“God did not create all men equal. What is inside them is not equal.” – Khoza Noukhayev

Twenty years have passed since the killing of Paul Klebnikov (Павел Юрьевич Хлебников) on a Moscow street. Although he was an American citizen, born in America to American-born parents, his unsolved murder is better known in Russia than in the United States. A business journalist for Forbes Magazine, Paul Klebnikov’s seminal book, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia, must be read in softcover. The hardback is long out of print and there are no electronic versions available. Paul is known as Pavel in Russia—another man, almost, for his death had even deeper implications abroad. Today, Klebnikov would be 61 years old. He is, like the Russians looking back, grounded in time, as the country they leave behind grows older, stranger, with a future not their own. Yet Klebnikov flowed in the opposite direction, towards Russia, as America itself grew less and less recognizable. After all, if one points to the dangers of journalism in Russia, Russia can point to America’s increasing tolerance for the murder of their own journalists on foreign soil. In the minds of oligarchs and warlords—the world Paul Klebnikov got to know—all things are enumerated. A book, no matter how worthwhile, is published only if there is money to be made. Politics grow whimsical in service of a trend. Berezovsky, Klebnikov’s chief antagonist, is long dead, possibly due to suicide, after losing a power struggle with Vladimir Putin and exhausting his wealth. Yet Klebnikov’s own death can’t easily be linked to Putin, and so he remains between memory and restoration: too captive to let go, yet too impractical to dwell upon—with his lessons perpendicular to the lessons being sought. […]