yet have the stranglehold on the courts that they do today, and judges still regarded the brazen absurdity of such charges as bad form. So you could say I was lucky.

When it became clear that Shkolov was not going to deliver, Polonsky decided to try a different tack. On June 10, 2011, a rather interesting post appeared on his LiveJournal:

“Everything written here is about getting back my honestly earned money! People came to me offering to return the cash for half the amount. I got greedy and refused. Money defeats reason, and to prove it—I can officially state today that half of the recovered funds, half of the two and a half billion grabbed by Russian Railways and by my former board member and chairman, will go to various charitable foundations, and this will be officially announced (thinking out loud—they’ll say it’s PR again. To hell with anyone who thinks that. There are things far more important than all this).”

With this post, Polonsky essentially declared open season on me, though in reality the hunt had begun the moment my sentence was handed down. Having realized he couldn’t break me by “legal” means, Kucher turned to outright banditry...

2011

“You’ve heard what happened to Pyotr Ivanov, of course?” Scar asked when I arrived at our usual Coffeemania for an urgent meeting on May 24.

I nodded. All Moscow had been talking about it since yesterday. The day before, on Filevsky Boulevard, someone had tried to kill Pyotr Ivanov, head of FCSP. As the businessman pulled up to his office, a white Audi convertible with two young men inside drew alongside. They asked him some idiotic question along the lines of “Do you know Gena?” then fired several shots from a non-lethal pistol and hit him in the face with a bag weighted down with a piece of heavy iron. According to the news, the head of FCSP was saved only by his deputy, Alexander Zykov. He grabbed a hammer from the glove compartment and jumped out of the car, frightening off the would-be assassins, who sped away in their white convertible to parts unknown.

And now, the very next day, my “helpers” summon me to a meeting and ask about Ivanov the moment I walk in. Could this have something to do with our story?

“There’s a theory that Polonsky hired those two,” said Good Guy. “He’s still furious about being pushed out of the Kutuzovsky Mile project.”

“Though it would have been strange not to push him out, given that he hasn’t put a kopeck into the project for the last two years—he simply ignored his obligations altogether,” Scar put in.

“And his two-billion-ruble lawsuit against FCSP,” Good Guy went on, “was dismissed by the court. Ivanov also refused to sell his stake in the development. Today, May 24, he was supposed to go to the site with an inspection commission, so that later he could file claims against Mirax for failure to meet its contractual obligations... and then this happens.”

“That’s all very unfortunate, no doubt,” I said, “but what does it have to do with me?”

“We have information that Polonsky was... extremely disappointed by the court rulings in your cases,” Scar said slowly. “He spent obscene amounts of money, brought in powerful people like Shkolov... and in the end achieved absolutely nothing. You didn’t even pay the fine to him—it went to the state. And as for Kursky and your assets, let’s not even go there.”

“But the real problem is that he has no leverage left over you,” Good Guy added. “The legal avenues are exhausted. And the Ivanov incident suggests that Polonsky wouldn’t object to using illegal ones. Threats, maybe physical pressure... Well, I think you understand yourself that with Polonsky, anything is possible.”

“But nothing has been proven in the Ivanov case yet, has it?” I asked.

“Be that as it may, it was clearly a public act of violence,” Scar said. “If they’d wanted to get rid of him quietly, they would have driven up in a tinted Lada they could abandon in any courtyard. And they would have chosen a quieter place, not right outside his office in Fili. Besides, Polonsky has people in his inner circle who could pull off something like that. You even know one such... ahem... candidate.”

“Really? And who would that be?” I asked, surprised.

“Porschman, alias Efimtsev.”

I nodded slowly. The name—and the nickname—were indeed familiar. Back in 2005, Sergei Efimtsev had come to play Mafia at Polonsky’s Kupol penthouse in Golden Keys-1. Sergei introduced him as “Porschman, an old friend from St. Petersburg.” Short, with an intense stare, the taciturn Efimtsev seemed like a decent guy and quickly blended in. He became a regular at Polonsky’s, but in late 2006 Sergei told me Porschman had robbed him: he’d shown up at Kupol to pay back a $40,000 debt... then got Kucher drunk and cleaned out his house—and his Porsche—down to the last cent. After that, Porschman disappeared.

“The last time Yefimtsev and I saw each other was in 2006,” I said. “I haven’t even heard his name since... What happened to him?”

“In May 2007, the Investigative Committee under the Ministry of Internal Affairs sent a criminal case to court,” Shram replied. “The defendants were charged with fraud and money laundering involving assets belonging to the largest distilleries in the Tula region. The damage from their criminal activities exceeded 600 million rubles. Their actions paralyzed Russia’s largest spirits association for a long time; as a result, Tulaspirt and Tulaspirtprom went bankrupt, and their employees were left without wages.”

“And what does any of this have to do with Polonsky?” I asked, frowning.

“Everything,” Dobryak said with a smile. “There’s a direct link between him and Vakha through the Tula schemes. After the bankruptcy, Tulaspirt’s assets passed through a chain of shell companies, landed under the control of the Yekaterinburg-based Slavia group, and were eventually resold to Merkury-Spirt, owned by...”

“Vyacheslav Leibman,” I finished. “Polonsky’s friend and partner.”

“Exactly,” Dobryak nodded. “And the second partner was none other than Sergei Yefimtsev. The deal was worth $15 million, including Sberbank promissory notes valued at $5 million. Yefimtsev paid with those notes... except the buyers’ check showed the securities were counterfeit. The transaction was later ruled illegal.”

“In effect, Vakha screwed Polonsky directly,” Shram said. “But since the promissory-note scheme collapsed and the collusion became public, the thief-in-law wound up owing the developer several million dollars. That’s a serious obligation; by the thieves’ code, Yefimtsev couldn’t simply deny it. So he traded the debt for silence, and in 2009, after receiving an eight-year sentence, he was sent to serve his time in the Irkutsk region, near Angarsk. What’s more, as came out during the trial, he had never been a thief-in-law, not even a self-styled tangerine; in his entire life, his only brush with the law had been a speeding ticket.”

“Yet he was convicted specifically as a thief-in-law,” Dobryak cut in, “and was supposed to serve the full term... but he was released just recently—after barely two years—in blatant violation of parole rules.”

“How is that even possible?” I asked.

“We believe Polonsky had a hand in it,” Shram said. “And he needs Vakha to shake down former partners—people like you—through gangster-style intimidation.”

“So that’s who he was writing about in his blog?” I said. “And what am I supposed to do now?”

“The main thing is, don’t worry,” Dobryak said gently. “We’ve already sent him a little message from his ‘colleagues in the trade’ and told him to back off. We think he’ll… see reason.”

“But stay alert all the same,” Shram added. “Polonsky—you know this better than we do—often acts on impulse when he’s angry. I expect he’ll let off steam and calm down, but a little caution won’t hurt in the meantime.”

“Well, there you go… And I was just about to appeal the court’s decision,” I said with a crooked smile.

“Maxim, let’s be honest,” Dobryak said sternly. “In a sense, you were lucky. Once the steamroller of Russian ‘justice’ gets moving, there’s only one person in the entire country who can stop it—and even that doesn’t always work. More often than not, even he’s powerless. The system has a life of its own. Next time, you may not be so lucky. Think about that. All the best.”

They said their goodbyes and left, and I went back to my own affairs. At the time, I was working through an idea for a cigar business, weighing the risks against the opportunities, but after that meeting I kept replaying our conversation several times a day. It seemed to me that Shram and Dobryak’s fears were unfounded, and that Polonsky wouldn’t dare send gangsters to put pressure on me.

And yet, barely a couple of days after our talk at Coffeemania, as I approached my building, I saw two grim-looking men in worn leather jackets shifting from foot to foot by the entrance, and I instinctively slowed down. Of course, I knew I was winding myself up, that it didn’t necessarily mean anything…

“Privezentsev?” one of them asked—a man with a sharp, jutting chin and murky green eyes—as I was already nearing the door.

“What’s it to you?” I asked instead of answering.

“We’d like to talk about his work at Kursky Station,” said the other, broad-shouldered, with a square jaw and a dark buzz cut, taking a step toward me.

At that point, all doubt vanished. They were going to shoot me right there with a rubber-bullet gun, just like Ivanov, and run for it—a parting gift from a former partner.

Then again, no, they wouldn’t shoot. They needed me alive. Only alive could I hand everything over. So intimidation was the game.

“I have no intention of discussing that,” I said, glancing sideways at Buzz Cut. “If only because I haven’t had anything to do with Kursky Station in a long time.”

“Well, well, not much of a talker,” Murky snorted. “Maybe we should bring your family into the conversation—your wife, your children? That might liven things up, don’t you think?”

“My children and my wife have nothing to do with this,” I said, my voice trembling slightly with agitation.

Right—they couldn’t touch me, but my family, my property? Why not? That same unpleasant, sticky fear spread through me again. I had to find some way to end the conversation…

Fortunately, the front door opened and a neighbor came out.

“Hello,” she said, casting a wary glance at the men I was talking to.

“Hello,” I replied with an exaggerated smile.

“Consider yourself warned,” Buzz Cut said, turning on his heel and striding off first. Murky followed; halfway across the courtyard, he glanced back at me, shook his head, and kept walking.

My neighbor watched them leave with a sullen stare, then turned to me, muttered something under her breath, and hurried off as I slipped inside. The encounter left a mark. I didn’t know whether those scumbags had been bluffing when they threatened my family, but I had no desire to find out.

One thing was clear: sitting tight and keeping quiet was no longer an option. If I folded now, if I backed down, Polonsky would make my life hell.

The very next morning, I filed a police report.

A day later, my Lexus was torched in the lot beside my gym. When I came out after my workout, it was already engulfed in flames.

Apparently deciding that going after my family or my apartment was too complicated—and carried too much risk of collateral damage—Polonsky started with the easiest target: my car.

“You can walk for a while, Privezentsev.”