Brzezinski is an exceptional guide. He grew up in Canada and landed in Poland in 1991, just in time to see his ancestral homeland become a star performer among the post-communist countries. He started as an office assistant in the The New York Times’ Warsaw bureau, then moved to Kiev where he worked as a stringer for the Wall Street Journal, living on a shoestring and witnessing the utter failure of the Ukrainian economy. He quickly learned how badly things can go wrong when a thug took him prisoner in his own apartment, and beat him until he realized that this was one foreigner who really had almost nothing worth stealing. Imagine Brzezinski’s relief when he arrived in Moscow as a staff correspondent, and discovered a city pulsating with new energy and new money. “Henceforth I would be living large, earning a real salary and hobnobbing with the bright lights of Russia,” he writes.

And those lights were shining brighter and brighter. The streets were jammed with the priciest Mercedeses and BMWs–armor-plated, of course, since their owners had the disturbing habit of getting gunned down or blown up. Restaurants and nightclubs were crammed with the new biznesmeni and their molls, who blithely spent thousands of dollars in a single evening on booze, food and a good time. No behavior was too outlandish, or too tacky. At the Bolshoi, Brzezinski recalls, cell phones kept going off throughout the performances. The stock market soared and, miracle of miracles, the ruble stabilized. Even as the IMF was called in for repeated bailouts, the biznesmeni stashed billions abroad.

Brzezinski’s account is particularly good at capturing how Westerners got caught up in the Moscow frenzy. First, there was what passed for Western aid–much of which paid the lavish expenses and fees of visiting consultants. Then there were the investors, eagerly accepting the assurances of their Russian partners that they were helping transform the country to benefit everyone. Brzezinski saw this world up close, not just by drinking and dining in all the right places but mainly because his future wife was part of that scene. As a young World Bank staffer, she lived in a $4,000-a-month apartment and drove a Toyota Land Cruiser, and soon jumped to an aggressive Western investment firm that promised hefty commissions on gigantic deals. Brzezinski isn’t shy about admitting that he was already estimating the size of their first boat.

But in the great Potemkin tradition, Russia’s “reformers” were perpetrating grandiose fraud in the name of privatization. Whenever Brzezinski ventured outside of the showcase capital, he found appalling misery. In the oil-rich Russian Far East, teachers weren’t paid for six months at a time, water mains burst and no one fixed them, ambulances stood idle for lack of fuel. Neither state nor newly privatized companies paid more than a pittance in taxes. Boris Yeltsin’s team and its Western defenders liked to compare what was happening to the robber-baron era of capitalism in the United States. Brzezinski pinpoints the fallacy of that analogy: “Rockefeller built his Standard Oil from nothing, while the oligarchs seized the assets of Soviet Russia. They had not created wealth; they had simply grabbed it.”

When the stock market crashed in 1998 and Western investors headed for the exits, the Kremlin defaulted on its debts and the ruble plunged again. At that moment, the Kremlin chose to amend its tax code to up its take, even retroactively, and dispatched the tax police–particularly to foreigners, who served as convenient scapegoats. Faced with a huge tax bill and the end of their dream of instant wealth, Brzezinski and his fiancee abruptly resigned from their jobs and fled. Hardly an uplifting ending to Brzezinski’s story, but a fitting one. In the wake of the economic crisis, there were recriminations all around, and many Westerners deserved to squirm. Brzezinski convincingly argues that this should not deflect criticism from where it belongs. “The truth of the matter is that no one lost Russia but the Russians themselves,” he writes. The sad part, though, is that Russians who never called the shots on anything or had any possibility of fleeing have to live with the consequences.