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So one of the great things about working in New York City, there are many great things.
You get to take the subway all the time.
Yeah, that's not one of them.
Now.
I do actually like the subway. You get around pretty quickly, But it is the access you get to book parties that you get to go to, and that includes one for our next guest, who is a New York Times bestselling author, biographer and a prolific writer a business management trends of which he has joined us before to talk about. But he is at with his first work of fiction, written some thirty years ago, set in nineteen ninety one Moscow,
a year when the Soviet Union was dissolved. And I have to say, in kind of reading again in for this, I was googling that year and the Soviet Union. I kept coming up with a Metallica concert that played in Moscow for the first time ever. It was like one point six million people. I think it was an open air concert, but it was a year in time when it seems scot and the former Soviet Union would be on a very different front and a much more democratic track.
It was supposed to be the end of history.
Yeah exactly, or a new chapter.
Yeah right.
Journalists and author Kevin Maney joins us now in our Bloomberg in Director Broker Studio to talk about his first work of fiction. It's entitled Red bottom Line. It is about the Soviet Union back in the nineteen nineties, but again a work of fiction. So nice to have you back on with us.
How are you good. Yeah, this is great. I'm glad to be here.
Well, I'm really glad to have you here. And I know at the party it was we talked about the book and stuff, but I want you to share with us with our audience. It is your first work of fiction, written about three decades ago.
Right. Well, So the background story is that in the late eighties and early nineties, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating in the East Block and the Iron Curtain was coming down and all that stuff was happening, I was a reporter for USA Today and I was covering that as a journalist, and so in the it was just one of these like one set of more kind of history making kind of time when all these crazy stuff
was happening all around me. And so I had this idea that, you know, despite all the stories I've written for the newspaper everything, that I would use that as a setting for a novel. Now I had never written a book before. At that point in time, I was thirty thirty one years old, and so I wrote this a draft of this novel, and then basically did nothing with it for thirty years. But I held on to it. But I held on to it well, so so thirty years later, I actually was writing it when my daughter
was first born. And so thirty some years later, she starts asking me about it. She says, you know, you wrote that novel? Where is it? I'm going like, I wrote it at a floppy disc. I worked perfect, like I've never gonna it turned out that I had a print out of it, like you know, the printouts that were all like to pash together with the polls on the size and stuff. And I pulled out the print out and I started reading it, and I'm going like, wait, this is actually pretty good with a little work.
Why didn't you collect dust on a floppy disc for thirty years?
Though?
Like what stopped you from pursuing.
You know, I didn't know anything about the book business. I sent it to a couple of editors randomly, which is probably dumb. Didn't hear anything back, and I just kind of figured, well, you know, all right, never mind. You know, it's like probably not that good. But then I, you know, I went on and started writing nonfiction books and had a lot of success. I have published nine nonfiction books, all about business and biographies and things like that.
So when I returned to it, you know, I had more of a path and more of a knowledge of, like how to get this thing published.
I think what's interesting is it takes us back to a different era, right And I know at your book party we talked a little bit about it and stuff. But you think about, you know, what our expectations were for a Russia moving forward or a Soviet or what the new Soviet Union or not, you know, the dissolution like they did their first presidential election. Like you just think about what where it was and where it could have gone.
Well that was, you know, and when you read the if you read the novel, because it's you know, it's all real stuff that I experienced. I mean, it's basically a made up story based on real facts of what
was happening. And there was this optimism. There was a sense among young people and there's you know, these young characters in the novel who were all into this idea of like creating businesses and you know, getting into private enterprise and you know, making contacts with Westerners and and there was this incredible optimism that there was something new was going to rise out of this and everybody felt that, right, Yeah, everybody felt that, and you know, and us business people
were starting to go over I you know, I ended up being present at the opening of the Moscow McDonald's.
I was going to talk about that because that's like so iconic from that era, and it was also iconic two years ago around this time. We talked a lot about it because when McDonald's exited the country in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it brought back those images from the early nineties of people waiting in line to try the first big mac.
That's right, yeah, and it was it was. I mean, we forget about it, how but it was this incredible cultural, geopolitical event that McDonald's opened in Moscow, and there were, Like I think there were thirty eight thousand people that went the first day to that McDonald's because they were so hungry for not hungry for burgers, but hungry for like, you know, American stuff.
Well, you know, it's funny. I have a conversation when I was with my husband and we just said, you know, what if we had decided rather than especially if you look at the tensions between US and China today, like if we decided, well, let's work with Russia and let's manufacture stuff there, Like just if we'd made as a as a world, as a you know, generally decided to work more with Russia going forward, Like you just wonder how things might have played out differently.
Well, there wasn't the transition time. There wasn't enough time for enough stuff to happen because pretty quickly, and I experienced this because I wasn't living there, but I was traveling there frequently, right and from the late eighties to around nineteen ninety two, you could actually sense every trip that things were getting like more chaotic, more dangerous, more weird, because you know, there was this sort of transitions of the government from Gorbachev, Yels and Yeltsen was kind of
a disaster. He wasn't really he started handing out whole industries to his friends, which is what the birth of the oligarchs was. And you know, sort of mob activity was running half the economy, and so there was never a chance for this to really catch hold before the Russian society basically got sick of this and was welcoming somebody like Putin to come in and say I'm going
to actually create some order out of this chaos. And then it just all kind of fell apart as terms of being able to connect with the West.
What I think so notable about the novel is that it paints a picture of what could have been in Russia and what many people in the early nineteen nineties thought would actually happen. It's there collecting dust for thirty years before you go and publish it, and here you are publishing it, and it's the complete opposite of what ended up happening, as you just described, right, right, So what was the moment you think it went wrong or went on a different path. Wasn't Yeltsin was?
It was under the y To administration, right, And you know, I mean, look, I never met Boris Elson. But there's lots of reports about him. I mean, you know, the guy was kind of a disaster as a leader, and it just let things sort of fall apart all around him. So what could have been set on a path of creating a more global, western facing country just got derailed. And then you know, and Putin wanted to take it
in a completely different direction once he got aboard. But you know, the point, one of the points you were sort of alluding to here is that if I had sat down to write this novel today, trying to rely on my memory or my notes or something from I could never have captured all the details that I did.
I think one of the even like for me rereading it, one of the magical things about it is that I wrote it in the moment, So I was recalling like all these sort of very fresh, tiny little details about what life was like for individual Russians or for somebody who was trying to run a factory and trying to
transition to capitalism and all these things. And because I was writing it while I was there, those are captured, and then you know, all these years later, now I was just able to put a little bit more shine on them and make it, you know, a more holistic story that works better.
What was that like when you picked it up again, right, because you hadn't read it really in thirty years there is and like to go back there and be like, oh my god, like, yeah, this is exactly what was going on.
Well. What was fun for me was because I had I remember very little of it, so it was almost like I was reading here for the first time. I got I would who is this guy that wrote this thing?
Is actually pretty good? Published?
You know what?
It's fascinating, right, It's like a window back into kind of exactly what you were experiencing.
Yeah, oh I had, I had, so I wrote this little author zone in the beginning that that, you know, after before I thought of doing anything with it. I actually sent it to my daughter and she is she's a journalist and editor herself. So she reads it and she writes back to me and says, you know, Dad, this is really good, but like here I've got like
two pages. No, say you can make it better. But one of the things I thought was funny that she pointed out was so the like, especially the main character, there's kind of this nineties sort of you know, the characters from friends kind of like language and snarkiness that are in the book that she said, like it is sort of inappropriate today, right, and like so if I were writing that book today, like it wouldn't even have that sort of language in it.
But it's emblematic of the time.
It was epblematic of the time.
Right, Yeah, like a time without iPhones and a time that people had to actually you know, make plans to meet in certain places, right.
And you know, make jokes about things that nobody would want to make jokes about it exactly, and stuff like that. Right.
That's a really good point.
Right.
It's just again, it's a snapshot in time, right, and it takes you back there and you realize, okay, the things that have changed and what is appropriate or not. I want to continue the conversation. We're going to do a little bit of news, Kevin. But the one thing I think about is more broadly is I think we think democracy is going to of course always win, and people are going to always want to move increasingly that
decoration in that direction. We've thought it with China, right, with all the Western businesses moving in, and yet here we are and it feels very very different. So I want to maybe dig into that a little bit when we come back. We're going to continue with journalists and author Kevin Maney, New York Times best selling author. I should point out he's here in studio, but we're talking about his first work of fiction. It's entitled Red bottom Line, again taking us back to the Soviet Union in the
late eighties and early nineties. Will continue in just a moment.
I'm not going to all.
Right, yeah, back in the USSR. And that is what we are talking about. Red bottom Line. It's a new book by New York Times bestselling author and journalist Kevin Maney, his first work of fiction, although it was written about thirty years ago, and it is though it takes you back to the Soviet Union in the nineteen nineties. You know, we kind of tease Kevin that this whole idea that we think democracy will prevail, and right now we feel like democracy is under attack globally.
Give us some.
Thoughts, as you've been a journalist, just thinking about kind of what's going on in the world and how democracy continues to be tested, because we think every time a market seems to open up its arms to it, we think, okay, it's just going to continue. And it's not the case. It wasn't certainly in the Soviet Union, it hasn't really been in China, even though a lot of Western companies moved in there, and we thought it would be a different outcome.
Yeah, you know, I mean, I'm not a political expert and go more of a business expert. But and you know, my observation is.
We thought, like the business momentum into these countries, right, would kind of.
I mean, you mentioned McDonald's that was like a seminal moment when it came to the the former Soviet unions embrace of capitalism.
Well, yes, but there was a I think there was an interesting nuance that there was not so much about like this anticipation that Russia or China when you know, in this nineties and we're going to be democratic, But there was this anticipation that there was going to be a legal system, a rule of law, a set of rules that everybody could play by that was not the
whims of a dictator or something like that. That's what's really important to to businesses more than you know, more than the fact that the people are going to vote
for their leaders. The fact that that you know, the opposite of what's happening now in Russia or in China, you know, where she is sort of taking all these these sort of random actions of penalizing tech companies and other you know, and there's an uncertainty, and that uncertainty is what the business you know, business people don't want, you know, less than the idea of pure democracy, right the rules change.
It's funny that you say that we're you know, zekeer like having Chinese ev maker making its debut here in New York and I po it was a big deal here. But part of the questioning with the.
Executive Yeah, it was the CFO right about.
Okay, Chinese government involvement. And that's part of the problem right now, right like we just don't know as investors, and we've seen certainly investors pull back when it comes to China overall of just not knowing do the rules change, especially if you're investing in a business.
Yeah, and and you know, and and there was this, you know, in the in the moment when the book is said, there was this rush into uh into Russia by a lot of businesses McDonald's and Procter and Gamble. There was there was One of the impetuses for me going over in the first place, in fact, was there was you know, the Russian people had never seen much
of anything of American products. And I learned about a convention that was going to happen where all these companies like Procter and Gamble and Unilever or whatever, We're going to show stuff like toothpaste and deodorant, and you know, and and I an enormous convention center where there was all these you know, typical displays of all these little things, and just mobs of Russian citizens coming in and just with bags and trying to grab everything that they could.
But all those companies wanted to go in because they they were anticipating that the economy is going to open up, there's going to be this hunger for Western may products, but also that there was going to emerge out of this, you know, the Gorbachev era, something that was more predictable and stable than you know, under the whims of the former Soviet premiers, that could just basically, you know, order anything to have happened, right, and that was what was important.
And then you know, and then it all fell apart when another sort of dictator like figure came into power and shut that down.
You know, you say you're not a political expert, You're more an expert in business. But I'm still going to ask you some questions about the politics, because you absolutely understand it. We had it on the program a couple of weeks ago.
David E.
Sanger from the New York Times. He's got a new book out called New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's invasion in America's struggled to defend the West, and he argues that you know, we didn't the West didn't see coming post the collapse of the Soviet Union what we see today. We were busy fighting, you know, this war on tear, And in the meantime, China's has the Belton Road initial around the world, and Russia is coming back with its
plans for an empire once again. And I'm wondering if you see any similarities now in twenty twenty four to what you saw what we saw before the fall of the Soviet Union, Like if there is sort of a new kind of axis forming right now between Russia and China.
Well, I mean, it seems like to me like the opposite of what was happening back then. Right, I mean there was this, there was this moment in time and again it's like it's almost like it's so different now that we almost can't believe that it actually was happening. But the in the if you grew up in the nineteen eighties, there was this thing called the Iron Curtains, yeah, which was impenetrable, right, it was, and it was all those Eastern European countries. It was a Soviet Union. China
was a closed nation essentially to the West. So there was this entire part of the world that wasn't even part of the global economy.
But is that happening again, that seems to be we're returning.
That's what there was this, Yeah, So there was this moment in time that was mostly contained in the nineteen nineties really between China and Russia and the Deng Jumping Area era in China, when it seemed like all of that was this. I mean, this was the era when the idea of globalization was birth, because there was this moment in time when it seemed like the whole world
was going to play together. And if the whole world was going to play together, then there was this prospect for a kind of global piece that was never possible before. And in the late nineteen nineties that was sort of the that was sort of where we were, and the economies around the world were absolutely booming, you know, and that was the whole dot com move in the US, and the markets were going crazy. And to me, what
marked the end of that was nine to eleven. Suddenly it just was like this this wayake up call that the world was not playing going to play together, and you know, and then we started to see things roll back in Russia and China through the two thousand and twenty tens, and we are we've kind of moved back to that era when there was this entire part of the world that was operating separately from the rest of US.
Yeah, it's it's kind of fascinating. I do feel like, you know, some of the alliances. We've talked a lot about kind of the Middle East, and I'm lumping a lot in there, but just kind of the amount of money that's coming out of the Middle East and going into so many different areas, whether it's business, whether it's renewables, whether it's sports, and just that how countries, United States and others are picking when to look away because of the money involved, or they needed the need for an
alliance versus when to say, wait a minute, something's not here. It's just it's an interesting time to say the least.
Yeah, yeah, and you know the And there's another sort of sad thing about this too, is it that?
And just got about forty seconds last.
That I'm not rush because I was. I've always written about technology, and so one of the things I sought out in Moscow in the late eighties and early nineties
were these little startups that were starting to bloom. And there were so many smart, incredibly talented, like software people in Russia at the time, and there was this seed of what could have been a global tech industry that came out of there that just got snuffed and either the smart people that had those ambitions came to the US and set up in Silicon Valley, which a lot of them did, or they just sort of disappeared and that never materialized.
Right like what could have been right, very different. Thank you so much. This is what we were I was hoping we could do with you, so thank you so much for five times really appreciating that awesome Kevin Maney, we said New Times best selling journalist and author his book Red bottom Line