On the night of July 9, 2004, Paul Klebnikov, the editor in chief of Forbes Russia, left his office in northeast Moscow a few minutes before 10:00 p.m. and walked toward Botanichesky Sad, a Metro station less than a quarter of a mile away. In the fading summer twilight, a Lada 2115 sedan, known in Russia as a Zhiguli, crept slowly behind him.
It was not unusual for Klebnikov to work late. He had moved to Moscow six months earlier to launch a Russian edition of Forbes, leaving his wife and three young children in New York, and the 41-year-old's life revolved around the office.
Klebnikov's magazine had intrigued the nation's new elites. "It wasn't just about business coverage," says James Michaels, the legendary former editor of Forbes, "but also about lifestyle—wine, clothes, travel. He wanted to use the magazine to raise the standards of taste, as well as ethics." A list of Russia's 100 richest people appeared in the second issue and was much discussed in the media—as were the angry responses from several newly minted billionaires who wanted knowledge of their extreme wealth kept private. At that moment, the man on top of the list, Yukos chief executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was facing criminal prosecution, and other business leaders were anxious. One occupant of the list anonymously told the Russian business paper Vedomosti that inclusion was an invitation for a government investigation. Forbes Russia's growing notoriety raised its editor's profile, and Klebnikov was becoming a frequent commentator on Russian television.
As a reporter for Forbes in the 1990s, during the former Soviet Union's tempestuous transition to a free market, Klebnikov was among the first Western journalists to expose the dubious manner in which a handful of men—the self-proclaimed "oligarchs"—came to dominate Russian business and politics. His feature on oil-and-media magnate Boris Berezovsky, later expanded into the book Godfather of the Kremlin, so incensed Berezovsky that he sued Forbes for libel.
But Russia was more than a great story for Klebnikov; it was a lifelong cause. As the scion of Russian émigrés, Klebnikov had been immersed since early childhood in the country's language, history, and culture. "There was an attachment to the place that was very powerful," says his wife, Musa, the daughter of Wall Street financier John Train, whose family had socialized with the Klebnikovs since childhood. "I remember Paul walking up a snow-covered road in upstate New York, reciting Pushkin, or singing loud Russian military marches with the kids. It was a source of joy for him."
