I have been on the ragged edge of doing a dual review: Bill Browder's Red Notice and Adam Curtis' Traumazone. The former is an investment banker's discovery of ethics as he transitions from corporate raider to political dissident; the latter is a skilled but heavy-handed documentarian's near-total removal of his influence over a subject told almost entirely through carefully selected BBC News B-roll of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Browder, notably, doesn't ever figure out that creating a kleptocratic paradise in the ashes of the world's largest state economy might end badly until he finds himself detained by the FSB... and doesn't really seem interested in doing anything about it until his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is tortured to death. Curtis, on the other hand, rubs your fucking nose in the fact that we spent 10 years whistling past the graveyard, pretending that every warning sign we saw was a blazing red flag prophesying the return of the Tsars.

I think we made the same mistake we made with China: give every advantage of a free market to a market that isn't free and the cagiest and most sophisticated in the ecosystem will make out like bandits while the hoi polloi develops extremely-well-justified hatred for your entire way of life. Browder's book illustrates the Upton Sinclair maxim “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" while Curtis points out just how complicit the rest of the world was in creating the modern failed state of Russia.