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Vetrimaaran

• Born September 4 , 1975 · Cuddalore, Tamilnadu, India
• Vetrimaaran is an Indian film director, screenwriter and film producer, who works in the Tamil film industry. Vetrimaaran made his directorial debut with the Polladhavan. His second feature film Aadukalam won six National Film Awards. He produces films under his production company, Grass Root Film Company. His movie Visaranai (2016) was selected as India's official entry to the Academy Awards.His film Asuran (2019) was named as the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Tamil. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Raju
• Children Poonthendral
• Parents V Chitravel Megala Chitravel

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Ranking Vetrimaaran Films — From Polladhavan to Viduthalai Part 1

Ranking Vetrimaaran’s films — excluding the short films he made — can feel like picking a winner from a competition of despair. And yet, because of the artistry, his films end up challenging his own filmography; building on his flaws, adopting newer visual languages to express older tropes of a violent world. 

Beginning with Polladhavan (2007), his films increasingly hold you in a brusque, violent, and breathless chokehold. Visaranai (2016), his third and most celebrated film, which was even sent to the Academy Awards as India’s nomination, is best described as a relentless marathon of brutality. Every time you think the film has let go, like steam released from a pressure cooker, the plot tightens into lashings and screams.

That none of this violence feels gratuitous is because of how normal violence feels in the world Vetrimaaran creates on screen. When characters die, they just do. When they are violated, they just are. Is this violence repetitive? Yes. But does it feel repetitive? No, because his films are not hinged on stylized violence. He doesn’t need to find innovative ways to stage it, since his films are about the contexts in which violence begins to feel like an everyday phenomenon — brutal but, like air, everywhere. It is these contexts that keep changing — from Madurai to Vada Chennai (North Chennai), Andhra Pradesh to the forested hills of Tamil Nadu — and the violence remains unsettlingly natural to all of them. 

6) Polladhavan (2007)

The opening credit of “non-linear editor”, the voiceover narration, and the opening shot yanking you into a flashback in Polladhavan — Vetrimaaran’s debut film is preoccupied with time flipping over itself, bending, contorting, staring at a bloody present and then tracing backwards to how we reached this bloodbath. The film follows the fallout after its happy-go-lucky protagonist Prabhu (Dhanush) loses his bike, and comes in contact with first an insecure underworld and then the inefficient blackhole of the police station.  There is a visual recklessness, almost a disenchantment with stillness in the film. When the image does become still, it is usually like a jerk — either a photograph or a forceful pausing of the frame. Here is a director who refuses to be bound by conventional framing and narrative. He will bung in two narrative voiceovers — what Preston Sturgess called “narratage”. He will place the camera between two vessels on the gas, the foreground of coffee being flipped from tumbler to tumbler, with Prabhu entering from behind. 

Polladhavan is dated in the sense that you see a director struggling with his style and the template that he wants to both tap into and wreck open — the grating dream songs of love and amorous celebration in a disco, for example. Vetrimaaran himself said in an interview with Film Companion , “From Polladhavan , I learnt I should never make a film like that.”

5) Aadukalam (2011) 

We begin in the present, but return to it only in the last half hour of this film. Karuppu (Dhanush) is a masterful cockfighter, but the Othello-like machinations of jealousy lead his mentor (played by V.I.S. Jayapalan) to exact violence by slowly chipping away at Karuppu’s reputation through gossip and cross-speak. And yet, as Karuppu’s fortunes balloon, his love for his mentor is never challenged. His mentor’s rejection of him never translates to Karuppu’s resentment. It is the kind of mythological devotion Ekalavya showered on Drona — one incapable of rancour. Blind love, as director Vetrimaaran notes in an interview with Film Companion , can be most dangerous.

The “centrepiece” — where Karuppu has to make his cock fight, not once, but thrice in the dust-flung competition,— is a grunting, unending tapestry of tension. It cemented Vetrimaaran as a director with a vision that drew from the well of Cine Madurai violence while cutting against it, stamping his distinct visual style, his trademark panting exposition in the beginning and his casual irreverence towards heroism. In the first “action scene” Karuppu is given, the camera is static, staring at the fight like a spectator, watching as Dhanush’s lithe frame tries to pummel the goons.

Aadukalam ends with Karuppu escaping the scene with his Anglo-Indian lover (Taapsee Pannu), not wanting to explain himself to those who have misunderstood  him or been manipulated into believing incorrect things about him. It’s a rare, mature narrative closing that shows a protagonist who is okay being thought of as wrong, even though he was wronged. If that means keeping the memory of his mentor — who orchestrated the manipulation — unsullied, so be it. 

4) Visaranai (2015)

Visaranai felt like an aesthetic sharp-turn for Vetrimaaran, showing us that as a director, he is capable of patient storytelling, linear storylines; neat, spare flashbacks, that unfold at the pace of life, without sizzling it up or slurring it down. The only throbbing background score in the film is that of ominous rain and crickets.

Perhaps, because the film is based on events that are true and shocking, Visaranai looks as though it is “captured” and not “shot” as a film (look at these violent words used to describe cinema). It does not even have that “centrepiece” moment of bloodshed that Vetrimaaran usually places carefully somewhere in the middle. It does not need it. The film, based on accounts of police custodial violence — first in Andhra Pradesh to poor Tamil Nadu migrants, then in Tamil Nadu to a white collar auditor — yanked from M. Chandrakumar’s novel Lock Up , is brimming with blood. The centrepiece, if anything, is that moment of quiet, of silence, of hope, that comes in little snatches before it is pulled away. 

The cinematic virtue of this film is its relentless violence which never feels gratuitous. What differentiates one from another? Here is violence treated as life — without drama, without emphasis. A rare restraint that nonetheless produces horror unlike in another film — by Vetrimaaran or anyone else. 

3) Vada Chennai (2018)

With Vada Chennai , Vetrimaaran returns to the titular North Chennai where he shot his debut film. This time, however, there is more blood, more history, and more politics, and a richer, denser world full of human foibles and fumbles. The detailing is more vivid — like prisoners snorting lizard tails to get high. The violence is more structural — it telescopes its attention on a neighbourhood over time, not a group of friends like in Visaranai .  

Like Aadukalam , Vada Chennai starts with bloodshed, which it returns to in the last half-hour. Unlike Aadukalam, this structure feels perfunctory, because the beginning is almost forgotten in the blitzkrieg of rat-a-tat action centred around Anbu (Dhanush), a sincere carrom player, who gets caught in the crossfire of a gang war that he further curdles and erupts. 

This is a hypnotic movie, moving across time, back and forth, sometimes a flashback within a flashback. If you pause the film, turn and ask what year the events are taking place, it takes a moment because of how much is churning in the story. The death of M.G. Ramachandran and Rajiv Gandhi are used as temporal walking sticks to help us wade through the film. The original cut for Vada Chennai was 5.5 hours long, and the reason we feel scenes end abruptly with moments often collapsing as they begin, is because of the unsparing edit to bring it down to 2.5 hours. The action, the relentless throw of context, dialogue, and exposition, keeps you afloat, as though you were being swept away in an furiously rushing river. 

What sets Vada Chennai apart is not just Anbu as an ambivalent hero who is swept into heroism by circumstances, but a hero who is unsure of who is right and who is wrong. He expresses this moral dilemma to his wife in a moving scene. There is a sense that if this film was narrated from another perspective, it might easily flip the moral labels we have slapped on characters. That a film allows its characters this latitude is a triumph of an expanded, exploded imagination — both moral and literary. 

2) Asuran (2019)

Both Vada Chennai and Asuran are, perhaps, the most cinematic of Vetrimaaran’s films — with a slow-motion pay-off that belongs to the masala template, lodged comfortably alongside the various Vetrimaaran-isms. Both insert their intermission after a rousing action sequence that disarms you with its style and emotional punch. However, while Vada Chennai is impatient in its storytelling — by narrative design and editorial desperation — Asuran digs deeper. 

The first shot of the film, of a moon among milky clouds, crumples when feet are placed over it — we realise that we were seeing a reflection of the moon over still water, which is now being trampled over by escaping feet, that of Sivasaami (Dhanush) and his son Chidambaram (Ken Karunas). Chidambaram has just hacked the man who murdered his elder brother — an act of vengeance that dislocates his family, who are now fugitives. 

Asuran perfects a lot of Vetrimaaran’s pursuits — the mass film without the mass conventions. There is no hero entry scene. There is, instead, the intermission block. There is no hip dangling love. There is, instead, trauma and affection. Humour does not exist, distilled in the form of a separate character, like a court jester. It is baked into the exchanges. There is no beauty, no polish. There is a harsh abruptness with which scenes transition. And yet, Asuran has packed in it the most potent scenes of grief and redemptive violence. It is Vetrimaaran allowing his films to char your heart, not just your senses. The second half gives the origin for Sivasaami’s docile nature, one that he has arrived at after a youth of bloodshed that left him orphaned and without love. This mirroring of the two halves is another beautiful Vetrimaaran-ism — from the slippers, to the heroism, to the tragedy that culminates in an escape. It is easy to dismiss this film as templated, but there is a reason templates have survived the onslaught of genre, taste, and time shifts. That it is predictable does not take away from what an artist can do with and within that predictability. Asuran is Vetrimaaran’s most emotionally staining — not draining, but staining — film; its violence lingering as hurt, not horror. 

1) Viduthalai Part 1 (2023)

In one sense, Viduthalai is the culminating artistic collaboration between Vetrimaaran and cinematographer Velraj, who has lensed all of Vetrimaaran’s films except Visaranai . The opening shot of around 10 minutes takes us, in one sweeping, single take, through the debris of a train bombing. The sheer audacity of the scene, the lubricated ease with which the camera slides, both vertically and horizontally, sets the stage for Kumeresan (Soori), a kind-hearted police officer who has been sent to the forested hills as part of a police force that is trying to weed out an extremist group. It invokes awe while depicting horror. The dense prologue, the unfussy heroism of Vetrimaaran are both here. The politics is just as long winded and stiff — like how Vada Chennai questioned development, here, too, the story hinges on how the state uses development as a cover for profiteering; the police, here, too, are brutal beasts. Love comes as a reprieve — both to the character and the narrative. 

But what marks Viduthalai apart is how it makes violence seem so routine, Vetrimaaran isn’t even interested in sharpening it. There is a blunt relentlessness to it. It is not that the director can’t show violence that whips our moral sense of the world. It’s just impossible to fixate and linger on violence the way he did in the previous films. In Visaranai what was happening to a group of friends, in Asuran what was happening to a family, is, in Viduthalai happening to a whole movement of people. Vetrimaaran employs a disenchanted cutting away from these moments before their full impact is even felt, for the impact is not in its festering but in its unrelentingness.

If you notice closely, these rankings are in the order of Vetrimaaran’s filmography, suggesting that, at least artistically, he seems to be streamlining ahead, a swift, sure motion away from where he first began. 

• Entertainment

"He Will Be Deeply Missed": Vetrimaran Pays Tribute to Vetri Duraisamy

The news of Vetri Duraisamy's tragic passing struck a chord with many on February 4th. While traveling with friends in Himachal Pradesh, an accident in Kinnaur claimed his life, leaving a void in the hearts of those who knew him.

A search operation involving various teams, including the SDRF, NDRF, ITBP, and local police, recovered his body on Monday after a post-mortem examination. Divers located him three kilometers from the accident site.

Numerous political leaders and film personalities joined in grieving Vetri's sudden demise. Director Vetrimaran, a close friend and collaborator, organized a condolence meeting at his educational institution, IIFC, to honor his memory.

Sharing their profound connection, Vetrimaran acknowledged, "Vetri often said he learned cinema from me, but in reality, he taught me just as much. One thing we deeply shared was our love for nature and its creatures."

"He was an explorer, driven by a thirst for knowledge and adventure. For the past decade, he was my constant companion. Whether it was sourcing props for my films, musical instruments for our home, or simply finding joy in nature, he was always there, enthusiastic and supportive," Vetrimaran fondly recalled.

"Vetri's belief in supporting others led him to readily embrace the vision of IIFC. Without his unwavering support, the institute wouldn't be what it is today. He also actively contributed to his father's Humanities Foundation, demonstrating his genuine desire to help others," Vetrimaran continued.

He further highlighted Vetri's passion for wildlife photography, stating, "Vetri's curiosity and passion radiated through his award-winning wildlife photography. His recent expeditions to Africa for gorillas and the Arctic for polar bears showcased his dedication to capturing nature's wonders. Tragically, his life was cut short while pursuing his dream of photographing the elusive snow leopard."

"His infectious smile and genuine kindness extended not only to humans but to all living beings. His absence leaves an unfillable void. Life throws these unimaginable challenges at us. He had just completed his first film and was brimming with potential when this tragedy struck," Vetrimaran said with a heavy heart.

"To honor his memory, we plan to initiate awards at IIFC. One award will be dedicated to the first Tamil filmmaker, and another to wildlife photography, both bearing his name. We will share further details soon," he announced.

"Life brings us many people, some fleeting, others leaving an indelible mark. Vetri Duraisamy was the latter. His absence leaves a profound emptiness, but his memory will continue to inspire us," Vetrimaran concluded solemnly.

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• entertainment

Vetrimaaran reveals how Pa Ranjith started a bold movement in the Tamil movie industry

Merry Christmas | Tamil Song - Title Track

Visual Stories

Tamil filmmakers have seldom recognized the untapped potential of Tamil literature. The argument that Tamil cinema is too ‘masala’ for it to borrow from literature doesn’t hold water because Tamil literature doesn’t just have ‘serious’ and ‘deep’ books. It has a humongous repository of pulp fiction. For every intense work like Pa Singaram’s Puyalilae Oru Thoni, there’s one gripping page-turner like Sujatha’s Ratham Orae Niram or Rajkumar’s Kaatrin Niram Karuppu. Thus, it is dumbfounding when stars complain about the paucity of good stories from filmmakers.

However, novel adaptations in Tamil are not entirely nonexistent. It is an age-old phenomenon. Films like Jayakanthan’s Unnaipol Oruvan (which received a National Award in 1965), Rajinikanth ’s Priya (1978), Karaiyellam Shenbagapoo (1981), and Kamal Haasan ’s Vikram (1986) are some of the notable examples. Yet, these are just flashes in the pan. A sustained trend of film adaptations hasn’t happened in contemporary Tamil cinema. But filmmaker Vetri Maaran seems to be giving some hope.

The National Award-winning filmmaker has so far directed five feature films of which two are adaptations of Tamil novels. His upcoming films Viduthalai and Vaadivasal are also based on Tamil literary works, which makes Vetri Maaran, a vital link between Tamil literature and cinema. Not just that, he has also cracked the formula of using serious literature for making commercial films.

Literature and Vetri Maaran

The relationship between literature and Vetri Maaran should have begun way early in his childhood as his mom Megala Chitravel is a noted Tamil novelist. On top of that, the director also studied English literature at Loyola College, Chennai. When he wanted to work with his mentor, prolific filmmaker Balu Mahendra, it was his knowledge of literature that aided him to get the opportunity. In an interview with Tamil magazine Anandha Vikatan, Vetri Maaran shared that Balu Mahendra asked him to come up with a synopsis for a novel as part of his interview process for the assistant director role. Though only his third film, Visaaranai (National Award-winning film and official Indian entry to the 89th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film) turned out to be his first adaptation, one can see that his tryst with written words has been an integral part of his journey.

Making literature mainstream

One of the criticisms against Asuran, Vetri Maaran’s film adaptation of Poomani’s Vekkai (Heat), is that the story was commercialised and unfaithful to the source material. Yet, his mainstream treatment of the novel is what contributed to the film’s commercial success. Vetri Maaran gave a ‘Baasha’ twist to Poomani’s novel, which turned the layered novel into a story of an underdog.

Vekkai is about Sivasamy and his 15-year-old son Chidambaram, who are on the run from the police after the latter kills an upper caste man Vadakooran to avenge the murder of his elder brother. As the dad and son spend around eight days in the forest hiding, the story of oppression and caste politics unfolds. The novel is devoid of heroism and deals with everyday people and their excruciating pain. Vetri Maaran made a significant change in his film by making Sivasamy the ‘hero’ of the film, while in the book, Chidambaram is the ‘protagonist’. Also, Dhanush ’s Sivasamy is an entirely different person from the one we find in Poomani’s book. In addition, the entire backstory of Sivasamy, which depicts him as a rebellious young man, is absent in the novel. This made Dhanush’s Sivasamy a familiar trope of mainstream cinema – a man with a violent past. This vital change made the film accessible to all sections of the audience.

However, critics of Vetri Maaran are also not wrong. A faithful remake of the film aided by Vetri’s brilliant cinematic language would have yielded a far better cinema, but it would have been a gamble when it comes to the business aspect of the film. One should only look at Vetri Maaran’s attempts as a small step in the right direction.

Challenges ahead with Vaadivasal

I am looking forward to seeing what he does with CS Chellapa’s novella Vaadivasal. The story of the novel doesn’t have enough meat for a typical Tamil feature film as it is just a story of events happening in one day at a Jallikattu event. A guy named Picchi arrives at a neighbouring village for the jallikattu event. He wants to tame the frightening bull named Kaari, which killed Picchi’s father years ago. That’s all there is to the story of the novella. Yet, it stands as a brilliant literary piece for its dialect and the depiction of caste politics in the sport of jallikattu. It would make up for a great cinema if Vetri Maaran recreates everything faithfully on screen.

Yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if the director opts for an entire flashback portion for Picchi’s father (Reports, already suggest that Suriya is playing a dual role in the film).  Despite the commercialisation, such adaptations continue to sustain the importance of literature. I mean without the film adaptations, the mainstream would have remained unaware of these literary gems.

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Every Vetrimaaran Movie Ranked and Where to Watch Them

Published on.

Shaurya Singh Thapa

Official JustWatch writer

Known for his gritty crime dramas, underdog heroes, and numerous collaborations with actor Dhanush , Vetrimaaran has established himself as one of Tamil film industry’s leading directors.

If you wish to know more about the Asuran and Vidhuthalai director’s filmography, we have got you covered with a complete streaming guide that leads you to all of Vetrimaaran’s movies and information you need on where to stream them online.

Which Vetrimaaran movies should I watch first? 

The best way to watch Vetrimaaran’s movies is in the same order as their release date, as this sequence would show how the director has only improved in his craft with every passing movie. Vetrimaaran made his directorial debut in 2007 with the action thriller Polladhavan . Dhanush played the lead character, a man whose fate changes after he buys a bike and later gets it stolen. Opening to rave reviews for Dhanush’s acting and Vetrimaaran’s directing, the movie spawned numerous remakes in other languages and popularised the Bajaj Pulsar (the bike featured in the movie) among Tamil youths.

The director and actor joined forces again for the drama Aadukalam . The 2011 hit found Dhanush’s protagonist embroiled in an unattainable romance and a rooster-fighting business. The movie earned Vetrimaaran a National Award for Best Director and Best Screenplay.

While Vetrimaaran’s first two movies addressed social themes like an economic class divide, his political themes got more evident in his third film: a police thriller titled Visaranai (also released as Interrogation). The gruelling social drama revolves around the fates of two men who are forced to confess to a crime after they are locked up by the cops. The film won a National Award for Best Tamil Film and also opened much debate and discourse over the ethics of the police force in Tamil Nadu.

Visaranai’s success opened the avenues for more ambitious projects like the period gangster epic Vada Chennai , yet again starring regular collaborator Dhanush. The movie charts an underdog’s journey between rival criminal factions in a fishing community in ‘70s-era South Chennai. Vada Chennai ended on a nail biting cliffhanger, teasing the possibility of a sequel that fans still await.

With Dhanush already starring in several anti-caste dramas, Vetrimaaran cast him again in Asuran. Addressing the oppression faced by marginalised castes, Asuran starred Dhanush as a hot-headed lower-caste youth who kills an oppressive upper-caste landlord. The ensuing chaos made for a violent, powerful, and relevant watch. As is the case with many Vetrimaaran films, Asuran also earned the National Award for Best Tamil Film. 

Why is Vidhuthalai Part 1 Vetrimaaran’s best movie to watch? 

Intending to direct a two-part saga next, Vetrimaaran directed Vidhuthalai Part 1 . Set in the 1980s and inspired by real-life politics of the era, Viduthalai explores the conflict between the police and a separatist group. However, neither side is good or bad as Vetrimaaran’s story explores the morally grey areas of the policemen and their atrocities as well. Boasting impressive performances by Vijay Sethupathi and Soori, Vidhuthalai is a gripping political thriller.

Where can I watch the best Vetrimaaran movies online? 

Below you can find the latest streaming information for every Vetrimaaran movie. This includes every offer for viewers in India today.

Viduthalai: Part I

Kumaresan, a police constable, gets recruited for an operation implanted to capture Perumal Vaathiyar, who leads a separatist group dedicated to fighting against the authorities for committing atrocities against innocent village women in the name of police interrogations.

Vada Chennai

A young carrom player in North Chennai becomes a reluctant participant in a war between two feuding gangsters.

The teenage son of a farmer from an underprivileged caste kills a rich, upper caste landlord. How the pacifist farmer saves his hot-blooded son is the rest of the story.

Pandi and his friends, immigrant workers in Andhra Pradesh, are picked up by cops for a crime they never committed. And thus begins their nightmare, where they become pawns in a vicious game where the voiceless are strangled by those with power.

Pettaikaaran is famous in his town for an impeccable track record of successes in rooster fights. When one of his aides, Karuppu, goes against his word in a fight, it leads to an enmity between them.

Polladhavan

Prabhu is dejected when he learns that his bike has been stolen. He decides to find the people who stole the bike, but lands in trouble when he realises that his bike has been used to transport drugs.

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Alexander Pichushkin, Russia's Chessboard Killer

The cold-blooded killer's goal was to kill enough people to fill a chessboard.

• Photo Credit: Murderpedia

Russian serial killer Alexander Pichushkin knew at a young age that he was destined to murder. He was only a teenager when took the life of his first victim in 1992, pushing a boy out a window to his death. Of his first murder , Pichushkin said, “It’s like first love, it’s unforgettable.”

After keeping his impulses at bay for several years, in the early 2000s, Alexander Pichushkin embarked on a gruesome murder rampage that he turned into a twisted game. Pichushkin was a very good chess player. The Russian killer wanted to claim 64 victims: the number of humans it would take to fill every spot on a chessboard. Pichushkin’s bizarre quest led him to take the lives of nearly 50 confirmed victims before his capture in 2006.

Related: 9+ Creepy Stories to Make You Never Want to Go Outside Again  

Pichushkin was an outsider as a child, and it was his beloved grandfather who introduced him to the game of chess. Pichushkin became a very good player, and he would face off against grown men in Moscow’s Bitsa Park. When his grandfather passed away, the chess prodigy and future killer took the death badly, and he turned to drinking large amounts of vodka to help dull the pain.

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In 2001, Pichushkin began to kill in earnest, primarily targeting homeless and elderly men. Pichushkin would ask the men to drink vodka with him in Bitsa Park, often claiming to be mourning the death of his dog. Once the unsuspecting victims were intoxicated, he would bash their heads in with a hammer or another blunt object. A broken vodka bottle pushed into the skulls of the dead men became Pichushkin’s calling card. In addition to homeless and elderly men, he also killed some women and at least one child. By 2006, Russian authorities knew they had a serial killer on their hands. The residents of Moscow lived in fear of the mystery murderer known as the “Bitsa Park Maniac.”

Related: Gone In the Dark: The 40-Year Hunt for the Golden State Killer  

Pichushkin’s years avoiding police scrutiny came to an end in June 2006. On June 14, a co-worker of Pichushkin’s, 36-year-old Marina Moskalyova, was found dead in Bitsa Park. The day before she died, Moskalyova had told her son she was going on a date with Pichushkin, writing down his name and number in case of emergency. Additionally, police discovered a metro ticket in her coat, which led them to review surveillance video of the Moscow metro that showed footage of Moskalyova walking with Pichushkin. Police raided Pichushkin’s Moscow apartment , and he was arrested.

Pichushkin stunned investigators when he said that he had killed not only Marina Moskalyova, but a total of 60 other people over the past several years. The killer also explained to authorities about his chessboard murder fantasy – by the time he was taken in, 61 of the chessboard’s squares had been filled in. Pichushkin was found guilty of 48 murders, so many that Russia considered reinstating the death penalty. He was ultimately sentenced to life in prison in 2007, with the first 15 years to be served in solitary confinement.

Today, Alexander Pichushkin is 42 years old. He remains in, and will spend the rest of his life in, a Russian prison.

This story was first published on did you know?  

Featured photo: Murderpedia

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'I see myself as Russia's true believer'

Remember the old John Major joke - the man who ran away from the circus to become an accountant. You can tell it about Bill Browder, too. In fact, he tells it about himself. His grandfather, Earl Browder, was head of the US Communist party in the middle of the last century and twice ran for president; his grandmother was a Russian intellectual; his father is a left-leaning maths professor. Browder joined a bank.

"I'm the rebel in my family," he insists. "But for me rebellion wasn't getting tattoos or following rock bands around the world; it was going to business school and becoming a businessman." A highly successful businessman - his company, Hermitage Capital Management, has $4bn worth of investments in Russia and is rated as one of the best-performing hedge funds in the world. "If you had invested $1,000 when we set up 10 years ago, it would be worth $23,000 today," he tells me proudly. (If only.) He has made a packet, and has the monogrammed shirt cuffs to prove it.

But how could the grandson of a leading communist and the son of a man who spent the 1950s being barred from university posts because of his leftwing politics end up running a hedge fund? "I was the younger of two sons," he explains. "My brother was a child prodigy who was obviously going to follow in the family tradition and become an academic [he is a physics professor]. As the second son often does, I chose to rebel and decided early on that I wanted to go into business. I did well academically but in areas that were considered off limits to well-brought-up Browders. I wanted to do something that I could excel at in my own way. It was never just about making money. When I first got involved in eastern Europe , it wasn't considered a profitable place to be."

When Browder went to Moscow to set up Hermitage in 1996, he was retracing the footsteps of his grandfather, who in 1927 had been invited to the Russian capital as the US delegate to the Comintern, the Communist International. There Earl Browder met and married his wife, and it was in Moscow that Bill Browder's father was born. Though he says he has never been interested in leftwing politics, or indeed politics of any persuasion, the arch-capitalist of the family is closer to his communist forebear than you might think.

Browder, who studied economics at the University of Chicago and did an MBA at Stanford Business School, admits that his family found it difficult to accept his conversion on the road to Wall Street. "They never really wholeheartedly embraced my pursuit of business. But in my family excellence in whatever field is applauded, and I would hope my achievements are at a level that they would approve generally."

It was at Stanford in 1989 that Browder, now 41, made his decision to specialise in Russia - and it was a conscious choice to follow his grandfather's example, albeit from a radically different perspective. "I thought, 'I come from this long line of communists, my grandfather had gone to Russia and met my grandmother, I'm going to use my business skills in some way connected to eastern Europe.' That was the year the Berlin Wall came down. I would have done it even if the Berlin Wall hadn't come down, because you have to go with your passion, your roots and your heart. But all of a sudden the Berlin Wall came down and there were opportunities to do things in eastern Europe."

He isn't just crowing about making pots of money; in his own way, Browder seems as driven by ideology as his grandfather. Browder's obsession is "corporate governance" - cleaning up Russian business practice and outlawing corruption. His relentless pursuit of transparency over the past 10 years has earned him many friends in the west - he is the darling of the business press - and just as many enemies in Russia, mainly businessmen who had enjoyed the fruits of opacity. Now, one of his enemies has got even - by getting Browder banned from the country.

Last November, Browder was on a routine flight back to Russia when he was stopped at Moscow airport and told his visa was no longer valid. He had been deemed an "enemy of the state" and has not been allowed back into Russia since. Browder assumes that one of his commercial enemies - he shows me a lengthy list of suspects - had called in a favour at the interior ministry. High-level lobbying is under way to get the ban lifted and even Jack Straw has got involved - Browder holds a British passport, having lived here since 1989. He is a prominent supporter of Putin and hopes the president might eventually respond to the lobbying.

Despite the ban, Browder remains chipper. "I'm a very tough guy. I can take anything they throw my way, and in six months' time I'll be the one on top in this whole thing."

Browder must have been tough to survive in the 1990s, when he faced both the economic implosion of 1998 that saw most western investors quit Russia and the wrath of the oligarchs. Then it wasn't a ban that was the danger but a bullet in the head. "I used to have to travel with a team of bodyguards," he says. "I was afraid someone would shoot me or blow me up, and I think it was a justified fear based on what has happened to other people in Russia."

The bodyguards turned out to be superfluous, but there were plenty of other examples of harassment. "What happens when people are not happy with you is that they try to retaliate. We've had our phone lines bugged, been victims of spurious lawsuits, and faced all sorts of investigations." He points me to a website that specialises in commercial harassment - "quality and reliability guaranteed!" But things are gradually improving - "We're well into the transition from horrible to bad in Russia," he says and, accentuating the positive, he thinks the latest ruse to block him is a sign of progress. "If you have visa problems, that shows they've reached the level of western sophistication."

It was a lack of western interest that confronted Browder when he undertook his first forays into the former Soviet empire. He joined investment bankers Salomon Brothers in London and tried, without much success, to get them interested in investing in Russia, where state assets were being sold off dirt cheap. "They thought I was out of my mind. It was like investing on Mars or something. My credibility was sinking and sinking until the point where I was really on the ropes career-wise." He was rescued by a call from a colleague in New York who decided there was money to be made on Mars and gave him $25m to play with. Within a year it was worth five times that and he suddenly found himself very popular. Then, in 1995, the legendary financier Edmond Safra (who died in 1999) suggested they set up an investment fund headed by Browder in Moscow. Hermitage was born, and enjoyed spectacular success in its first year before plunging amid general financial collapse in Russia in 1998.

"It was at this point that I discovered shareholder activism," says Browder, "because in 1998 the Russians no longer had any reason to behave themselves. All of Wall Street had shut up shop as far as Russia was concerned. I realised that the only way I could survive if the oligarchs were misbehaving was to fight them in their misbehaviour, and that's when I started this whole corporate governance thing. It wasn't a business strategy at the beginning; it was a survival strategy in the middle."

He says the oligarchs were destroying Russia and that only when Putin came to power did things start to improve - for all the population, not just wealthy western investors. "If these enormous companies are not misusing assets for the benefit of the management and pay their taxes, then their taxes are used to provide public services. It's win-win all round. The worst thing you can have is the situation you had in the 1990s, when 22 individuals got control of 40% of the country from the state and then took all of the money away, so nobody else got anything. As a result, professors had to become taxi drivers, policemen had to become security guards for the mafia, nurses had to become prostitutes, and the whole situation deteriorated into anarchy."

This, he says, underpins his support for Putin. "I saw what life was like under the oligarchs. It was like Somalia; it was chaos. Sometimes you need a strong man to pull together a country. Russians can objectively say that their lives are much better now - the average person's income is five times higher than when Putin came to power. Of course, there are unpleasant aspects to the system of governance - you can't have pluses without minuses. But the pluses in Russia far outweigh the minuses, and as they get richer hopefully they can have a less autocratic system."

Despite his visa "blip", Browder's zeal for contemporary Russia is unwavering. "I see myself as Russia's true believer. This is a bump in the road; there are a lot of bumps in the road. One would be unrealistic to expect a smooth transition after 70 years of communism, but I'm optimistic. We are winning the battle to clean Russia up. There was an article in the Moscow Times last week saying they should have given me a medal, not taken away my visa."

Whether the late Earl Browder would agree with his grandson's vision of a capitalist nirvana is, of course, a moot point. But Browder Jr likes to believe that, in a way, they are on the same side. "One thing that would make him proud is that I've been fighting against injustices caused by big businessmen. That's where we have the common thread in our genes."

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