Boris Jordan of Sea Cliff, New York, was the brash, go-getting face of American investment in post-Communist Russia over the last decade. Arriving in 1992 to head up the customary expatriate phalanx of slackers and profiteers, the twenty-six-year-old NYU graduate made millions for CS First Boston by buying up Russian privatization vouchers, and then became a major player in facilitating the notorious "loans-for-shares" auctions in which a few insiders fleeced the country of its largest industrial companies. Despite these large-lettered signs of unsavoriness, the New York Times and The Economist gave the "wunderkind" financier rave reviews, while others praised his philanthropic work in financing a monument to brutal eighteenth-century generalissimo Aleksandr Suvorov. Now, with Jordan's appearance as the frontman for the Kremlin's takeover of Russia's sole privately owned national television network, America's disastrous involvement in Russia has grown farcical without, unfortunately, becoming any less tragic.

Earlier this month, as NTV's founder Vladimir Gusinsky fought extradition charges in Spain, Jordan was appointed to head the network. Twelve days later, he took the headquarters -- where workers had been staging a sit-in protest -- in a predawn raid, and then watched as Gusinsky's influential Segodnya daily was shut down and the entire staff of the newsweekly Itogi, which was actually turning a profit, was fired. Jordan's continued insistence that this was all just wholesome free-marketeering would be boilerplate propaganda if he didn't seem so earnestly and dangerously to believe it. What's more remarkable is that his logic is widely shared by American journalists. Jordan claims that NTV, which was sharply critical of the Russian slaughter in Chechnya, could not be independent under the oligarch Gusinsky. This conviction has been duly passed on by American reporters, who seem to believe that all our own corporate-owned media outlets were actually formed by spontaneous meetings of the citizenry in the public squares. The Kremlin has always known us better than we knew ourselves, and apparently figured that if they were going to destroy their only decent television station, they might as well let an American do it -- after all, no one who speaks American can be bad. But they could hardly have anticipated the positively ginger references to Jordan simply as an "American-born financier," as if he had just flown in from Houston for the weekend; or the soft, "it's-more-complicated-than-that" coverage in the weeks before the final takeover; and who among them could have predicted that the New York Times' Moscow correspondent would deliberately muddy the waters last week by referring to journalists loyal to the Kremlin as "dissidents"?

We should probably not overestimate American culpability for the devastation wrought on Russia, but if we have the names we should name them. Upon taking a city, generalissimo Suvorov would allow his soldiers three days in which to do with it whatever they pleased; Jordan and his cohorts have had ten years. As the fun-loving Yeltsin-Clinton duo recedes into fond memory to be replaced by the sinister mediocrities Putin and Bush, the party, as those post-Soviet T-shirts used to say, is over. The two new presidents both had a perfectly nice Cold War, and wouldn't mind going back. Thus Putin clamps down on dissent, and the United States issues stinging criticism of the NTV takeover only after the deed is consummated (the American reaction to the takeover was described by a high-ranking Russian diplomat on April 6 as "quite balanced"). And since people, unlike presidents, cannot merely retire to their privatized dachas but must go along to get along, we have the spectacle of Boris Jordan, American-born financier, promising "strategic international investors" to a populace that with his help has suffered the largest regressive redistribution of wealth in human history -- though maybe the trickle down is just around the corner.

One of the millions of people in Russia to get screwed by Jordan was another American-born financier by the name of Bill Browder, grandson to Earl Browder, head of the American Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s. Grandpa Browder invented the Popular Front slogan, "Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism," and one only hopes that Jordan, himself the grandson of a Russian White Army officer, is not the face of twenty-first century Americanism. Here, after all, is a man who in April 2001 makes pious references to his superior business model and speaks of ushering in a "truly independent" media. You almost get the sense that Russia no longer breeds fanatics, but we do; that Jordan is not Putin's cynical, media-age Pétain, but a True Believer; that, lacking independent media outlets, he has managed somehow not to hear the news confirmed beyond doubt by the Russian experiment of the past ten years. To paraphrase the triumphalists of 1991: Capitalism just doesn't work.