What you didn't know about Bill Browder

Putin only mentioned one individual by name: William F. Browder, a 54-year-old investor and financier, originally from Chicago, who reportedly made hundreds of millions of dollars in the Wild West marketplace of post-Soviet Russia.

Anyone who has intermittently tried to follow the shadowplay narrative of Russian history and politics during the Putin era heard alarm bells going off, and perhaps felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. This was a plot twist that requires some explication, in a story that quite likely no one will ever fully understand.

Several major publications supplied obligatory “Who is this guy?” articles almost immediately, and Browder himself wrote a piece for Time magazine, offering his own highly truncated version of his history with Putin. None of it was untrue, exactly, but for my money those accounts largely served to obscure the deeper historical currents that flow beneath this implausible tale. Neither man is likely to mention that they were once close allies; Browder was described as among Putin’s “most vocal cheerleaders” in a 2006 Economist article (which has become remarkably difficult to find). Furthermore, Browder becomes slightly more difficult to cast as an American hero once you notice that he renounced his U.S. citizenship 20 years ago, for reasons he has never adequately explained


I imagine both Browder and Putin would say that their shared connection to the pre-Putin past of Soviet Communism is irrelevant to their present-tense dispute. I’m not so sure: Russia has some of the same mythic qualities as William Faulkner’s Deep South, where the past is not dead and isn’t even past.

Putin was of course a KGB officer during the later years of the Soviet Union, who witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall from his post in East Germany. Bill Browder’s grandfather, Earl Browder, was perhaps the most famous American Communist during the decades before World War II. An all-American boy from a farm family in Kansas, Earl Browder became a socialist as a teenager, spent several years in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution and was leader of the Communist Party USA for 15 years, even running for president as the party’s nominee in 1936 and 1940. He was also almost certainly a Soviet spy and recruiter, meaning that he worked for the same organization that would educate and employ the young Vladimir Putin some years later.