| There were collective sighs of relief in Moscow's banks and securities houses when Boris Yeltsin won a convincing 14% victory over communist rival Gennady Zyuganov in the presidential elections in July. But none were louder, or longer, than those of a small group of US passport holders all of whom were mindful of an incident 79 years earlier when their aristocratic and capitalist grandparents were forced to flee the country after the communists bypassed elections and won the subsequent civil war. They are the White Russians, a group of young professionals who returned to their homeland and whose public face outside Russia has been Boris Jordan, the 30-year-old banker entrepreneur who reputedly made $100 million for CS First Boston in one year, before setting up his own firm, Renaissance Capital. They all come from in or around the same town, Sea Cliff, Long Island a suburb of New York. Some were former school friends, some were tent mates at summer camps, but they all have flawless Russian language skills. The drift back to Russia began in 1992 when the then minister for foreign affairs, Andre Kozyrev, called a meeting in the New York Plaza hotel, where the turnout of 100 young professionals came mostly from the financial sector. |