Meet William Browder, CEO of the brokerage firm Hermitage Capital which specializes in guiding investment in Russia. Ironically, he’s the grandson of Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1932 to 1945 (the party expelled him in 1946).

As anyone who has seen the Oscar-winning film Reds knows, Russians have a habit of destroying those who try to befriend them, and it seems William didn’t learn that learn that lesson from his father or the movies.

As blogger Robert Amsterdam notes: “For many years, Browder has been one of the most enthusiastic advocates of investment in Russia, bullish and confident even while others have recoiled in the face of increased state interference. Once a well known supporter of President Vladimir Putin, he was also known for his occasional (and naturally in my opinion, misunderstood) public attacks against my client Mikhail Khodorkovsky.”

Naturally, therefore, the Kremlin can’t wait to destroy him. And as soon as he made a few innocuous statements about the need for some reforms in the commercial sector to facilitate investment, and began to appear just a bit too influential in Russian commercial sectors, it moved to do so.

The Moscow Times reports:

Hermitage says the attack began with an inquiry by Moscow tax officials into a Cyprus-based account it managed. Last June, Interior Ministry investigators raided the Moscow offices of Hermitage and its lawyers at Firestone & Duncan, according to court filings by a unit of HSBC Holdings, the trustee and administrator of the fund. They took Hermitage’s corporate seal, tax registration and charter, according to the filings. A month later, Hermitage, once the largest foreign owner of Russian stocks, was defended by lawyers it did not hire in a lawsuit in St. Petersburg that it did not know about, the complaints said. The court ordered Hermitage to pay $367 million, a ruling that has since been reversed, documents show. “None of these events or actions could have occurred, including the falsification of new corporate bylaws and the powers of attorney, without those responsible having gained access to the original corporate documentation and corporate seals seized by the Interior Ministry,” wrote Paul Wrench, a director at HSBC’s Guernsey branch, in a complaint to the Guernsey Financial Intelligence Service dated Feb. 13.

The paper adds more bad news for Mr. B: “Kommersant said that Browder had been charged in absentia with evading more than 4 billion rubles ($169 million) in taxes.” Russian tax laws are so Byzantine, arbitrary and opaque that the Kremlin can charge anyone it likes with “tax evasion” at an time. Ironically, Browder had called for some reforms in this area — but why would the Kremlin want to change a system that’s ever so convenient for dealing with rivals?

It’s surprising to see this much justice come out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. One can only wish him all the best in continuing an aggressive campaign to wipe out all foreigners who seek to profit from the rise of Russia’s neo-Soviet state at the expense of human rights, democracy and international security.

One would think that after the neo-Soviet show trial and jailing of Khodorkovsky, Russia’s leading corporate reformer, and the corrupt desecration of his Yukos oil firm that followed, Westerners would have got the message by now that they have no financial future in Russia. Having been so clearly warned, it’s just about impossible to feel sorry for those about to be pulverized in the meat grinder of Russian authoritarian revival.