Introduction

This book is the story of two Russians who forged a relationship in the early years of the Yeltsin era that would ultimately become a bitter feud, played out against the backdrop of billion-dollar financial deals, Kremlin infighting, and international politics. One, the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, has been dead for over a decade. The other, Russian president Vladimir Putin, is very much alive and in February 2022 began a devastating military campaign in Ukraine that has destroyed large parts of that country, killed thousands of Ukrainians, and displaced millions of others. Putin has also turned his own country into a closed fortress, where democratic freedoms and the rule of law, which began to develop during the Boris Yeltsin presidency, have ceased to exist.

Dubbed the “godfather of the Kremlin” by slain American journalist Paul Klebnikov, Berezovsky, a trained mathematician turned successful businessman and media mogul, played an outsized role in Russia after 1991. Worth a reported $3 billion by 1997, he was a winner in the notorious grab for the spoils of the former Soviet state by those who became oligarchs; he engineered the re-election of Yeltsin as president in 1996 and successfully negotiated an end to the 1995–96 Chechen war. Most importantly, he was crucial in Putin’s rise to be elected Russia’s president in March 2000.

By the time Berezovsky said his final good-bye to Putin at a private meeting in the Kremlin in August 2000, he had come to regret his support for the Russian leader. Putin had already begun to dismantle the reforms that Yeltsin had introduced and had instigated criminal investigations against some of Russia’s top businessmen, Berezovsky among them. Facing possible prosecution and imprisonment, Berezovsky fled Russia in October 2000 and later gained asylum in Britain, where he devoted himself—and his fortune—to a highly publicized campaign against the Putin regime.

Just after Berezovsky left his country for good, Russian political commentator Andrei Piontkovsky observed: “The relationship between Putin and Berezovsky is beginning to resemble that of Stalin and Trotsky. This affair risks ending with Berezovsky getting a bullet in the head.”¹ Exiled in Mexico, Leon Trotsky, a former Bolshevik leader who fell out with Stalin, was murdered on the Kremlin’s orders in 1940 after years of exposing Stalin’s crimes. His murder was a stark reminder of the fate that awaited those who opposed the Soviet dictator, no matter where they sought refuge.

More than seven decades later, in March 2013, Berezovsky was found dead, a scarf tied around his neck, on the bathroom floor of his ex-wife’s mansion outside London. Whether Berezovsky’s death was a suicide by hanging, as some—including the Kremlin—claim, or murder, as his family and close friends insist, remains a mystery. The British coroner left the cause of death undetermined. But one thing is certain: In Putin’s eyes, Berezovsky was a traitor. He had accused Putin of despicable crimes. The fact that Putin was indebted to Berezovsky for helping him gain the Russian presidency made Berezovsky even more treacherous to the Kremlin leader. And Putin has long made it clear that he believes traitors deserve death.²

Putin is similar to Stalin in his capacity for revenge. Although his public image is one of a leader who keeps his emotions tightly in check, it is well known that Putin carries deep grudges against those who have challenged him in any way. Maybe this trait, as some have suggested, resulted from Putin’s childhood experience as a boy of small physical stature who had to defend himself against bullies on the back streets of Leningrad’s impoverished neighborhoods. Or perhaps it relates to his career in the KGB, where even the smallest expression of opposition to Communist dogma was considered a threat. Whatever the reasons, Putin has consistently and clearly revealed his vengefulness in comments like the one he made about Chechens in the autumn of 1999, when he vowed to “rub out the bandits in the crapper.” Putin kept his word, launching a brutal military war in Chechnya, which destroyed the capital, Grozny, and caused hundreds of thousands of innocent Chechens to lose their lives.

Numerous killings, or attempted killings, of Putin’s political opponents have been widely attributed to the Kremlin. Following my account of several of these cases in my 2017 book Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder, more targets and victims were added to the list: the GRU (military intelligence) defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter Iulia were poisoned in Britain with a nerve agent, Novichok, in March 2018; Nikolai Glushkov, Berezovsky’s former business associate, was strangled to death at his London home just days after the Skripal attack; and in August 2020, Russia’s most prominent opposition politician, Aleksei Navalny, was poisoned with Novichok during a visit to the Siberian city of Tomsk, an attack that he barely survived.

Berezovsky himself had received numerous death threats during his almost twelve years in British exile. In one case, British police arrested a would-be Russian assailant with a gun in Berezovsky’s London office building. Apparently to avoid a diplomatic row with Moscow, British authorities simply sent the man back to Russia. The continual barrage of Kremlin demands to have Berezovsky extradited from Britain on bogus criminal charges, although refused by British authorities, added to the sense that Berezovsky was under siege. In 2012, after losing a highly publicized legal case in the London High Court against Roman Abramovich, an oligarch close to Putin, it seemed as though Berezovsky was all but vanquished. He allegedly even wrote to Putin apologizing and saying he wanted to return to Russia. Was that enough to quell the Russian president’s thirst for revenge? Or, like Stalin with Trotsky, did Putin need a more final solution to the problem of Berezovsky?

Marina Litvinenko, the wife of ex-FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko—murdered by a dose of radioactive poison—once told me that “with Putin, everything is personal.”³ This goes a long way toward explaining why Putin continued his vendetta against Berezovsky and other political opponents well after he was securely in power in the Kremlin. Berezovsky, arrogant and reckless, was also driven by personal motives in his self-destructive campaign from London to orchestrate Putin’s downfall. But the story of their feud goes beyond a clash of personalities. It is part of the larger story of how Russia descended from a fledgling democracy after the Soviet collapse into what today is the one-man dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. Neither Berezovsky nor others who used their vast wealth to promote Putin’s leadership and later became his victims were heroes. They not only made the crucial mistake of misjudging Putin; they set the stage for the inevitable demise of Russia’s democracy. The “operation successor” carried out by Yeltsin’s inner circle to elevate then FSB chief Putin to the presidency was in large part a cynical Faustian bargain, made to protect Yeltsin’s family and close associates from corruption investigations. The group, including Berezovsky, thought that they would be able to control Putin after he replaced Yeltsin and keep Russia on a democratic path. They were sorely wrong.

Unlike the many Russian oligarchs who chose to ignore Putin’s transformation into a lawless autocrat and gave him their unquestioned support, Berezovsky made determined attempts in exile to reveal the dangers of the Putin regime both to his countrymen and to the West. His warnings were largely ignored. Putin maintained a loyal population by reversing Russia’s economic decline and enlisting the state-controlled media to promote his leadership cult. As for the West, its leaders were incredibly slow to acknowledge that Putin was far from being the democrat he purported to be. In a review of a recent London play about Berezovsky and Putin, Patriots, his longtime aide Alex Goldfarb made this point clearly: “Those of us who, like Boris, watched from the relative safety of London how Putin transformed the freewheeling Weimar Russia of Yeltsin into a police state still cannot fathom how an army of western policymakers could miss those early signals.”⁴

Much of the material for this book comes from the extensive accounts in the Russian media during the period in question, accessed through online archives. I have also relied on Western reporting, biographies of Putin, Berezovsky, and others, Berezovsky’s own writings, and personal interviews with family members and close associates of Berezovsky. Documents from the numerous cases involving Berezovsky and adjudicated in British courts and those from the inquiry into the death of Litvinenko have been additional invaluable sources. I have drawn on my own long experience of research and writing about the Soviet Union and Russia—along with numerous visits there—to interpret these materials and create a narrative that I hope will offer readers new insights into Russia’s recent history. Kremlin politics has always been an enigma, but that is what makes it so fascinating.