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Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin's Russia
“There are many books that explain the transformation of Russia by focusing on the politicians, oligarchs, and KGB/FSB spies who run Russia. This isn’t one of them. Let me explain how a kid from New York founded a law firm in Moscow, had to flee for his life and ended up in a pissing contest with the Putin regime.”
An American lawyer’s brilliant, propulsive story of witnessing and playing a part in the transformation of Russia under Yeltsin and Putin, a true tale of fascinating personalities, criminal intrigue, harrowing situations, audacious actions and international politics that combines Bill Browder’s Red Notice with Michael Lewis’s Liar's Poker.
Raised by his father, a multimillionaire conman and crack addict who owned Manhattan’s most expensive brothel, twenty-four- year-old Jamison Firestone decided to change the channel. He graduated from law school in 1991 and sought his fortune in Gorbachev’s USSR establishing Russia’s first independent foreign law firm.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, Jamison lived in the maelstrom that was Russia, defending himself and his clients from mafia attacks, dealing with corrupt police officers, having his law office raided by armed commandos, and once having to bug the offices of the Russian police.
Jamison was at the center of some of Russia’s most important events. He employed Sergei Magnitsky who was murdered for uncovering the largest tax theft in Russian history and teamed up with Bill Browder and Alexei Navalny to expose his killers. Along the way he inadvertently taught Navalny to make videos exposing corruption and started a war with the Russian government over passage of the Magnitsky Acts which threatened to sanction Russia’s most powerful people.
A real life story that reads like a spy novel, Rule of Lies goes deep inside contemporary Russia and events that have reshaped the globe. Darkly comic, sometimes horrifying and deeply moving, it is a chilling warning of what can happen when a nascent democracy succumbs to one man’s corrupt iron rule, becoming not only an authoritarian nation but a profoundly criminal one—a true mafia state.
An American lawyer’s brilliant, propulsive story of witnessing and playing a part in the transformation of Russia under Yeltsin and Putin, a true tale of fascinating personalities, criminal intrigue, harrowing situations, audacious actions and international politics that combines Bill Browder’s Red Notice with Michael Lewis’s Liar's Poker.
Raised by his father, a multimillionaire conman and crack addict who owned Manhattan’s most expensive brothel, twenty-four- year-old Jamison Firestone decided to change the channel. He graduated from law school in 1991 and sought his fortune in Gorbachev’s USSR establishing Russia’s first independent foreign law firm.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, Jamison lived in the maelstrom that was Russia, defending himself and his clients from mafia attacks, dealing with corrupt police officers, having his law office raided by armed commandos, and once having to bug the offices of the Russian police.
Jamison was at the center of some of Russia’s most important events. He employed Sergei Magnitsky who was murdered for uncovering the largest tax theft in Russian history and teamed up with Bill Browder and Alexei Navalny to expose his killers. Along the way he inadvertently taught Navalny to make videos exposing corruption and started a war with the Russian government over passage of the Magnitsky Acts which threatened to sanction Russia’s most powerful people.
A real life story that reads like a spy novel, Rule of Lies goes deep inside contemporary Russia and events that have reshaped the globe. Darkly comic, sometimes horrifying and deeply moving, it is a chilling warning of what can happen when a nascent democracy succumbs to one man’s corrupt iron rule, becoming not only an authoritarian nation but a profoundly criminal one—a true mafia state.
400 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 26, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
October 1, 2026
At points I think this was hard to follow but OMG does it detail the Russian experiences he lived. Beyond my ability to describe the life path he took. The photos were 5 plus stars as it gives you real insight into the changes and places he jumped after a Hollywood California multi-millionaire level early childhood. No psyche or fortune teller could envision his future- as diverse and "opposite" side of the world decades he lived. That the Russian people have to live with this kind of observable limiting is only one of the experiences you get by reading this book. Death is very much momentarily possible for great segments of this tumultuous life from 1991 until the present.
June 29, 2026
Very interesting and a side of history and current affairs that I hadn’t looked into in much depth before. So well written and easy to follow for what could easily be a complicated non-fiction! Just crazy this shit happens in real life 😠
August 4, 2026
Jamison Firestone was a new law-school grad in 1991 when he went to do business in early-90s Moscow, and ended up with front-row seats to Russia’s transformation under Gorbachev and his successors, the early promise of democratization evolving into autocracy under Putin. He worked with characters in important events, such as Bill Browder, Sergei Magnitsky and Alexei Navalny. Firestone recounts the events and forces that influenced them in an accessible and engaging way that helped flesh out memories I have of the period. A good read.
July 23, 2026
Loved the author’s writing style, it kept me engaged
I loved stories that shed light in the crevices of the headlines we get bombarded with. The author references Bill Browder’s book, Red Notice and Freezing Order, also two great reads
I loved stories that shed light in the crevices of the headlines we get bombarded with. The author references Bill Browder’s book, Red Notice and Freezing Order, also two great reads
July 12, 2026
It’s a hell of a book! What a thriller and what a punch it delivers in the final chapter: read, read, read!
If you are a fan of Bill Browder’s Red Notice, this is even better! (Sorry, Bill)
If you are a fan of Bill Browder’s Red Notice, this is even better! (Sorry, Bill)
June 21, 2026
A furiously fast paced, and justifiably furious, story about how cynicism, abuse of power and stratospheric levels of corruption have become the key pillars of the system operating under Putin.
Much of the book is focused on the author's crusade to bring justice to one of its victims, his former colleague Sergey Magnitsky. Magnitsky's story in a nutshell is that of a lawyer who uncovers massive theft of Russian taxpayer money, but instead of being given a state award for services to the country, is arrested, thrown into jail in horrific conditions, denied crucial medical care, is beaten up and eventually dies from all the abuses. The state then prosecutes the lawyer, after his death in their own custody (!), for stealing the money himself (!).
As so often with Russia, you couldn't have made it up if you tried.
Much of the book is focused on the author's crusade to bring justice to one of its victims, his former colleague Sergey Magnitsky. Magnitsky's story in a nutshell is that of a lawyer who uncovers massive theft of Russian taxpayer money, but instead of being given a state award for services to the country, is arrested, thrown into jail in horrific conditions, denied crucial medical care, is beaten up and eventually dies from all the abuses. The state then prosecutes the lawyer, after his death in their own custody (!), for stealing the money himself (!).
As so often with Russia, you couldn't have made it up if you tried.
September 14, 2026
The story is often described as one of Russian corruption. That description is accurate, but incomplete. The deeper subject is the conversion of law into an instrument of predation—and the willingness of the outside world to continue doing business with a regime that had made such predation part of its governing method.
The book’s unsettling question is not simply how Putin’s Russia became what it is. It is why so many people, companies, banks, lawyers, politicians, and governments continued to behave as if the system were merely rough around the edges.
Under Putin, the state became more capable, but not necessarily more lawful. The unruliness of the early post-Soviet period gave way to a system in which coercion could be directed from the center. Courts, tax authorities, police agencies, prosecutors, and security services could be deployed selectively—against an inconvenient business owner, a political opponent, an investigative journalist, or a foreign investor who had mistaken written law for actual protection.
Corruption is often imagined as a bribe slipped across a desk: a small violation committed by an individual inside an otherwise functioning system. The Russia described in Rule of Lies is something more serious. It is a system in which the institutions themselves can become the mechanism of theft.
A company can be taken over through fabricated tax claims. Corporate records can be falsified. A seal can be stolen or reproduced. A criminal investigation can be opened not to discover the truth but to create leverage. A raid can intimidate employees, remove documents, and announce that the law belongs to whoever controls the men carrying the weapons.
This is sometimes called reiderstvo, or corporate raiding. The phrase sounds like a specialized term from the post-Soviet business world. Its implications are broader. When the state can manufacture a legal pretext for confiscation, private property exists only by permission. When the police can be converted into collection agents, the rule of law becomes theater.
The United Nations Committee Against Torture repeatedly raised questions about Magnitsky’s death in custody and about the adequacy of the investigation that followed. The case came to represent not only a death in detention but a failure of accountability extending through the entire chain of authority.
This is how authoritarian systems preserve themselves. They do not need to persuade everyone that the lie is true. They need only to make truth expensive.
The investigator can be arrested. The journalist can be threatened. The lawyer can be disbarred, raided, surveilled, or forced into exile. The witness can be discredited. The financial institution can be pressured. The foreign government can be warned that public confrontation will endanger commercial relations.
The lie does not have to win an argument. It has to outlast the courage of the people challenging it.
The stolen money, according to the accounts that shaped the campaign around Magnitsky, moved through international banking and corporate structures. Property and financial assets could be held in jurisdictions far from the officials who allegedly benefited from them. The geography of the theft was Russian; its financial infrastructure was global.
This is where the moral responsibility of Western institutions becomes unavoidable.
A kleptocratic regime requires more than corrupt officials. It requires places to store wealth, professionals to disguise ownership, banks to process transactions, real-estate markets to absorb unexplained capital, and governments willing to ask few questions as long as the money arrives legally enough to be useful.
The West often congratulates itself for having liberal institutions while ignoring the fact that those institutions can be rented.
A London townhouse, a New York apartment, a Swiss account, a European passport, or a luxury asset purchased through a shell company can become part of an authoritarian system’s survival strategy. These are not merely private choices. They are infrastructure.
The question is not whether every foreign investment from Russia was illicit. It was not. Nor is it that every Russian businessperson abroad was an agent of the Kremlin. Such claims would be careless. The question is whether democratic states built systems capable of distinguishing legitimate wealth from politically protected corruption—and whether they were willing to use those systems when doing so became inconvenient.
For years, the answer was often no.
The money was welcomed first and investigated later, if at all. Lawyers invoked client confidentiality. Banks cited compliance procedures. Real-estate agents completed transactions. Politicians accepted donations. Universities accepted gifts. Cultural institutions accepted sponsorships. The arrangement had all the outward forms of legality and none of the moral seriousness that legality requires.
There is a danger in writing about Russia that the country acquires more importance on the page than it possesses in the world.
Russia is not an economic peer of the United States, China, or the European Union. Its economy is comparatively narrow, heavily dependent on hydrocarbons, minerals, metals, agriculture, chemicals, and military production. It is not a dominant supplier of consumer electronics, advanced machinery, pharmaceuticals, software, financial services, or manufactured goods. Its share of global goods and services is modest, and the fortunes of its oligarchs—large as they may be individually—are insignificant beside the total wealth controlled through the major financial centers of North America, Europe, and Asia.
Russia’s money is not the world’s money. Its assets are not necessary to keep global capitalism functioning. The international economy would not collapse if Russian capital disappeared from London property, European banks, or offshore corporate structures. In many cases, the opposite would be true: the removal of politically protected wealth would make financial systems more transparent and less vulnerable to capture.
The same point applies to trade. Russia is not indispensable as a general-purpose economic partner. Most countries could, at least over time, replace Russian suppliers of ordinary manufactured goods and services. The world does not need Russia in the way it needs major manufacturing centers, shipping networks, semiconductor producers, or global financial institutions.
Yet economic importance and strategic leverage are not the same thing.
A country can have a modest share of global production and still control a handful of goods that become extraordinarily important during a crisis. Russia has long occupied that position in energy, uranium, fertilizer inputs, grain, industrial metals, and other commodities. These products may represent only a fraction of the world economy, but they sit inside supply chains that are difficult to replace quickly.
That gives Russia bottleneck power rather than comprehensive economic power.
The distinction matters. Russia does not dominate the world economy. It can, under certain conditions, disrupt parts of it. Those are different claims, and the second is more accurate than the first.
Russia’s influence also comes from capabilities that have little relationship to its economic output.
It possesses a large nuclear arsenal, a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, long-range missile systems, submarines, intelligence agencies, cyber capabilities, and a substantial military-industrial base. Its economy is not comparable to that of the United States or China, but its capacity to threaten neighboring states and raise the risk of a wider war is much greater than its GDP would suggest.
Geography amplifies that power. Russia borders Eastern Europe, the Black Sea region, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Arctic, and the Pacific. It sits beside important energy routes, shipping corridors, undersea infrastructure, and states whose security affects the wider European and Asian order.
It also benefits from asymmetry. A government does not need to match an opponent’s economy to interfere with an election, conduct a cyberattack, spread disinformation, support a proxy force, harass commercial shipping, or damage infrastructure. The attacker can spend relatively little while forcing the target to spend far more on defense, repair, investigation, and political management.
Russia’s power, then, is not the power of a comprehensive economic center. It is the power of a specialized and dangerous state: limited in many areas, consequential in a few, and willing to accept costs that wealthier democracies may be reluctant to bear.
That distinction should govern the response. Russia should not be treated as an indispensable economic pillar. It should be treated as a strategic risk whose leverage can and should be reduced.
Magnitsky’s name eventually became attached to a new kind of foreign-policy instrument. The United States established sanctions aimed at individuals implicated in serious human-rights abuses and corruption, including asset freezes and restrictions on entry. The policy later expanded into a broader Global Magnitsky framework.
This was an important shift. Traditional sanctions often punish countries in the abstract, imposing costs on populations while allowing the responsible elite to retain access to foreign luxury and finance. Magnitsky-style sanctions try to identify the person: the official who ordered the torture, the commander responsible for abuse, the oligarch who launders public wealth, the intermediary who makes repression profitable.
That approach carries a moral clarity that broad economic punishment often lacks. It says that sovereignty is not a license to torture, steal, or murder. It says that a government official cannot automatically use national borders as a shield against personal consequences.
The uncomfortable truth is that authoritarian regimes are often more resilient than their critics expect. They adapt. They use intermediaries. They shift assets. They recruit front companies. They exploit differences between legal systems. They wait for elections, wars, energy shortages, and public fatigue.
The power of targeted sanctions depends not only on their severity but on the credibility of enforcement. A regime must believe that the cost will persist after the news cycle ends.
Russia’s influence was not produced by Russian strength alone. Other countries helped build it.
European governments and businesses spent decades making themselves dependent on Russian energy. Cheap pipeline gas was treated as an economic benefit rather than a strategic vulnerability. Infrastructure was designed around Russian supply. Long-term contracts deepened the relationship. Alternative sources existed, but diversification was slower, more expensive, and politically less attractive.
The same pattern appeared in finance. Russian wealth entered European property markets, banks, luxury industries, professional-services firms, universities, cultural institutions, and political networks. The money was often welcomed before anyone asked seriously where it came from or what political relationships protected it.
This was not forced upon the West. It was a policy choice, repeated over many years.
Economic interdependence was supposed to make conflict less likely. Instead, it gave Moscow additional tools. Energy dependence created hesitation. Financial ties created lobbying pressure. The presence of Russian wealth made enforcement appear costly. The prospect of losing contracts encouraged governments and companies to describe a political threat as a manageable commercial disagreement.
Europe did not make Russia a global economic giant. It made certain European systems more vulnerable to Russian pressure.
That vulnerability was avoidable. Energy supplies could have been diversified earlier. Strategic reserves could have been expanded. Infrastructure could have been built with political risk in mind. Corporate ownership rules could have been stronger. Financial institutions could have investigated suspicious wealth with greater seriousness. The fact that these steps were difficult does not mean they were impossible.
A government that chooses convenience over resilience cannot later describe the resulting dependence as an act of nature.
The demand for total economic separation is morally understandable. It is also harder to implement than the slogan suggests.
Russia is not a central producer of nearly every major category of goods and services. Its economy is concentrated, and much of its output can be replaced over time by other producers, though not always cheaply or immediately.
The problem is less that the world cannot live without Russia than that governments allowed themselves to become dependent on particular Russian supplies.
Russia remains a major exporter of commodities that affect food, energy, industrial production, and national security. Some countries have reduced their dependence on Russian fossil fuels, but others continue to rely on Russian supplies or on infrastructure designed around them. Nuclear fuel is especially difficult to replace because certain reactors require specialized fuel and long-term supply arrangements. Fertilizer and grain markets create another dilemma: a policy meant to punish the Kremlin can also raise prices for countries already vulnerable to hunger.
The result is an ugly compromise. Governments try to restrict the Russian state’s access to money while avoiding shocks that would harm their own citizens or destabilize global markets. Other major economies have maintained commercial relationships with Moscow, purchasing Russian commodities or serving as intermediaries in trade.
Every government claims to be balancing principle and necessity. But necessity can become a permanent excuse. A commodity is declared irreplaceable. A financial channel is called too complicated to close. A wealthy investor is treated as too valuable to investigate. A diplomatic relationship is preserved because confrontation might produce instability.
Eventually, the exception becomes the system.
The argument for cutting Russia off therefore requires precision. The goal should not be theatrical economic erasure. It should be to sever the channels that finance aggression, protect illicit wealth, and reward coercion while maintaining carefully controlled trade in goods whose sudden removal would cause humanitarian harm.
That means reducing dependence rather than pretending it can disappear overnight. Replacing energy infrastructure takes time. Developing new uranium supply chains takes time. Expanding fertilizer production, securing shipping routes, and finding substitutes for industrial metals takes time. Some countries will face higher prices during the transition, and poorer populations may feel those costs first.
Enforcement against intermediaries matters as much as punishment directed at Russian entities. If a country, bank, shipping company, commodities trader, or professional-services firm repeatedly helps move restricted goods or conceal ownership, it is not merely operating in a gray area. It is helping preserve the system.
The point is not to punish commerce for its own sake. It is to prevent commerce from becoming the delivery mechanism for impunity.
There is a comforting story about authoritarianism in which ordinary people are powerless and foreign governments can do little. The story is partly true. Individuals inside a repressive state face immense danger. Institutions outside it cannot simply impose liberal democracy by decree.
But the story becomes an alibi when it is applied to the choices of powerful states.
Western governments had tools before Magnitsky was killed. They had immigration controls, anti-money-laundering laws, tax records, financial intelligence, corporate registries, diplomatic leverage, and criminal-investigation powers. They had the capacity to identify suspicious wealth and to deny sanctuary to people who used state power for private enrichment.
What they often lacked was the political will to use those tools against people whose money was profitable, whose connections were useful, or whose punishment threatened broader commercial interests.
This is not uniquely a Russian problem. The same weakness appears wherever authoritarian elites can move money into democratic markets. Dictatorships are not self-contained moral ecosystems. They depend on external institutions that launder their reputation, protect their assets, educate their children, host their businesses, and normalize their presence.
The bargain was this: Russia would be treated as a difficult but manageable partner, while Russian wealth would be absorbed into Western systems. In return, the outside world would receive energy, investment, contracts, and the illusion that commerce was softening politics.
In reality, commerce was often strengthening the regime.
Authoritarian states are rarely sustained by terror alone. They are sustained by normality.
There are restaurants open in Moscow. There are offices, schools, concerts, marriages, holidays, advertisements, courtrooms, and business conferences. There are people who want to get through the day, provide for their families, and avoid politics. There are officials who regard corruption as a fact of life rather than a moral emergency. There are foreign visitors who see the surface of society and mistake it for the whole.
The point is not the specific cultural wedge. The point is the mechanism. A government that cannot offer clean institutions, accountable courts, or shared prosperity can offer belonging. It can define the nation against internal enemies. It can make cruelty feel like patriotism.
Russia’s strategic significance does not require treating it as a civilization-scale economic power.
Russia should not receive more economic deference than its actual contribution warrants. Its markets are not essential. Its capital is not irreplaceable. Its companies are not the foundation of global prosperity. Its political class should not be allowed to convert a relatively small pool of wealth into outsized influence simply because Western institutions are willing to host it.
At the same time, Russia cannot be ignored while it possesses nuclear weapons, military reach, geographic advantages, commodity bottlenecks, and a demonstrated willingness to use disruption as a tool of state policy.
Treat Russia as what it is: not an indispensable economic center, but a specialized power whose risks have been magnified by the concessions of others.
Trade should not mean sanctuary. Investment should not mean immunity. Diplomatic recognition should not mean that officials accused of torture can shop, bank, educate their children, and purchase property abroad without scrutiny. Engagement should not require pretending that a regime’s crimes are merely domestic matters.
The title Rule of Lies describes a political system in which falsehood is not an accidental defect but a governing technology. The lie protects the theft. The theft finances the power. The power protects the lie.
The book’s unsettling question is not simply how Putin’s Russia became what it is. It is why so many people, companies, banks, lawyers, politicians, and governments continued to behave as if the system were merely rough around the edges.
Under Putin, the state became more capable, but not necessarily more lawful. The unruliness of the early post-Soviet period gave way to a system in which coercion could be directed from the center. Courts, tax authorities, police agencies, prosecutors, and security services could be deployed selectively—against an inconvenient business owner, a political opponent, an investigative journalist, or a foreign investor who had mistaken written law for actual protection.
Corruption is often imagined as a bribe slipped across a desk: a small violation committed by an individual inside an otherwise functioning system. The Russia described in Rule of Lies is something more serious. It is a system in which the institutions themselves can become the mechanism of theft.
A company can be taken over through fabricated tax claims. Corporate records can be falsified. A seal can be stolen or reproduced. A criminal investigation can be opened not to discover the truth but to create leverage. A raid can intimidate employees, remove documents, and announce that the law belongs to whoever controls the men carrying the weapons.
This is sometimes called reiderstvo, or corporate raiding. The phrase sounds like a specialized term from the post-Soviet business world. Its implications are broader. When the state can manufacture a legal pretext for confiscation, private property exists only by permission. When the police can be converted into collection agents, the rule of law becomes theater.
The United Nations Committee Against Torture repeatedly raised questions about Magnitsky’s death in custody and about the adequacy of the investigation that followed. The case came to represent not only a death in detention but a failure of accountability extending through the entire chain of authority.
This is how authoritarian systems preserve themselves. They do not need to persuade everyone that the lie is true. They need only to make truth expensive.
The investigator can be arrested. The journalist can be threatened. The lawyer can be disbarred, raided, surveilled, or forced into exile. The witness can be discredited. The financial institution can be pressured. The foreign government can be warned that public confrontation will endanger commercial relations.
The lie does not have to win an argument. It has to outlast the courage of the people challenging it.
The stolen money, according to the accounts that shaped the campaign around Magnitsky, moved through international banking and corporate structures. Property and financial assets could be held in jurisdictions far from the officials who allegedly benefited from them. The geography of the theft was Russian; its financial infrastructure was global.
This is where the moral responsibility of Western institutions becomes unavoidable.
A kleptocratic regime requires more than corrupt officials. It requires places to store wealth, professionals to disguise ownership, banks to process transactions, real-estate markets to absorb unexplained capital, and governments willing to ask few questions as long as the money arrives legally enough to be useful.
The West often congratulates itself for having liberal institutions while ignoring the fact that those institutions can be rented.
A London townhouse, a New York apartment, a Swiss account, a European passport, or a luxury asset purchased through a shell company can become part of an authoritarian system’s survival strategy. These are not merely private choices. They are infrastructure.
The question is not whether every foreign investment from Russia was illicit. It was not. Nor is it that every Russian businessperson abroad was an agent of the Kremlin. Such claims would be careless. The question is whether democratic states built systems capable of distinguishing legitimate wealth from politically protected corruption—and whether they were willing to use those systems when doing so became inconvenient.
For years, the answer was often no.
The money was welcomed first and investigated later, if at all. Lawyers invoked client confidentiality. Banks cited compliance procedures. Real-estate agents completed transactions. Politicians accepted donations. Universities accepted gifts. Cultural institutions accepted sponsorships. The arrangement had all the outward forms of legality and none of the moral seriousness that legality requires.
There is a danger in writing about Russia that the country acquires more importance on the page than it possesses in the world.
Russia is not an economic peer of the United States, China, or the European Union. Its economy is comparatively narrow, heavily dependent on hydrocarbons, minerals, metals, agriculture, chemicals, and military production. It is not a dominant supplier of consumer electronics, advanced machinery, pharmaceuticals, software, financial services, or manufactured goods. Its share of global goods and services is modest, and the fortunes of its oligarchs—large as they may be individually—are insignificant beside the total wealth controlled through the major financial centers of North America, Europe, and Asia.
Russia’s money is not the world’s money. Its assets are not necessary to keep global capitalism functioning. The international economy would not collapse if Russian capital disappeared from London property, European banks, or offshore corporate structures. In many cases, the opposite would be true: the removal of politically protected wealth would make financial systems more transparent and less vulnerable to capture.
The same point applies to trade. Russia is not indispensable as a general-purpose economic partner. Most countries could, at least over time, replace Russian suppliers of ordinary manufactured goods and services. The world does not need Russia in the way it needs major manufacturing centers, shipping networks, semiconductor producers, or global financial institutions.
Yet economic importance and strategic leverage are not the same thing.
A country can have a modest share of global production and still control a handful of goods that become extraordinarily important during a crisis. Russia has long occupied that position in energy, uranium, fertilizer inputs, grain, industrial metals, and other commodities. These products may represent only a fraction of the world economy, but they sit inside supply chains that are difficult to replace quickly.
That gives Russia bottleneck power rather than comprehensive economic power.
The distinction matters. Russia does not dominate the world economy. It can, under certain conditions, disrupt parts of it. Those are different claims, and the second is more accurate than the first.
Russia’s influence also comes from capabilities that have little relationship to its economic output.
It possesses a large nuclear arsenal, a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, long-range missile systems, submarines, intelligence agencies, cyber capabilities, and a substantial military-industrial base. Its economy is not comparable to that of the United States or China, but its capacity to threaten neighboring states and raise the risk of a wider war is much greater than its GDP would suggest.
Geography amplifies that power. Russia borders Eastern Europe, the Black Sea region, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Arctic, and the Pacific. It sits beside important energy routes, shipping corridors, undersea infrastructure, and states whose security affects the wider European and Asian order.
It also benefits from asymmetry. A government does not need to match an opponent’s economy to interfere with an election, conduct a cyberattack, spread disinformation, support a proxy force, harass commercial shipping, or damage infrastructure. The attacker can spend relatively little while forcing the target to spend far more on defense, repair, investigation, and political management.
Russia’s power, then, is not the power of a comprehensive economic center. It is the power of a specialized and dangerous state: limited in many areas, consequential in a few, and willing to accept costs that wealthier democracies may be reluctant to bear.
That distinction should govern the response. Russia should not be treated as an indispensable economic pillar. It should be treated as a strategic risk whose leverage can and should be reduced.
Magnitsky’s name eventually became attached to a new kind of foreign-policy instrument. The United States established sanctions aimed at individuals implicated in serious human-rights abuses and corruption, including asset freezes and restrictions on entry. The policy later expanded into a broader Global Magnitsky framework.
This was an important shift. Traditional sanctions often punish countries in the abstract, imposing costs on populations while allowing the responsible elite to retain access to foreign luxury and finance. Magnitsky-style sanctions try to identify the person: the official who ordered the torture, the commander responsible for abuse, the oligarch who launders public wealth, the intermediary who makes repression profitable.
That approach carries a moral clarity that broad economic punishment often lacks. It says that sovereignty is not a license to torture, steal, or murder. It says that a government official cannot automatically use national borders as a shield against personal consequences.
The uncomfortable truth is that authoritarian regimes are often more resilient than their critics expect. They adapt. They use intermediaries. They shift assets. They recruit front companies. They exploit differences between legal systems. They wait for elections, wars, energy shortages, and public fatigue.
The power of targeted sanctions depends not only on their severity but on the credibility of enforcement. A regime must believe that the cost will persist after the news cycle ends.
Russia’s influence was not produced by Russian strength alone. Other countries helped build it.
European governments and businesses spent decades making themselves dependent on Russian energy. Cheap pipeline gas was treated as an economic benefit rather than a strategic vulnerability. Infrastructure was designed around Russian supply. Long-term contracts deepened the relationship. Alternative sources existed, but diversification was slower, more expensive, and politically less attractive.
The same pattern appeared in finance. Russian wealth entered European property markets, banks, luxury industries, professional-services firms, universities, cultural institutions, and political networks. The money was often welcomed before anyone asked seriously where it came from or what political relationships protected it.
This was not forced upon the West. It was a policy choice, repeated over many years.
Economic interdependence was supposed to make conflict less likely. Instead, it gave Moscow additional tools. Energy dependence created hesitation. Financial ties created lobbying pressure. The presence of Russian wealth made enforcement appear costly. The prospect of losing contracts encouraged governments and companies to describe a political threat as a manageable commercial disagreement.
Europe did not make Russia a global economic giant. It made certain European systems more vulnerable to Russian pressure.
That vulnerability was avoidable. Energy supplies could have been diversified earlier. Strategic reserves could have been expanded. Infrastructure could have been built with political risk in mind. Corporate ownership rules could have been stronger. Financial institutions could have investigated suspicious wealth with greater seriousness. The fact that these steps were difficult does not mean they were impossible.
A government that chooses convenience over resilience cannot later describe the resulting dependence as an act of nature.
The demand for total economic separation is morally understandable. It is also harder to implement than the slogan suggests.
Russia is not a central producer of nearly every major category of goods and services. Its economy is concentrated, and much of its output can be replaced over time by other producers, though not always cheaply or immediately.
The problem is less that the world cannot live without Russia than that governments allowed themselves to become dependent on particular Russian supplies.
Russia remains a major exporter of commodities that affect food, energy, industrial production, and national security. Some countries have reduced their dependence on Russian fossil fuels, but others continue to rely on Russian supplies or on infrastructure designed around them. Nuclear fuel is especially difficult to replace because certain reactors require specialized fuel and long-term supply arrangements. Fertilizer and grain markets create another dilemma: a policy meant to punish the Kremlin can also raise prices for countries already vulnerable to hunger.
The result is an ugly compromise. Governments try to restrict the Russian state’s access to money while avoiding shocks that would harm their own citizens or destabilize global markets. Other major economies have maintained commercial relationships with Moscow, purchasing Russian commodities or serving as intermediaries in trade.
Every government claims to be balancing principle and necessity. But necessity can become a permanent excuse. A commodity is declared irreplaceable. A financial channel is called too complicated to close. A wealthy investor is treated as too valuable to investigate. A diplomatic relationship is preserved because confrontation might produce instability.
Eventually, the exception becomes the system.
The argument for cutting Russia off therefore requires precision. The goal should not be theatrical economic erasure. It should be to sever the channels that finance aggression, protect illicit wealth, and reward coercion while maintaining carefully controlled trade in goods whose sudden removal would cause humanitarian harm.
That means reducing dependence rather than pretending it can disappear overnight. Replacing energy infrastructure takes time. Developing new uranium supply chains takes time. Expanding fertilizer production, securing shipping routes, and finding substitutes for industrial metals takes time. Some countries will face higher prices during the transition, and poorer populations may feel those costs first.
Enforcement against intermediaries matters as much as punishment directed at Russian entities. If a country, bank, shipping company, commodities trader, or professional-services firm repeatedly helps move restricted goods or conceal ownership, it is not merely operating in a gray area. It is helping preserve the system.
The point is not to punish commerce for its own sake. It is to prevent commerce from becoming the delivery mechanism for impunity.
There is a comforting story about authoritarianism in which ordinary people are powerless and foreign governments can do little. The story is partly true. Individuals inside a repressive state face immense danger. Institutions outside it cannot simply impose liberal democracy by decree.
But the story becomes an alibi when it is applied to the choices of powerful states.
Western governments had tools before Magnitsky was killed. They had immigration controls, anti-money-laundering laws, tax records, financial intelligence, corporate registries, diplomatic leverage, and criminal-investigation powers. They had the capacity to identify suspicious wealth and to deny sanctuary to people who used state power for private enrichment.
What they often lacked was the political will to use those tools against people whose money was profitable, whose connections were useful, or whose punishment threatened broader commercial interests.
This is not uniquely a Russian problem. The same weakness appears wherever authoritarian elites can move money into democratic markets. Dictatorships are not self-contained moral ecosystems. They depend on external institutions that launder their reputation, protect their assets, educate their children, host their businesses, and normalize their presence.
The bargain was this: Russia would be treated as a difficult but manageable partner, while Russian wealth would be absorbed into Western systems. In return, the outside world would receive energy, investment, contracts, and the illusion that commerce was softening politics.
In reality, commerce was often strengthening the regime.
Authoritarian states are rarely sustained by terror alone. They are sustained by normality.
There are restaurants open in Moscow. There are offices, schools, concerts, marriages, holidays, advertisements, courtrooms, and business conferences. There are people who want to get through the day, provide for their families, and avoid politics. There are officials who regard corruption as a fact of life rather than a moral emergency. There are foreign visitors who see the surface of society and mistake it for the whole.
The point is not the specific cultural wedge. The point is the mechanism. A government that cannot offer clean institutions, accountable courts, or shared prosperity can offer belonging. It can define the nation against internal enemies. It can make cruelty feel like patriotism.
Russia’s strategic significance does not require treating it as a civilization-scale economic power.
Russia should not receive more economic deference than its actual contribution warrants. Its markets are not essential. Its capital is not irreplaceable. Its companies are not the foundation of global prosperity. Its political class should not be allowed to convert a relatively small pool of wealth into outsized influence simply because Western institutions are willing to host it.
At the same time, Russia cannot be ignored while it possesses nuclear weapons, military reach, geographic advantages, commodity bottlenecks, and a demonstrated willingness to use disruption as a tool of state policy.
Treat Russia as what it is: not an indispensable economic center, but a specialized power whose risks have been magnified by the concessions of others.
Trade should not mean sanctuary. Investment should not mean immunity. Diplomatic recognition should not mean that officials accused of torture can shop, bank, educate their children, and purchase property abroad without scrutiny. Engagement should not require pretending that a regime’s crimes are merely domestic matters.
The title Rule of Lies describes a political system in which falsehood is not an accidental defect but a governing technology. The lie protects the theft. The theft finances the power. The power protects the lie.
July 2, 2026
Rule of Lies:
My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin’s Russia
By Jamison R. Firestone (2026)
Bruce W. Bean
Dedicated to Terry Duncan, Sergei Magnitsky, and Alexei Navalny.
The book’s copyright includes an express prohibition on the use of AI technologies to train generative AI. The first such usage I have noted.
Background and Early Life
Jamison Firestone was born into wealth in Beverly Hills, but his father was both erratic and corrupt. In 1971, the family relocated from Beverly Hills to New York City, where his father continued his criminal activities, including operating what was euphemistically described as a “private gentleman’s club.” His father was ultimately convicted of tax evasion in 1983.
Firestone attended Hackley School in Westchester County, where he grew close to the headmaster, Mr. Barr. He describes himself as a poor student. In one telling early episode, facing failure in his Russian final exam, he approached his teacher and offered to pay for tutoring. The teacher quoted him ten sessions at $25 each; Firestone paid the full $250. The teacher pocketed the money and told him to get out. He passed.
Tulane, Law School, and the Journey to Moscow
After Hackley, Firestone enrolled at Tulane University, where he met Terry Duncan, who would become his law partner and close friend. Duncan’s father was a senior IRS special agent in the criminal tax division and was perhaps aware that Firestone’s father had been convicted of tax evasion.
Firestone graduated from Tulane in 1988 and entered Tulane law school. While in law school he met Robert, then a freshman undergraduate, who became his boyfriend and, twenty-eight years later, his husband. Firestone graduated from law school in 1991. Having already learned some Russian, he departed for Moscow one week after sitting for the New York bar exam.
He was inspired to go to Russia by Esther Dyson’s descriptions of the early post-Soviet period. Firestone noted, “I was in a country where they had nothing and needed everything. I had seen the future the previous week in the USA. I knew what would work in Russia. Everything would work.” Many other expats in Russia in the 1990’s, including me, came to this same conclusion. Within days of Firestone’s arrival in Moscow he witnessed the August 1991 failed KGB coup against Gorbachev.
Building Firestone Duncan
Over Christmas of 1992, Firestone called Terry Duncan and offered him the opportunity to go from recent law school graduate to law firm partner in his Moscow law firm. Firestone Duncan helped foreign clients start businesses in Russia by assisting with difficult to obtain multi-entry visas into Russia and registering new companies.
Firestone also brought his father to Moscow, who selected his own krysha (literally “roof,” meaning Russian Mafia protection) and jumped into Moscow’s used-car trade. In a short time his father had to flee the Mafia and return to the United States. Firestone’s own problems with lawless Russia began with a Russian partner, Konstantine Ponomarev, who would eventually become a multi-millionaire by stealing ever-larger sums from his employers, including $650,000 from Firestone Duncan.
The firm’s darkest early chapter was the assassination of 26-year-old Terry Duncan at the Ostankino television tower during Yeltsin’s 1993 attack on the Communist-controlled legislature. Firestone claims Yeltsin had received a mandate from his 1993 constitutional referendum which followed Yeltsin’s victory over the legislature, a claim that is, at minimum, questionable, but not at all central to his story.
Putin’s Early History
Firestone writes: “Much to my surprise, Putin seemed pretty good for business at first.” Firestone joined the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia and had the opportunity to meet and speak with Don Evans, G.W. Bush’s Secretary of Commerce. Having lived in Russia from 1995 to 2003, I completely agree with Firestone’s verdict on Putin’s early presidency. As Firestone noted, “For the first three years of Putin’s presidency, it looked as if Putin might actually make Russia law-abiding.” This ended by late 2003 with Khodorkovsky’s arrest and the beginning of the endless Yukos affair litigation, which continues in 2026. Firestone concludes that the Yukos Affair was confirmation that “Putin’s dictatorship of the law might be incompatible with the law itself.”
Sergei Magnitsky, Bill Browder, and the Hermitage Affair
Firestone introduces Sergei Magnitsky, describing him as a child prodigy who became the head of the accounting, audit, and tax department at Firestone Duncan. The firm’s representation of Bill Browder’s Hermitage Capital, Russia’s largest outside investor, began in 1996. After a decade of successful investing and considerable activist shareholder litigation by Hermitage against corrupt Russian businesses, which made him no friends in Russia, in November 2005, Browder was denied re-entry to Russia. Hermitage Capital subsequently liquidated its Russian investments, paid over $400 million in Russian taxes and withdrew its capital from Russia. Despite this exit, in June 2007, both Hermitage and Firestone Duncan were raided on the same day by Russia’s so-called tax police.
The mechanics of how certain Russian tax officials engineered a fraudulent $231 million tax refund becomes the central thread running through the remainder of the book. The role of Department K of the FSB is examined in detail. In November 2008, with Browder and Firestone safely in London, Sergei Magnitsky was arrested as part of the attack on Hermitage and Firestone Duncan. Others from Firestone Duncan had also left Moscow for London, but Sergei Magnitsky had decided to remain. As the world now knows, at the end of 2009 Sergei Magnitsky died in custody, having been beaten and denied treatment for serious internal injuries.
Aftermath: The Magnitsky Act and the Long Arm of Corruption
Browder and Firestone worked incessantly to keep the Magnitsky tragedy in the public eye globally. They produced compelling YouTube videos and Browder wrote Red Notice and Freezing Order describing how the Russian tax officials managed to steal $231 million from the Russian state. Browder and Firestone worked ceaselessly to ensure sanctions were applied to corrupt Russian officials and that the Magnitsky Act was enacted, first in the U.S. and then elsewhere. Firestone notes his disappointment with the Obama State Department, which was “not interested in punishing corrupt Russian officials,” but was instead “hell-bent on resetting relations,” which “pretty much meant overlooking things like corruption and murder.” He details the crimes and killings of numerous Russian government officials both in Russia and in the UK.
Despite Russian assassinations in the United Kingdom, Firestone writes that “the UK was awash with Russian money and courting Russian investment.” He lays blame on the David Cameron government for attempting to improve relations with Putin’s Russia by ignoring murder and corruption.
Konstantine Ponomarev, who had stolen $650,000 from Firestone Duncan years earlier, later became a billionaire through fraud, including an unlikely scheme against IKEA. Under the terms of a capacity-based electricity agreement, IKEA was required to pay for electricity whether it consumed it or not, based on the capacity of generators Konstantine continued to deliver to the site. The scheme ultimately required IKEA to pay Konstantine almost one billion dollars.
No one should be surprised that in 2013, Browder and the long-deceased Magnitsky were tried in absentia in Russia (and of course, convicted) on “money-laundering” charges. The book also discloses the remarkable, disturbing tale of John Moscow’s journey from highly successful prosecutor in the Southern District of New York (where he had prosecuted Firestone’s father) to attorney for Hermitage and Bill Browder and finally to mouthpiece for the Russian government in its pursuit of Hermitage. Firestone shows that John Moscow was hired by Natalia Veselnitskaya, the glamorous Russian attorney who claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton and met Trump campaign officials in Trump Tower prior to the 2016 election. Firestone details obstruction to the subsequent Global Magnitsky Act in the U.S. Congress posed by Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who was later labeled by Politico as “Putin’s favorite Congressman.” In April 2019, Firestone encountered John Moscow at a conference and said: “Your clients turned out to be agents working for the Russians.” Moscow’s response: “Fuck you, Jamison.”
Conclusion: Putin and the Rule of Lies
Firestone offers his final character assessment of Putin: “Deep down, he’s a product of both Russian imperialism and the KGB. He believes his mission is to restore what the Soviet Union lost.” Firestone does not discuss how or why Putin’s policies changed, given his earlier conclusion that “For the first three years of Putin’s presidency, it looked as if Putin might actually make Russia law-abiding.” This question must someday be addressed.
One of the most compelling sections of the book is the Afterword, in which Firestone details what became of the major players: his father, the tax officials who stole $231 million, Konstantine, and many others. There are also useful links to press coverage concerning John Moscow, Terry Duncan, and those implicated in the Magnitsky murder. Not all of those responsible got what they deserved; but some did.
Rule of Lies is a valuable first-person account of three decades inside Putin’s Russia, written by someone who was present for the KGB coup against Gorbachev, the 1998 ruble collapse, the Yukos affair, the colossal persecution of Hermitage, the Magnitsky tragedy, and the slow unmasking of a kleptocratic dictatorship. Rule of Lies deserves a wide readership.
My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin’s Russia
By Jamison R. Firestone (2026)
Bruce W. Bean
Dedicated to Terry Duncan, Sergei Magnitsky, and Alexei Navalny.
The book’s copyright includes an express prohibition on the use of AI technologies to train generative AI. The first such usage I have noted.
Background and Early Life
Jamison Firestone was born into wealth in Beverly Hills, but his father was both erratic and corrupt. In 1971, the family relocated from Beverly Hills to New York City, where his father continued his criminal activities, including operating what was euphemistically described as a “private gentleman’s club.” His father was ultimately convicted of tax evasion in 1983.
Firestone attended Hackley School in Westchester County, where he grew close to the headmaster, Mr. Barr. He describes himself as a poor student. In one telling early episode, facing failure in his Russian final exam, he approached his teacher and offered to pay for tutoring. The teacher quoted him ten sessions at $25 each; Firestone paid the full $250. The teacher pocketed the money and told him to get out. He passed.
Tulane, Law School, and the Journey to Moscow
After Hackley, Firestone enrolled at Tulane University, where he met Terry Duncan, who would become his law partner and close friend. Duncan’s father was a senior IRS special agent in the criminal tax division and was perhaps aware that Firestone’s father had been convicted of tax evasion.
Firestone graduated from Tulane in 1988 and entered Tulane law school. While in law school he met Robert, then a freshman undergraduate, who became his boyfriend and, twenty-eight years later, his husband. Firestone graduated from law school in 1991. Having already learned some Russian, he departed for Moscow one week after sitting for the New York bar exam.
He was inspired to go to Russia by Esther Dyson’s descriptions of the early post-Soviet period. Firestone noted, “I was in a country where they had nothing and needed everything. I had seen the future the previous week in the USA. I knew what would work in Russia. Everything would work.” Many other expats in Russia in the 1990’s, including me, came to this same conclusion. Within days of Firestone’s arrival in Moscow he witnessed the August 1991 failed KGB coup against Gorbachev.
Building Firestone Duncan
Over Christmas of 1992, Firestone called Terry Duncan and offered him the opportunity to go from recent law school graduate to law firm partner in his Moscow law firm. Firestone Duncan helped foreign clients start businesses in Russia by assisting with difficult to obtain multi-entry visas into Russia and registering new companies.
Firestone also brought his father to Moscow, who selected his own krysha (literally “roof,” meaning Russian Mafia protection) and jumped into Moscow’s used-car trade. In a short time his father had to flee the Mafia and return to the United States. Firestone’s own problems with lawless Russia began with a Russian partner, Konstantine Ponomarev, who would eventually become a multi-millionaire by stealing ever-larger sums from his employers, including $650,000 from Firestone Duncan.
The firm’s darkest early chapter was the assassination of 26-year-old Terry Duncan at the Ostankino television tower during Yeltsin’s 1993 attack on the Communist-controlled legislature. Firestone claims Yeltsin had received a mandate from his 1993 constitutional referendum which followed Yeltsin’s victory over the legislature, a claim that is, at minimum, questionable, but not at all central to his story.
Putin’s Early History
Firestone writes: “Much to my surprise, Putin seemed pretty good for business at first.” Firestone joined the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia and had the opportunity to meet and speak with Don Evans, G.W. Bush’s Secretary of Commerce. Having lived in Russia from 1995 to 2003, I completely agree with Firestone’s verdict on Putin’s early presidency. As Firestone noted, “For the first three years of Putin’s presidency, it looked as if Putin might actually make Russia law-abiding.” This ended by late 2003 with Khodorkovsky’s arrest and the beginning of the endless Yukos affair litigation, which continues in 2026. Firestone concludes that the Yukos Affair was confirmation that “Putin’s dictatorship of the law might be incompatible with the law itself.”
Sergei Magnitsky, Bill Browder, and the Hermitage Affair
Firestone introduces Sergei Magnitsky, describing him as a child prodigy who became the head of the accounting, audit, and tax department at Firestone Duncan. The firm’s representation of Bill Browder’s Hermitage Capital, Russia’s largest outside investor, began in 1996. After a decade of successful investing and considerable activist shareholder litigation by Hermitage against corrupt Russian businesses, which made him no friends in Russia, in November 2005, Browder was denied re-entry to Russia. Hermitage Capital subsequently liquidated its Russian investments, paid over $400 million in Russian taxes and withdrew its capital from Russia. Despite this exit, in June 2007, both Hermitage and Firestone Duncan were raided on the same day by Russia’s so-called tax police.
The mechanics of how certain Russian tax officials engineered a fraudulent $231 million tax refund becomes the central thread running through the remainder of the book. The role of Department K of the FSB is examined in detail. In November 2008, with Browder and Firestone safely in London, Sergei Magnitsky was arrested as part of the attack on Hermitage and Firestone Duncan. Others from Firestone Duncan had also left Moscow for London, but Sergei Magnitsky had decided to remain. As the world now knows, at the end of 2009 Sergei Magnitsky died in custody, having been beaten and denied treatment for serious internal injuries.
Aftermath: The Magnitsky Act and the Long Arm of Corruption
Browder and Firestone worked incessantly to keep the Magnitsky tragedy in the public eye globally. They produced compelling YouTube videos and Browder wrote Red Notice and Freezing Order describing how the Russian tax officials managed to steal $231 million from the Russian state. Browder and Firestone worked ceaselessly to ensure sanctions were applied to corrupt Russian officials and that the Magnitsky Act was enacted, first in the U.S. and then elsewhere. Firestone notes his disappointment with the Obama State Department, which was “not interested in punishing corrupt Russian officials,” but was instead “hell-bent on resetting relations,” which “pretty much meant overlooking things like corruption and murder.” He details the crimes and killings of numerous Russian government officials both in Russia and in the UK.
Despite Russian assassinations in the United Kingdom, Firestone writes that “the UK was awash with Russian money and courting Russian investment.” He lays blame on the David Cameron government for attempting to improve relations with Putin’s Russia by ignoring murder and corruption.
Konstantine Ponomarev, who had stolen $650,000 from Firestone Duncan years earlier, later became a billionaire through fraud, including an unlikely scheme against IKEA. Under the terms of a capacity-based electricity agreement, IKEA was required to pay for electricity whether it consumed it or not, based on the capacity of generators Konstantine continued to deliver to the site. The scheme ultimately required IKEA to pay Konstantine almost one billion dollars.
No one should be surprised that in 2013, Browder and the long-deceased Magnitsky were tried in absentia in Russia (and of course, convicted) on “money-laundering” charges. The book also discloses the remarkable, disturbing tale of John Moscow’s journey from highly successful prosecutor in the Southern District of New York (where he had prosecuted Firestone’s father) to attorney for Hermitage and Bill Browder and finally to mouthpiece for the Russian government in its pursuit of Hermitage. Firestone shows that John Moscow was hired by Natalia Veselnitskaya, the glamorous Russian attorney who claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton and met Trump campaign officials in Trump Tower prior to the 2016 election. Firestone details obstruction to the subsequent Global Magnitsky Act in the U.S. Congress posed by Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who was later labeled by Politico as “Putin’s favorite Congressman.” In April 2019, Firestone encountered John Moscow at a conference and said: “Your clients turned out to be agents working for the Russians.” Moscow’s response: “Fuck you, Jamison.”
Conclusion: Putin and the Rule of Lies
Firestone offers his final character assessment of Putin: “Deep down, he’s a product of both Russian imperialism and the KGB. He believes his mission is to restore what the Soviet Union lost.” Firestone does not discuss how or why Putin’s policies changed, given his earlier conclusion that “For the first three years of Putin’s presidency, it looked as if Putin might actually make Russia law-abiding.” This question must someday be addressed.
One of the most compelling sections of the book is the Afterword, in which Firestone details what became of the major players: his father, the tax officials who stole $231 million, Konstantine, and many others. There are also useful links to press coverage concerning John Moscow, Terry Duncan, and those implicated in the Magnitsky murder. Not all of those responsible got what they deserved; but some did.
Rule of Lies is a valuable first-person account of three decades inside Putin’s Russia, written by someone who was present for the KGB coup against Gorbachev, the 1998 ruble collapse, the Yukos affair, the colossal persecution of Hermitage, the Magnitsky tragedy, and the slow unmasking of a kleptocratic dictatorship. Rule of Lies deserves a wide readership.
July 10, 2026
This book was a very interesting read overall. The part of the book in which the author was living in Russia (1991 to 2008) was especially intriguing. I did not know much about Russia during that era or the time covered in the remainder of the book. This was an unusual book for me to choose because I read mostly about women lives and how they live at various times and places. The time and place was the actual draw for me. I am also glad to have read the 2026 edition for the extra material.
The author’s personal life was interesting but incidental to my interest. Another reviewer said he stopped reading early in the book because he had a problem with the author’s life; he missed out on the best parts of the book.
At the time of this writing, over half of the ratings for the title are five stars. I just can’t go there but it is definitely a four star read. It is well written and engaging. Most of the time it is fast paced and draws you in. Since there is pattern to the author’s travails, there are parts that slow the pace but aren’t unnecessary.
Structurally, there ae some very long chapters but they are broken up in sections with headings. I read in bits through the day and the sections were about the right size for me. As a memoir, I was pleasantly surprised to see an index and notes on sources. Of course both are essential to history and political texts. The pictures were also quite welcome. I even got a bit of information on women’s lives in several instances mention the power of the Babushkas, grandmothers.
Disclaimer: I won this book in a #GoodreadsGiveaway. This is a voluntary and honest review. Thank you, Harper
The author’s personal life was interesting but incidental to my interest. Another reviewer said he stopped reading early in the book because he had a problem with the author’s life; he missed out on the best parts of the book.
At the time of this writing, over half of the ratings for the title are five stars. I just can’t go there but it is definitely a four star read. It is well written and engaging. Most of the time it is fast paced and draws you in. Since there is pattern to the author’s travails, there are parts that slow the pace but aren’t unnecessary.
Structurally, there ae some very long chapters but they are broken up in sections with headings. I read in bits through the day and the sections were about the right size for me. As a memoir, I was pleasantly surprised to see an index and notes on sources. Of course both are essential to history and political texts. The pictures were also quite welcome. I even got a bit of information on women’s lives in several instances mention the power of the Babushkas, grandmothers.
Disclaimer: I won this book in a #GoodreadsGiveaway. This is a voluntary and honest review. Thank you, Harper
July 12, 2026
Thank you HarperAudio Adult and NetGalley for the advanced electronic audio review copy of this book. This is an interesting point of view memoir narrated by the author about his time spent living and working in Russia. Being from there is what originally drew me to the book. Of course the descriptions of deep corruption, money laundering, bribes, and killings for hire were not surprising as this was the world of business and politics during and after the collapse of the USSR. It was interesting to hear an outsider’s perspective.
August 3, 2026
A firecracker of a book!
Jamison Firestone (whose theatrical name is more than justified by a truly outré childhood, narrated at the beginning of this memoir) moved to Russia in time to witness the fall of the Soviet Union, the following chaotic and energetic years of hope that a better country might emerge, and the subsequent construction of Putin’s kleptocratic mafia-state.
Firestone realises too late that what Putin meant by a ‘dictatorship of law’ was rule by law, not the rule of law as he gets pulled into the endemic looting of the Russian state (and the Russian people) when his law firm is caught up in a corporate raid/tax fraud scheme. This eventually lead to the imprisonment and then murder-by-denial-of-care of his employee and friend Sergei Magnitsky, which sparks his campaign to reveal the brutal and grubby reality of Putin’s Russia and to sanction human rights abusers and corrupt oligarchs.
As post-liberalism is becoming fashionable in some circles in the West and western politicians such as Trump, Farage, and Hanson seek to remake their countries in the image of Russia, this is a timely look at just what that image is. It’s not a pretty picture.
Jamison Firestone (whose theatrical name is more than justified by a truly outré childhood, narrated at the beginning of this memoir) moved to Russia in time to witness the fall of the Soviet Union, the following chaotic and energetic years of hope that a better country might emerge, and the subsequent construction of Putin’s kleptocratic mafia-state.
Firestone realises too late that what Putin meant by a ‘dictatorship of law’ was rule by law, not the rule of law as he gets pulled into the endemic looting of the Russian state (and the Russian people) when his law firm is caught up in a corporate raid/tax fraud scheme. This eventually lead to the imprisonment and then murder-by-denial-of-care of his employee and friend Sergei Magnitsky, which sparks his campaign to reveal the brutal and grubby reality of Putin’s Russia and to sanction human rights abusers and corrupt oligarchs.
As post-liberalism is becoming fashionable in some circles in the West and western politicians such as Trump, Farage, and Hanson seek to remake their countries in the image of Russia, this is a timely look at just what that image is. It’s not a pretty picture.
September 5, 2026
✦ Book Review: Rule of Lies by Jamison R. Firestone
✧ ᴛʜᴀɴᴋ ʏᴏᴜ ꜰᴏʀ ᴛʜᴇ ꜰʀᴇᴇ ʙᴏᴏᴋ, @Harper
➊ 𝚂𝚈𝙽𝙾𝙿𝚂𝙸𝚂
Jamison R. Firestone recounts his years living and working as an American lawyer in post-Soviet Russia, where the promise of a newly opened country increasingly collided with corruption, organized crime, and political power. His experiences eventually placed him alongside figures such as Sergei Magnitsky, Bill Browder, and Alexei Navalny, giving him a firsthand view of Russia's transformation and the dangers faced by those willing to challenge the system.
➋ 𝚃𝙷𝙾𝚄𝙶𝙷𝚃𝚂
Most nonfiction comes down to a fairly simple test for me: was it well written, and did I finish the book knowing something I didn't know before? Rule of Lies checks both boxes. Firestone's firsthand experience gives the history a personal perspective and makes the corruption and political changes in Russia feel less abstract than they might in a traditional history book. I found his experiences interesting, learned quite a bit along the way, and came away with a better understanding of the people and events involved. That's pretty much exactly what I want from this kind of nonfiction. Informative, readable, and worth the time.
✧ ᴛʜᴀɴᴋ ʏᴏᴜ ꜰᴏʀ ᴛʜᴇ ꜰʀᴇᴇ ʙᴏᴏᴋ, @Harper
➊ 𝚂𝚈𝙽𝙾𝙿𝚂𝙸𝚂
Jamison R. Firestone recounts his years living and working as an American lawyer in post-Soviet Russia, where the promise of a newly opened country increasingly collided with corruption, organized crime, and political power. His experiences eventually placed him alongside figures such as Sergei Magnitsky, Bill Browder, and Alexei Navalny, giving him a firsthand view of Russia's transformation and the dangers faced by those willing to challenge the system.
➋ 𝚃𝙷𝙾𝚄𝙶𝙷𝚃𝚂
Most nonfiction comes down to a fairly simple test for me: was it well written, and did I finish the book knowing something I didn't know before? Rule of Lies checks both boxes. Firestone's firsthand experience gives the history a personal perspective and makes the corruption and political changes in Russia feel less abstract than they might in a traditional history book. I found his experiences interesting, learned quite a bit along the way, and came away with a better understanding of the people and events involved. That's pretty much exactly what I want from this kind of nonfiction. Informative, readable, and worth the time.
Review of advance copy received from Author
I knew most of the story, not all of the story, nor how Jamison, the author, came from Russia in one piece.
Reading the book, you have one heck of a thrill ride and will also learn a great deal of what could have been that has been sacrificed to serve a very select few.
It was hard to put down and I can't wait for part II
Reading the book, you have one heck of a thrill ride and will also learn a great deal of what could have been that has been sacrificed to serve a very select few.
It was hard to put down and I can't wait for part II
Did Not Finish
June 29, 2026A lot of major perversions to skim through with regards to his dad. Completely done reading when author mentions his marriage to another man.
July 28, 2026
This book reads like a spy novel. Hard to put down. So much is just unbelievable but all true. Great read.
August 30, 2026
Excellent book about the rampant corruption in Putin’s Russia. It is a memoir that reads like a thriller. A brave book to be written that is a must read.
August 23, 2026
I have always wanted to read Bill Browder’s books. This memoir has moved his books to high up on my TBR list. Fascinating insight into 21st century Russian politics. Funny how Romney called it in the 2012 election. We have paid a price for not heeding his warnings about Russia’s threat to democracy.
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