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As President Trump promotes renewed business ties with Russia, an American investor has a warning: Anyone there can become a pawn.
March 23, 2025Updated 7:32 a.m. ET
A foul cell in a Moscow detention center was about the last place an American businessman named Michael Calvey expected to find himself after spending 25 years building a flourishing venture capital firm in Russia that transformed some tech startups into global brands.
First, beefy agents from the F.S.B., the federal security service, ransacked his apartment before dawn. Hours later he was confined to a holding cell with two other inmates and a filthy hole in the floor for a toilet.
“The cell is stuffy and hot, an oppressive stench hanging in the air as if from accumulated decades of human sweat mixed with the indescribable horrors emanating from the toilet hole area,” Mr. Calvey wrote in a new book out this week called “Odyssey Moscow.” It details his extended ordeal through the Russian court system in a fabricated fraud case initiated in 2019: “In the course of a few surreal, terrifying hours I have morphed from one of the most successful Western businessmen in Russia into a prisoner of the state.”
With President Trump lauding the possibility of “major economic development transactions” between the United States and Russia as he seeks improved relations with Moscow, Mr. Calvey’s fate stands as a cautionary tale about the significant personal and professional risks involved in doing business in Russia, particularly given the arbitrary nature of its courts.
Perhaps no Western businessman promoted foreign investment in Russia more than Mr. Calvey, 57, who helped to forge internet titans from tech startups like Yandex — a version of Google, Amazon and Uber rolled into one — or Tinkoff Credit Systems, one of the world’s biggest digital banks. The firm he founded, Baring Vostok Capital Partners, earned colossal returns.
Then Baring Vostok got mired in a nasty commercial dispute with two dubious Russian partners who were stripping assets out of a bank in a troubled merger. Once, Mr. Calvey’s empty Moscow apartment mysteriously caught fire hours before a dinner involving tense negotiations.
