The bodyguards were hard to get used to. "Thank God, I could fire them," says Bill Browder, founder of the $450 million Hermitage Fund, which has weathered--with dramatically varying results--Russia's turbulent investment market since 1996. "That was when I was fighting a particularly fierce oligarch," he says, recalling his recurrent battles with Russia's corporate chieftains. "Russia has a long way to go, but it's in danger of becoming a much more civil marketplace." And as it does, Browder hopes to cash in big-time as one of the best-known U.S. investors on the Moscow scene.
Browder's grandfather would hardly have approved of...