Like many others in their generation, their characters are coming to terms with a past whose message is crystal clear and a present that is murkily ambiguous.
What is the extent of his personal fortune (probably huge) and how exactly did he spend his years in the St Petersburg bureaucracy (murkily)?As the authors point out, witnesses and those who investigate these mysteries tend to end up dead.
ABL's reputed expertise in the waters that flow murkily between officialdom, politics, business and intelligence has given the Czech language a new word: abelizace.
Getting together with them means a monthly dinner at the office, rather than an evening at the Four Seasons or a strip club.The likes of Portales (though not independent firms with a business model based on subscriptions) still have one thing in common with the big firms: they are rewarded murkily, through trades given to them by institutional clients rather than with straight cash for research.
The soberest hope is that the businesslike Mr Kasyanov may try to nudge his government away from the worst habits of the past.What else will he manage in the Russia murkily emerging under President Putin?
Nor are state authorities keen to take on responsibility for something as murkily intractable as urban government.Because it became notorious, East St Louis in the end demanded the state's attention.
The biggest are state-owned, and operated murkily.
A country will find it easier to contemplate the death of its young soldiers if they are going to help a familiar, nearby people than if they are being sent to fight in some murkily remote corner of the world (compare a western intervention to rescue refugees from a disintegrating Algeria with, say, an expedition to free Irian Jaya from Jakarta's rule).
Seen another way, he was an opportunist using a murkily obtained fortune, loosely estimated at up to £6 billion, to topple Georgia's pro-Western government and move it closer to Vladimir Putin's Russia.Police are treating his death, apparently from heart failure, in his closely guarded Surrey mansion on February 12th as suspicious, at least for now.
More murkily, some Russian weapons seem to be finding their way to eastern Ukraine, perhaps including an Igla rocket system that was used to shoot down a military aircraft on June 14th, killing almost 50 soldiers, and a handful of Soviet-era T-64 tanks.
Neither Cash for Questions, nor Labour's millionaire donors, nor any of the other similar upsets, has done anything to unravel a political culture with friendship, influence and PR murkily entwined.
