The years
when our country was swept over by the landless sea of legal nihilism seem to
have disappeared into the past, though, into the recent past. They have left us
a heavy heritage: camouflaged certainty about the fact that it is impossible to
live by the law in Russia. It is hard to say how long it will take us to
overcome this certainty. But we will have to overcome it, comprehending all
that happened to us, when we tried, in one foul swoop, disregarding the notions
of legality and law, to build ‘well-developed capitalism with a human face’ in
the country. The capitalism turned out to be supposedly wild. And it happened
to have the appropriate face. The book D-Day, excerpts from which we are
publishing, was written by the famous investigative journalist Andrey Kalitin.
It narrates the story of ascent to success in business of the well-known
entrepreneur Mikhail Chernoy, one of the most closed Russian oligarchs, now
living abroad.