With the encouragement of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, in the late 1980s, Leviev had the impeccable timing to begin doing business in the Soviet Union shortly before it crumbled, and he took advantage of that political watershed to become a major player in the Wild West that was the Russian economy in the succeeding decades. At the same time, he became a close friend of Vladimir Putin and also a Jewish philanthropist unequaled since the legendary Moses Montefiore.