Oliver Bullough on financial secrecy, corruption and global power

Thanks for having me on the show. It's lovely to be here.

Yeah, I'm actually from just outside Hay. So I grew up on a farm just outside Hay and grew up thinking every small town had a literary festival. I didn't realize it was just us. I had this sort of, you know, I used to be dragged in a sort of slightly unwilling way by my mother to [snorts] when it was still in the primary school. It was a lot smaller than it is now. Just these sort of Ted Hughes declaiming like a, you know, prophet Moses has just come down from Mount Sinai. And, you know, for a nine-year-old it leaves quite an impression.

I don't know. To be honest, I'm not sure I was drawn to literature. I was more drawn to the prospect of wandering around the world and finding things out. So literature is more of a means to an end. It's the stories I like and the finding things out. Writing books is just sort of a necessary end to the goal.

I studied, no, I studied history. And then after I finished university, I moved to Russia in 1999 and studied over, I mean, I studied Russian while I was there, but mainly just because I wanted to be able to talk to people and I fell in love with the place. It was fascinating. It was a really interesting time. I suppose when I arrived, I felt a little bit like I'd missed the story. You know, that the whole post-Soviet decade had ended and, you know, perhaps the whole democratization of Russia had been and gone. But actually about two weeks before I arrived in Russia, this new barely heard of guy called Vladimir Putin became prime minister and then shortly afterwards he was elevated to acting president, then was elected president. And as we know, he's been in one or other of those positions ever since. And so actually I got there, as it turned out, just at the most extraordinarily fascinating time to witness the transformation of Russia back into an autocracy.

Initially, I was living in St. Petersburg working for a nightlife magazine, a sort of St. Petersburg analog of Time Out, which was a tremendous amount of fun. It was incredibly cheap to live there. They just had a massive financial crisis, so I didn't really need to earn any money, which was lucky because I was only earning $200 a month. But you could live okay on that in those days. And I worked there for about a year learning Russian and messing around. And then I had a sort of crisis of confidence that I was, you know, living too comfortably in this very baroque, beautiful city. I don't know if you've been to St. Petersburg, but it is the most stunning place with this incredible art galleries. And, you know, I used to have a student card because I was studying Russian. And I used to go into the Hermitage every day, just because my bus went straight past the front door. And it was literally about six months of, well, pretty much daily visits before I realized it had a room full of Rembrandts. And I was just like, whoa. It was just so much of cultural wealth. So anyway,

Just astonishing. Yeah. So anyway, I had a crisis of confidence and decided to move to Central Asia. So I went and lived in Kyrgyzstan for a year working for the Times of Central Asia, which was an interesting adventure in and of itself. And while I was there, I, you know, was looking around for something else to do and I found a job at Reuters which eventually took me to Moscow where I sort of found a, you know, a home and a real, really in the center of things in Moscow. So that was what I did journalistically for ages.

Yeah. When I was in Russia, there was the, the Second Chechen War was really underway in a big way. And there was, it was the era, as you probably remember, of these real terrible atrocities. The Moscow theater siege, the Beslan school siege. There were multiple suicide bombings. It was a really difficult time. And, you know, I was, that was my story. That's what I did. And I really felt that there was a much bigger story to tell about that part of the world and about the really bloody history of it, which is, you know, comes across, but also about this incredibly attractive culture and astonishing natural sort of majesty of it as a region. So my first book, Let Our Fame Be Great, was about the Caucasus mountains, specifically the North Caucasus. I mean, the Southern Caucasus, which is the countries of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, are a bit better known, particularly Georgia these days. It's, you know, it's become a real tourist destination, which is great because it's a stunning place. But then the North Caucasus, so Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, and then all the way across to what used to be Ossetia until the destruction of the Ossetians, and which is now the Russian regions of Kabardino-Balkaria and Stavropol, is, I mean, just a fascinating, rich, barely known internationally area. And I wanted to tell that story, which is what I did in Let Our Fame Be Great, which was intended more to be a one-off. I didn't intend to become a book writer. Actually, it turned out to be quite a fun process, a really interesting way of having much more space to tell stories than you get when you're writing sort of 700, 800 words.

Yeah, I mean, The Last Man in Russia was about the Russian nation specifically. In Russian, you have two words. You've got a word which means the Russian state or pertaining to the Russian state, russky, and then also a word which pertains to the Russian ethnicity. And so it's primarily about the Russian nation, the ethnicity, which is obviously the majority population in Russia, but very much not everyone. It's very culturally diverse and they have a sort of demographic curse of very low birth rates and very high mortality, which is driven particularly by alcoholism. And I wanted to try and delve into the roots of that, the origins of that, and particularly via, there was an Orthodox priest, a Soviet Orthodox priest I became slightly obsessed by, called Dmitri Dudko, who had this incredible and very tragic life through the 20th century. It felt to me that his life was very analogous to the 20th century. And so, I mean, partly, you know, what I love doing is traveling to places which I wouldn't otherwise get to go to. And that book took me, you know, deep into the Russian Arctic, out into the sort of far west of Russia on the Belarusian-Ukrainian border, which is a place I hadn't been either. And I love traveling and exploring places, meeting new people, and trying to tell stories that haven't been told before, you know, more or less successfully. You know, people don't always want to read the stories I write, but I very much enjoy writing them.

Yeah. So corruption was a fact of life on a daily basis in living in Russia. I mean, it was just totally ordinary to be stopped by police officers, shaken down for, you know, however much money you happen to have on you, you know, for real or imagined offenses. It wasn't really something that I considered to be strange. It was just totally normal. And it was, I suppose, in Ukraine when I realized that this was a far bigger deal than I'd maybe given it credit for. You know, if something just becomes an everyday reality, you don't perhaps appreciate how strange it is. In Ukraine in 2014, they had a revolution and drove out the then president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was an egregiously corrupt man, really nasty piece of work. And he had not had time to take a lot of stuff with him because he'd fled in a helicopter, you know, taken money and various valuable things, but he had to leave particularly his business records behind, which gave this sort of really, I mean, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the inner workings of a kleptocratic regime and the amazing realization that has laid bare to me and lots of other people how deeply embedded he was and his team of cronies were into the global financial system, into supposedly respectable financial centers. Obviously, Switzerland is often referenced, but far more important was London. And the nature of kleptocracy, which, you know, I think partly because of the way corruption is talked about via things like Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, you think of it as a country-by-country phenomenon. You talk about a kleptocracy, Russia is a kleptocracy, Nigeria is a kleptocracy. That isn't how corruption works. Corruption is an international, globalized phenomenon, and it takes advantage of the ability of the owners of wealth to move the wealth around the world, to hide it in, you know, secrecy jurisdictions, places like the British Virgin Islands and so on, and then to bring it back into, you know, what we refer to as the onshore jurisdictions like the UK with all the taint washed free, where they can spend the money on property, on art, on, you know, private school fees, on private jets, whatever they want. And so, you know, I really, I mean, this struck me as a bit like a thunderbolt, this realization that corruption didn't work how I thought it had. And so I wanted to explore that, how it worked, and that was Moneyland, which was, you know, a book attempting to describe this kind of unaccountable world of money. And which felt to me like that it was like the possessors of great wealth had their own country where they were untouchable, where they could write the rules, where, you know, they could escape from any responsibility for their actions. And I call that country Moneyland. It sounds like a pretty depressing topic for a book, you know, which it is obviously, but I tried to write it with quite a lot of humor and also to bring in a lot of pop culture references. I have quite low cultural reference points as a rule. [laughter] You know, so my particular proudest moment was a whole extended reference to the film Lethal Weapon 2, which I don't think is remembered by anyone but me, but I'm particularly fond of it. I try to, I sort of often feel that the more serious a story is, the more you should try and tell it in a light way because otherwise it just becomes so depressing that no one wants to hear what you're saying. So yeah, that's what I try and do.