How Watching ‘Déjà vu’ (1990) Could Have Saved LTCM: A Hitman’s Guide to Russian Insanity
A Cautionary Tale for Anyone Who Thinks They Can Do Business in Russia
In 1998, Long-Term Capital Management — a hedge fund staffed with Nobel laureates, former Fed officials, and the certified geniuses of Wall Street — collapsed so spectacularly that the Federal Reserve had to orchestrate a $3.6 billion bailout to prevent the whole U.S. financial system from going down with it. These were the smartest guys in the room, armed with models so sophisticated they’d won the Nobel Prize for inventing them.
Their fatal mistake? Making a bet that should have been perfectly safe — except in Russia, a country where the rules are something from Bizarro World.
Here’s the thing: if any of those quants had watched a 1990 Soviet comedy called Déjà vu, they might have saved themselves — and the rest of us — a lot of trouble. Think Groundhog Day, but the Soviets made it first — and instead of Bill Murray learning to be a better person, it’s a hitman learning that Russia doesn’t care about his plans.
“The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry” — Robert Burns.
The film is a perfect two-hour lesson in why your elegant American assumptions turn to dust the moment they hit Russian reality.
The Hitman
The movie begins in 1925 in Prohibition-era Chicago. The mob’s bootlegging empire hums until one of their own, Mik Nich (Mikita Nichiporuk), sells out the gang to the police — snitches on the whole operation, triggering raids and big losses. But Mik Nich ran to Odessa, USSR, where he sets up his own bootlegging and smuggling racket. The bosses don’t forgive traitors. They decide to hire a top professional: hitman Johnny Polak, fluent in Russian, no-nonsense. They go to his apartment and his mother answers — it’s his day off, he went to the opera. So they go there looking for him.
We find Polak at the opera — Puccini’s Tosca, the final scene where Cavaradossi faces the firing squad. The soldiers aim, the guns fire, the tenor falls. But one of those bullets was real, fired by Polak from somewhere in the house. A hit so clean that a thousand witnesses saw nothing. The mark dies on stage, the audience applauds, and Polak walks out into the night.
Simple assignment — track the rat to where he’s fled, do the deed, collect the payout.
Polak arrives in Odessa disguised as an American entomology professor (studying insects, visiting his “father’s grave” — cover story perfection). He’s efficient, methodical, armed with a plan that works flawlessly anywhere but in Russia.
Then reality hits. The general Russian craziness and Soviet bureaucracy don’t care about efficiency. Endless forms for every move. Officials mistake him for a spy or a VIP scientist, triggering suffocating oversight. Nosy locals, vodka detours, petty functionaries wielding power like life-or-death authority — every step forward gets tangled in red tape and absurdity. Every move Polak makes gets thwarted by some unbelievably crazy thing that nobody from the US could ever dream of — but it’s perfectly normal in Russia. The “easy kill” becomes an endless farce. He can’t execute the contract cleanly because the environment — the country, the system, the people — refuses to conform to his assumptions. In the end, the job spirals into déjà vu loops: frustration, amnesia, and finally another killer showing up to restart the cycle. Chaos wins.
The Dead Souls
This isn’t Soviet weirdness — it’s Russian DNA. Gogol wrote Dead Souls in 1842 and the insanity was already there. The plot: a con man named Chichikov travels the countryside buying up “dead souls” — serfs (slaves tied to a particular plot of land) who’ve died but are still on the tax rolls — so he can mortgage them for profit. Perfectly rational scheme. But every landowner he meets is uniquely, creatively absurd in their own way, every official a petty tyrant, every transaction a surreal negotiation where nothing works the way it should. The scheme unravels — rumors spread, he flees, tries again, gets arrested, flees again. The novel literally ends mid-sentence with Chichikov still running. Think the snake oil salesman in Little Big Man — that guy who keeps turning up missing more body parts each time. Russia just keeps taking pieces off you.
Russia has its own logic. It just seems insane if you didn’t grow up there. And it’s invisible to outsiders until it steamrolls them.
The Quants
Now swap the hitman for LTCM’s quants in 1998. These were the Johnny Polaks of finance: Nobel winners, elite models, perfect hedges. Their “target”? Juicy Russian GKOs — high-yield bonds in a supposedly stabilizing emerging market. Plan: long the bonds, hedge the ruble risk with forwards, leverage massively, wait for spreads to converge. Math said low risk, high reward. In a “civilized” market like U.S. Treasuries, it would’ve printed money.
But they landed in Russia — not a spreadsheet, a sovereign wildcard. When the government defaulted on August 17, 1998 (devaluing the ruble, freezing trades, moratorium on debt), the hedges failed spectacularly. The risk wasn’t the ruble move — it was that Russia could suspend the game: no settlement, no liquidity, no rule of law. Counterparties vanished or couldn’t pay because the system shut down. No enforceable contracts — just policy fiat overriding everything. The country didn’t follow the models: desperate leaders chose survival over honoring foreign bets. The quants assumed if the spread widened too far, it had to snap back. But in Russia, the rubber band doesn’t just stretch — it snaps and hits you in the eye. Correlations spiked, liquidity evaporated, and the “hedged” play turned naked and lethal.
The quants saw the math but not the country. They didn’t grasp that sovereigns in crisis can rewrite the rules overnight — capital controls, trading halts, outright freezes — turning theoretical hedges into vapor. In the U.S., if a contract is breached, you go to court. In Russia, the court is just another player in the game. You can’t model for a referee who decides mid-game that goals now count for the other team.
If those Nobel brains had watched Déjà vu beforehand, maybe one lesson sinks in: Don’t assume the Russian territory plays by your map. When you venture into foreign wildcards — especially places where bureaucracy and politics trump logic — the locals (governments, crises, whims) will grind your perfect plan to dust. Math is blind to culture, desperation, and decrees.
And it’s not just LTCM. Every Western company that set up shop in Russia learned the same lesson eventually — BP, Shell, McDonald’s, all of them. You build your business, you follow the rules, and then one day the rules change and everything you built belongs to someone else. There is a reason Ukraine wanted to be part of the EU and not Russia and the EAEU.
The Moral
Stick to what you truly understand — businesses, ecosystems, or countries you know inside out. Avoid “Russia plays” where the numbers look flawless but the reality is a black box.
Which brings us to the current moment. Donald Trump has been trying to build a tower in Moscow since 1987 — almost forty years of failed attempts. His own son called Russia “a scary place” to do business after visiting six times and seeing the corruption firsthand. The deals keep falling apart.
And now Putin is dangling these great deals for the US in front of Trump.
The moment a Westerner thinks they have a “great deal” in Moscow is the moment they become the protagonist of a comedy.
Watch Déjà vu if you think that’s going to work.
The End.
P.S. If the opera assassination sounds familiar to gamers: yes, the "Curtains Down" mission in Hitman: Blood Money was inspired by Déjà vu.