Please join Charles Hecker for a discussion with Dasha Afanasieva about his new book Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia (Hurst, 2024). Drawing on his decades of experience working as a journalist and a geopolitical risk consultant in Russia and the Soviet Union, as well as interviews with senior executives, government officials and academics among many others, Hecker will explore the evolution of doing business in Russia, from communism to capitalism to collapse.

When the Soviet Union came to an end in late 1991, Russia’s market opened for business;  executives from around the world jumped on planes to take advantage of new opportunities. Over the next three decades, a market free-for-all transformed the Russian economy. For the international business community, Russia went from a mysterious frontier to a complex-but-manageable place to do deals, until it all came to an abrupt end. When Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the business world’s reference points for risk were suddenly unrecognisable. How did it come to this? 

In tracing the arc of international business in Russia, Hecker tells a story of careful planning, incautious adventure and staggering assumptions, and explores how business interacts with historical and cultural legacies as well as politics.

He also raises questions about the responsibilities of the international business community in Russia. Post-1991, Western governments encouraged investment in Russia, despite the lack of transparency in the economy, the political instability of the Yeltsin years, and the proximity of international business and oligarchic capitalism. Post-24 February 2022, executives are trying to balance their reputational and financial losses; some have openly spoken about shareholder ambivalence on whether their companies stay in Russia; others are simply waiting for sanctions to be lifted.

What does this reveal about how much the business community really understood about Russia – or how much they wanted to know? And is doing business in Russia the black-and-white moral and ethical issue that it is often painted as?

Charles Hecker has spent forty years travelling and working in the Soviet Union and Russia. He has worked as journalist for The Moscow Times and as a reporter for The Miami Herald. Until September, 2024, he was a partner at a geopolitical risk consultancy. A fluent Russian speaker, he holds degrees in Russian and Soviet Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and in Soviet Studies from the Russian Research Center at Harvard University.

Dasha Afanasieva is the European Consumer Goods Reporter at Bloomburg. Previously she was a columnist at Reuters Breakingviews, specialising in Russia and Turkey, and a financial reporter and Turkey correspondent with Reuters. She also worked at the BBC as a producer at the Russian Service, the Today programme and Newsnight.

Swedenborg House, 20-21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH