HE LEANED FORWARD and thrust the papers into my hands. Neatly drawn in black ballpoint pen, the documents displayed what appeared to be official tables of production figures. “I copied the documents exactly so you’d understand them better,” the man, Pavel Sergienya, said in Russian. I looked up at Pavel. A union boss for factory workers, he was stocky and well-built with closely cropped brown hair and the hands of someone who had spent the bulk of his 40-plus years in manual labor. We were in Yekaterinburg, a city in the Urals. I’d flown in from Moscow a few hours…

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