Astonishing tale of true-life adventure
The Siberia Job
By Josh Haven
It was 1994. The Berlin Wall had fallen and so had the government of the Soviet Union.
Suddenly, all the state-owned companies in what was now Russia became private companies. The new Russian government decided to privatize the companies, and attempt to create a stock market, by issuing vouchers. Every man, woman, and child in Russian got a voucher for a piece of a company.
To most ordinary Russians, these vouchers were merely a curiosity. They seemed worthless.
But, a Texas businessman was betting those vouchers were indeed worth something and he embarked on an extraordinarily dangerous adventure to buy a lot of them. If a person could buy 300 million vouchers, he reasoned, they might own a billion dollar oil company — assuming the Russian mob was agreeable.
As it turned out, they really weren't that agreeable.
That is the true basis of The Siberian Job, a thrilling, partly fictional, look inside the hurricane of changes in the 1990s Soviet Union. The book takes the principle characters from Russian cities to the frozen realms of reindeer herders; from limos to dog sleds to Russian tanks.
The book is based on the true-life adventures of Texas investor John Kleinheinz. Listed as fiction, with fictional names for the principal characters, the bones (and events) are true.
This relatively short book is a gripping tale of the wild and dangerous period in Russian history when the rule book was gone and the stakes were high.
If you read this book, and you should, be sure to catch the Hoover Institution's June 2023 interview with Kleinheinz on YouTube.