The Lone Star State has played a surprising role in the toppling of the Red Star nation and its immediate aftermath. The Soviet Union began running episodes of the CBS nighttime soap opera Dallas in the early 1980s just to show how eeeeevil those scheming bourgeois Texas capitalist hoarders and wreckers could be. The best-laid plans of mice and Mensheviks backfired when Soviet audiences gazed in awe at the wealth of the Ewings and wanted a little of that for themselves. Even the quotidian details of American life seemed astonishing to them, as Karol Markowicz, now with the New York Post, wrote during her blogging days:
In 1977, the year I was born and the year my father, his mother, his aunt and many other Jews left the Soviet Union (my mother and I left in 1978), the Soviet propaganda machine began circulating a rumor. It went, roughly: life in America is so terrible that the old people eat cat food.
This was…perplexing.
People didn’t quite get it: they have food specifically made for cats in America? What a country!
A lot of things about America remained beyond their comprehension.
But Soviet grandees would eventually see it firsthand later in the decade, and realize, contra Khrushchev, they were the Cold War nation that had been buried. In 1989, Boris Yeltsin, fresh off of visiting the Johnson Space Center, dropped by a Randall’s supermarket in the suburbs of Houston and realized the disparity between everyday Americans and Soviet citizens, “When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.”
Back in the Post-USSR
He was right. When the Soviet Union finally did collapse in 1991, John Kleinheinz, a young Fort Worth investor with an economics degree from Stanford, hatched a dangerous plan to make a fortune for himself and his well-healed financial backers – and did so, ultimately walking away with $500 million. It’s the theme of his 2023 book, The Siberia Job. Kleinheinz, who goes by the name of “John Mills” in the book, which was written under the nom de plume of Josh Havens, hatched a scheme to acquire millions of shares in Russia’s largest oil company, as the Hoover Institute noted in 2023:
After the demise of the Soviet Union, the newly-established Russian government privatized its industry by issuing vouchers to all of its citizens, allowing them the chance to be shareholders in the country’s burgeoning businesses. The slips are distributed among the population and auctions are arranged where they can be exchanged for actual shares. For the country’s rural populations living in abject poverty, the vouchers appear to be little more than pieces of paper, totally separated from the far-off concept of potential future fortunes.
But for Texas businessman John Mills and his Czech companion, Petr Kovac, the seemingly-valueless chits suggest a lucrative potential, worth much more than what the current owners are willing to sell them for. They travel to the furthest, coldest reaches of the country to acquire vouchers for the country’s national oil company, Gazneft, roving from town to town with suitcases full of cash. But they quickly learn that the plan has complications ― for example, the fact that the auctions at which these vouchers are traded for actual shares have been planned at the most remote, inaccessible locations possible to deter outsiders from buying in. And when the Russian mafia and the oligarchs in charge of Gazneft catch wind of their successes, the stakes become suddenly more deadly.
From Siberia to Spago
Writing The Siberia Job as fiction allows Kleinheinz to compress events to make them even funnier, such as “Mills” bribing a tank driver to take him to yet another small Russian town for yet another Gazneft auction, with the prospect of having dinner in Los Angeles with his favorite Playboy cover girl (whose name also appears to be fictionalized), after Mills spotted a stack of recent Playboys in the back of the tank. After a Siberian radio to Alaska to phone hookup with his L.A. financier, who had shot an indie movie with the Playboy model in the cast, Mills gets results:
“Donny Dietrich, I’m here with Stu Watanabe, Nina Bowyer’s agent.”
“Mr. Dietrich, what can I do for you?”
“Stu, this is going to sound crazy, but could I possibly arrange a dinner meeting between Nina and a friend of a friend? For sometime next week, maybe? Whenever’s good for her.”
“I’d have to ask her. Who’s the friend of the friend?”
“A very polite Russian who’s . . . sort of a business partner of mine. It’s fan service, but I’ll owe her one. Big time.”
“Okay, hold on, let me call her. Can I use the other phone?” “Sure,” said Lisa. There were another ten beeps. Stu’s voice resumed.
“Hi, Nina? It’s Stu. Could I set you up on a dinner meeting with a friend of Donny Dietrich’s sometime next week? It’s not work related, but it’ll be the basis for a great connection with Donny.” There was a pause.
“Yeah, it’s with a fan. A very polite one. A businessman from Russia.”
Another pause.
“Hold on, I’ll ask. Mr. Dietrich. She’s a little wary of meeting a stranger for dinner, since the Playboy cover. Could your friend do lunch? Next Tuesday at Spago?”
“Lemme check . . . John, how’s lunch? Over.”
John looked at the tank guy, who gave another very eager thumbs-up.
“Lunch works. Over.”
“You get that, Stu?” said Donny.
“Uh . . . yeah.”
“If you’re wondering about the ‘over’ thing, it’s a long story, which I would be happy to tell you sometime.”
“That’d be great, Mr. Dietrich. Hold on one sec.”
Another pause.
“Okay, Nina says we’re good for Spago at one next Tuesday. I’ll make the reservation myself.”
“Awesome, Stu. Lisa, Stu, you guys are lifesavers. I’ll be in touch.”
There was a chorus of goodbyes and then Donny’s voice alone: “John, you get all that? Over.”
“Roger-roger, Donny. You’re a guardian angel, my friend. Over.”
“I’ll make the flight for next Saturday?
From Novo-what?”
“Yeah, Saturday, from Novosibirsk.”
“Under whose name?” John looked at the tank guy and held out the mic for him to speak into it.
“Vladimir Nikolayevich Piatagorsky.”
Did it happen? As Klienheinz told the Fort Worth Report, “I would say that the most improbable events did take place, maybe not in the order they are in the book,” though as the newspaper adds, “while many of the stories and anecdotes in the book are true, the plot sequence is fictional. Some of the events in the book took place, and others did not.”
If I Had a Hammer (and Sickle, and Swastika)
That’s okay, because writing his adventures as a novel also allows Klienheinz to tell several amusing anecdotes about the history of the Soviet Union, and in one passage, how similar it was to another evil empire to its west:
“It’s funny,” said Petr, to John. “Today everyone acts as if to be a Communist was to be the opposite of a Nazi. They forget that the Communists and Nazis—Stalin and Hitler—were best friends with plans to share Europe between them until Hitler saw the opportunity to take it all and invaded the Soviet half. Till then, your American folk singers like Petr what’s his name . . . ‘We Shall Overcome’ . . .”
“Pete Seeger.”
“Yes, like Pete, were singing songs about how America shouldn’t get involved in the war against fascism, how Roosevelt shouldn’t send them to die for British ideals. Or the Sudetenland.”
20 years ago in City Journal, Howard Husock dubbed Seeger “America’s Most Successful Communist,” who lived long enough to have propped up every socialist dictator from Stalin and Hitler to Ho Chi Minh all the way to Saddam Hussein. As Glenn Reynolds likes to say at our sister site Instapundit, “Not anti-war, just on the other side.”
Fly the Friendly Skies of Siberia
Another history lesson in The Siberia Job occurs when Petr, John’s Russian business partner, needs to get a lift from Omsk to Magadan, some 4500 miles away, to score more Gazneft shares. So, as one does, he charted a recently “retired, privatized—privately owned and operated—Tupolev Tu-4. Which is to say, it was the Soviet copy of the American B-29, the Superfortress bomber that dropped Little Boy and Fat Man on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” This allows Kleinheinz to explain how, immediately after WWII, Stalin demanded the reverse engineering of a captured US Boeing B-29 to give his nation a plane to cart around the atomic bombs whose technology the Soviets had also stolen from the US. The result?
Other than its relative heftiness, the Tu-4 was a perfect copy, from the computer-controlled gun system to the automatic wing deicers. The only major changes were the engines—which were copied from a different American radial engine design—and the radios, which were cribbed not from the B-29, but the B-25s Russia had been given in Lend-Lease.
Even with an industrial maximum effort, the reverse-engineering program didn’t finish in time for World War II. Instead, the planes were debuted in 1947 in highly dramatic fashion. Americans were invited to attend a Russian military parade. Three Tu-4s were flown over. The implication was that these were the three captured B-29s. Then a fourth flew over, on its own, and the Americans knew that the Russians now had a strategic bomber that could drop a nuke on any American city from Chicago to LA.
Petr learned all of this in a lengthy and rather frank lecture from his pilot, the Tu-4’s only crewman. No copilot or flight engineer or any of the other members of the standard crew of eleven. Though, the pilot explained, they were mainly unnecessary, since it’s not like he needed gunners or a bombardier, and he was his own navigator.
Petr sat in the copilot’s seat, with the big hemisphere of glass that constituted the front of the plane wrapping around him, making him think of the Millennium Falcon. He mentioned this to the pilot, who asked if it was true that Czechoslovakia had split because Stars Wars had been released with subtitles in Czech but not Slovak.
Then the pilot made a joke about the plane being a piece of junk, and never telling him the odds. When Petr asked if he’d ever crashed a plane, the pilot said, “Not this plane.”
After that, they didn’t talk for a few hours, until Petr asked if the plane had a toilet, and was instructed on the lavatorial use of the bomb bay. Petr was actually a little disappointed when the pilot told him he was only kidding, and yes, there was a regular toilet. (Though in its own way, he said, it was still a bomb bay.)
The Names Have Been Changed to Avoid Gravity-Related “Accidents”
Writing it as a novel also allows Kleinheinz to protect the names of those involved in his wheeling and dealing, as he explained to Fort Worth Magazine in 2023:
The company involved said it wanted no publicity at all, Kleinheinz says.
“There’s still enough people around [who were involved] who could get in trouble and [the company] has got their own private security, much like the Wagner group.
“So, you know, there was just no reason to be overly factual.”
The Wagner Group is the mercenary outfit that recently quit its fight in Ukraine in order to march back to Russia seeking recompense from the military hierarchy and perhaps Vladimir Putin himself. It’s difficult to tell exactly what they were up to, but they ultimately backed off, its leader shipped off to exile.
The Siberia Job depicts the early days of the post-Soviet Russia as a cross between Weimar Germany and the American Wild West – bribery, corruption, and gangsters are everywhere, and no sheriffs to maintain law and order. And of course, that Russia no longer exists, Fort Worth Magazine noted:
What is to become of Russia today, God only knows. Putin, though at first embracing free-market reform, has turned his back on it and led his country back into a totalitarian (and outlaw) state corrupted by security forces. The best and brightest of its sons and daughters go make a life where they are free to think and innovate.
Kleinheinz, though, expects there will come another day like those days in 1994, which will forever be among his most fulfilling.
The Siberia Job is something akin to Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker meets Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, and as such, it would make for a terrific movie adaptation, provided Hollywood doesn’t assign it the same screenwriters who doused the movie version of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities with a massive cold shower of political correctness in 1990. In the meantime, it makes for a heck of a lot of fun to read, twinged with no small amount of sadness that under Vladimir Putin, post-Soviet Russia has ditched its wild west early days and reverted back to its evil empire roots.
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