Here Maddow recounts the rise and fall of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a now exiled Russian businessman, and his oil company Yukos. Khodorkovsky’s story, set against the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Yeltsin and Putin presidencies, describes a Russian entrepreneur whose fortunes reversed with the rise of Vladimir Putin. After successfully founding a bank and investing in multiple ventures, Khodorkovsky focused on what would turn out to be his most valuable venture of all: Yukos, an oil company that by 2002 “accounted for nearly 20 percent of the crude oil produced in Russia” (28). Khodorkovsky grew Yukos into a giant by using unconventional methods, such as bringing in an Oklahoma oilman, Joe Mach, to oversee Yukos operations in Siberia. With American-style drilling methods, Mach helped boost Yukos’s production by more than 10% in his first year on the job. Yet, just as Khodorkovsky’s success with Yukos was skyrocketing, his good standing with the Kremlin was fading, a sign of things to come.

Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first democratically elected president after the fall of the Soviet Union, was forced to resign after falling into corruption and “amassing a tidy private fortune for himself, his wife, his daughters, and select friends” (33).