Back to 1991: I Cleared Out the Soviet Union

“General Andrei, this train is loaded with five hundred tons of canned Spam and baijiu. A fair trade for that Su-27 gathering dust in your warehouse, wouldn’t you say?” In the bitter winter of 1991, the Red Empire was on the verge of collapse. It was a paradise for adventurers and a graveyard for the ambitious. The ruble had become worthless as scrap paper, gangsters roamed like wild dogs, and the steel torrents that once shook the world were being sold off as scrap metal by the pound. Back in that turbulent era, Jiang Lie started out burdened with enormous debts, but held in his hands a Strategic Military Supply Warehouse capable of devouring anything. On the freezing streets of Moscow, he began by peddling down jackets, gradually reaching for the empire’s core legacy. While Western vultures still had their eyes on oil and minerals, Jiang Lie had already hauled away the entire Red Empire’s fortune! He traded sausages for tank engines; thermoses for state-of-the-art radar; and a trainload of light industrial goods for thousands of top nuclear physicists who had been abandoned! Some called him the “Godfather of Moscow,” saying he controlled half of Russia’s economic lifelines; others called him the “War King,” saying his arsenal was better stocked than those of small nations; but behind the Red Wall across the ocean, his name was a top-secret legend. Years later, when a domestically built aircraft carrier took to the sea and stealth fighters patrolled the skies, Jiang Lie stood in a blizzard outside the Kremlin and lit a cigarette. He smiled faintly. “I’m no oligarch. I merely brought home the children Motherland had lost abroad.”