"Having awakened from its communist slumber, Russia in the roaring nineties is a place where everything and everyone is for sale and fortunes can be made and lost overnight. Into this maelstrom steps rookie Wall Street Journal reporter Matthew Brzezinski. Assigned to make sense of the financial markets, he is instantly plunged into the crazed world of Russian capitalism, where corrupt Moscow bankers and American carpetbaggers preside over the greatest boom and bust in international financial history.".

"Brzezinski knows he's in over his head; what he comes to realize is that so is the entire country. The government of Boris Yeltsin is under the thumb of seven powerful men known as "the oligarchs," and a flamboyant businessman from Chechnya - even as his homeland is under siege by Russian troops - has set himself up as one of Moscow's most notorious powerbrokers. Meanwhile, the gap between haves and have-nots is widening into an abyss.

Among Moscow's elite, solid-gold bathroom fixtures are de rigueur, while in Vladivostok, the last stop on the Trans-Siberian railway, long-suffering citizens must buy water by the pail from the local mafia."--BOOK JACKET.