Money doesn’t just disappear. Every stolen dollar must be found – or we will not survive

In this second extract from his biography Alexander Lebedev identifies a third and more brazen form of colonialism, one based on the subversion of elites, teaching them how to manipulate finance and siphon money into offshore centres that benefit Western economies

Who was responsible for the financial crisis of 2008? (Reuters)

All my life I have been fascinated by how people react to wealth, serious money and what it can buy. There was a time when I lived with my parents and brother in a 30-square-metre apartment. For years I darned my one and only pair of jeans. As a boy it took me three weeks to save the seven kopeks needed for an ice cream, and as a student I thriftily collected the deposit on bottles of the cheap alcohol I and my friends drank (which cost a ruble fifty for an 800ml ‘fire extinguisher’). I was far happier then than I was in the noughties.

Even making it on to the Forbes rich list was no big deal. It seems to me that if you have a few thousand dollars a month to cover the everyday necessities (what it is now fashionable to call an ‘unconditional basic income’), then anything above that will not make life appreciably better, and may well make it worse. I find that the only people with a fortune who deserve respect are indifferent to it or, better still, despise it.

We spend a third of our lives sleeping, and asleep everyone is equal in the property stakes. What difference is there between us in the shower, washing our faces, brushing our teeth, combing our hair? We all pay the same for water. Okay, there is social differentiation in the toiletries we buy, but no evidence to suggest that costly creams or lipsticks do anything for us. In fact, we see plenty of examples around which suggest the opposite. Expensive operations to alter lips, noses, breasts or backsides often leave their victims looking not more but less attractive. You can buy sports clothing, but not the shape, the fitness of your body. How well you work out on the treadmill, horizontal bar or weight machine depends not on how much you pay, but on how much graft, sweat and time you put in.