Upheaval in Ukraine

The Orange Revolution threw Putin and his comrades for a loop. Ukraine’s president, Leonid Kuchma, had been in office since 1994 and was not running for a third term in the country’s scheduled October 2004 presidential elections. Instead, he was supporting the candidacy of his prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich, the Kremlin’s preferred choice. The main opposition candidate, democratic reformer Viktor Yushchenko, favored closer ties with the West, including NATO and European Union membership, and thus was considered undesirable by the Kremlin. So the Putin team pressured Russian businesses to contribute large sums of money to the Yanukovich campaign and sent advisors to Ukraine to help strategize. In fact, Putin was so intent on achieving a Yanukovich victory that he even traveled to Kyiv on the eve of the election and urged voters to back his chosen candidate.⁴

The Kremlin’s efforts were for naught. After a runoff election in November, Yanukovich won narrowly, but the flagrant voter fraud set off mass protests by Yushchenko supporters, and a second runoff, held in late December, gave Yushchenko a victory with almost 52 percent of the vote, versus Yanukovich’s 44 percent. While for Putin the election was a humiliating defeat, it was a triumph for Berezovsky, who, according to Goldfarb, had contributed around $40 million to the Yushchenko campaign. After the election, he and Goldfarb set up an office of his International Civil Liberties Foundation in Kyiv, which, in Goldfarb’s words, would be used “as a bridgehead for a similar peaceful revolution in Russia.”⁵

Berezovsky was eager to play a role in Ukraine’s new politics and even spoke of moving to the country. He had reportedly pushed Yushchenko into making Ukrainian politician Yulia Tymoshenko his new prime minister and intended to make major financial investments in the country. But he faced strong obstacles. Russia’s outstanding criminal charges against Berezovsky meant that if he went to Ukraine, the Kremlin would pressure Ukrainian authorities to extradite him to Russia, which would place the new government in an awkward position. So the Yushchenko government denied Berezovsky’s request for a visa.⁶ Berezovsky’s financial contributions to Yushchenko’s campaign were also controversial, given his reputation for shady financial deals. In October 2005, Berezovsky met in London with members of the Ukrainian parliament (Verkhovna Rada) who were investigating possible illegal financial contributions to Yushchenko’s campaign. Berezovsky admitted that he had funneled millions of dollars into Ukraine but insisted that the money was to support the democratic process in the country, and not specifically for Yushchenko’s election.⁷

None of these problems stopped Berezovsky from giving advice to the new government in Kyiv, whether sought after or not. In May 2005, he wrote a letter to Tymoshenko, emphasizing that his main goal was to have Ukraine influence political change in Russia. He discussed proposed business projects in Ukraine that would generate profits to be used to further the aims of the Orange Revolution and urged Tymoshenko not to make concessions to Russia: “In general, your biggest mistake—both yours and V. Yushchenko’s—consists in your over-estimation of the power of Putin’s Russia. If you made fewer overtures to Russia … and were more methodical, the regime in Russia could be changed within a year, two years at most.”⁸

Berezovsky felt strongly that, in order to move forward, the new Ukrainian government had to address its past and finally get to the bottom of a crime that had plagued the country for several years: the gruesome September 2000 murder of the journalist and editor Georgiy Gongadze. Fraught with political intrigue, the case had been investigated on and off with little success because it was repeatedly sabotaged by various Ukrainian officials. A key piece of evidence was a recording of a conversation sometime before the murder between then President Kuchma and former interior minister Iurii Kravchenko about getting rid of Gongadze, who had been highly critical of the Kuchma government. The recording had been secretly made by Kuchma’s bodyguard, Mykola Melnychenko, who then fled the country and gained asylum in the United States.⁹

At some point Berezovsky’s people, including Litvinenko and Felshtinsky, contacted Melnychenko and obtained copies of the tapes. Berezovsky, who had agreed to provide Melnychenko with security protection, told Ukrainian lawmakers during the October meeting that his foundation had transcribed some of the tape recordings and handed over copies of tapes and the transcripts to Ukrainian law enforcement authorities.¹⁰ Melnychenko flew back to Kyiv in December 2005 to speak with Ukrainian investigators and members of the parliament. But by this time, he had apparently been pressured, possibly by the Russian security services, to hold back some of his evidence against Kuchma. Melnychenko claimed that the Yushchenko camp had told him to “lay off” Kuchma, and he later split with the Berezovsky group, after accusing its members of falsifying some of his tapes. In the end, Berezovsky’s involvement with the Gongadze case was unsuccessful in helping to expose those behind the murder, which to this day remains unsolved.¹¹

Putin Empowered

Berezovsky’s efforts on behalf of the Orange Revolution must have deeply rankled the Russian president. What Putin and his colleagues doubtless feared was what Berezovsky envisaged—that democracy in Ukraine would be contagious and spread to Russia, a fear that would motive the Kremlin’s military aggression against Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Their deep concern about political threats from abroad was aggravated by the eastward expansion of NATO in March 2004, when six countries were admitted as new members: Bulgaria, Slovenia, Slovakia, and the three Baltic states that had previously been part of the Soviet Union—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

When Putin met George Bush for a summit in Bratislava, Slovakia’s capital, in February 2005, it was clear that their once friendly relationship had cooled and that Putin, who sniped at Bush more than once during their exchanges, had lost interest in cooperating with the West. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice observed, “This Putin was different than the man who we had first met in Slovenia.”¹² The next month, addressing a joint session of the Duma and Federation Council, Putin made his now infamous statement that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest political catastrophe of the century.”¹³ However much Putin had wanted to be a member of the Western leaders’ club when he first became Russia’s president, he now seemed to be convinced that his political survival at home depended on aggressively protecting Russia’s depleted empire and striving to gain hegemony over what Russia had lost in 1991. As Lenin observed, “foreign policy is a continuation of internal policy,” and Putin believed that his ability to control domestic politics depended on being tough abroad.

Liudmila Putina had accompanied Putin to Bratislava, where she spent time sightseeing with Laura Bush and the wife of Slovakia’s president. But her trips abroad with her husband would become less frequent. According to Sergei Pugachev, a banker who was close to the Putins, Liudmila was unhappy about her husband’s re-election: “She said she had agreed to four years, no more than that. He had to persuade her to stay.”¹⁴ In an interview with three Russian newspapers in June 2005, Liudmila lamented that she and her daughters rarely had a chance to talk to Putin: “He doesn’t come home until half past eleven or twelve at night. I tried to persuade him that it is necessary not just to work but also to live … He works too hard. Everyone in the family knows this.” She also said that her involvement in projects as the president’s wife centered around her desire for world peace and communication among different countries: “Probably every woman has a desire to save the world. After all, a woman gives birth to children, and she wants to keep them alive, wants them to live in peace.”¹⁵ Her goals would increasingly diverge from those her husband was pursuing.

To ensure that his cohort was solidly behind him, Putin had made changes at the top. Voloshin, once Berezovsky’s advocate, resigned as head of the Presidential Administration in October 2003, shortly after Khodorkovsky’s arrest. His sympathies with Khodorkovsky and his pro-business orientation had put him at odds with Putin’s crackdown on Russia’s financiers.¹⁶ Dmitry Medvedev, the longtime loyalist from Putin’s St. Petersburg clan, assumed Voloshin’s post. Four months later, the last remaining member of the Yeltsin old-guard, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, was fired along with Putin’s entire cabinet. Kasyanov later became a vocal critic of Putin and joined the democratic opposition. Under Putin he had pushed for much-needed reforms of Russia’s financial system—including further privatization of state enterprises—as well as for an ambitious program of modernizing Russia’s outdated infrastructure, such as roads and rail transport. But he ended up achieving only tax reforms and a lower inflation rate.¹⁷

Putin’s new prime minister, Mikhail Fradkov, had a security background, having served abroad in posts reserved for the KGB, and later as director of the Federal Tax Police. (Putin would subsequently, in 2007, appoint Fradkov to head the Foreign Intelligence Service.) Patrushev would remain as head of the FSB until 2008, while Patrushev’s longtime KGB/FSB subordinate Rashid Nurgaliev assumed the leadership of the MVD, the regular police forces, in 2003. Minister of Justice Chaika swapped places with Prosecutor General Ustinov in June 2006, thus ensuring that Putin’s agenda of criminal investigations would be rigorously followed. In short, Putin continued to have all his bases covered when it came to security and law enforcement, the pillars of his regime.

Berezovsky Throws Caution to the Wind

On January 23, 2006, Berezovsky’s sixtieth birthday, his nemesis Aleksandr Khinshtein, who fed on sources in the Russian security services, published a sensational, damning piece about him. Khinshtein described an interview with Nikita Chekulin, a former director of a Russian scientific institute, who had earlier claimed publicly that he had been recruited by the FSB and had direct knowledge that the FSB had transferred hexogen from military facilities to secret recipients, presumably to be used for the 1999 apartment bombings. Chekulin had made an appearance at the screening in London of Assassination in Russia, on behalf of Berezovsky’s team. He then had a falling-out with Berezovsky and told Khinshtein that the story about hexogen was false and that Berezovsky and Litvinenko had invented it. Also, Chekulin claimed that Berezovsky had fabricated a murder plot against himself in order to gain asylum in the UK.¹⁸

In mentioning a murder plot, Chekulin was referring to the allegations of Vladimir Terluk that he had been recruited to kill Berezovsky in 2003. Like Chekulin, with whom he was acquainted, Terluk seems to have been persuaded by the Russian security services to take back his original story and thus provide further ammunition for a Kremlin disinformation campaign against Berezovsky. Later, in April 2007, the state-owned television channel RTR would feature a program intended to implicate Berezovsky in the Litvinenko poisoning. The program included a taped interview with Terluk (in silhouette under the pseudonym Pyotr), alleging that Berezovsky offered him large sums of money in 2003 to tell his false story to British authorities. In response, Berezovsky filed a defamation suit against RTR and Terluk, and in March 2010 he was awarded a judgment of 150,000 British pounds by a British court.¹⁹

Berezovsky’s tendency toward extreme comments about Putin and the Kremlin tested the patience of British authorities. To commemorate his sixtieth birthday, Berezovsky threw a lavish bash at Blenheim Palace, arranging for a plane to bring thirty of his oldest friends from Moscow to celebrate with his exiled London friends and his family. The next day, apparently roiled by Khinshtein’s slanderous article, Berezovsky gave two inflammatory media interviews. He told Ekho Moskvy that he had been working for a forceful seizure of power in Russia for the past year and a half. “The current regime,” Berezovsky said, “will never allow fair elections, so there is only one way out—a change, a forceful interception of power.” He went on to point out that no one could have predicted the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, and “Putin’s regime is much weaker in terms of force than the Communist one was.” Berezovsky elaborated on his plans with Agence France-Presse (APF), saying that power would be taken from Putin by an elite coup d’état, which would then inspire people to take to the streets. Claiming that his fortune had tripled to billions of dollars over the past five years, Berezovsky said that he would finance the coup with his personal funds.²⁰ His statements were so incendiary that even Litvinenko thought Berezovsky had gone too far, telling a British academic: “I warned him that he cannot talk about changing the political regime in Russia by force but he ignores me. They will get him. He is not careful enough.”²¹

It was not until a month later that the British government, probably pressured by the Kremlin, reacted to Berezovsky’s statements. In a written statement to the House of Commons on February 23, 2006, British Home Secretary Jack Straw gave a stern rebuke to Berezovsky: “Advocating the violent overthrow of a sovereign state is unacceptable, and I condemn these comments unreservedly.” After noting that his government respected Russia’s constitution and territorial integrity and valued its partnership, Straw went on to warn Berezovsky that his refugee status could be reviewed at any time and that “we will take action against those who use the UK as a base from which to foment violent disorder or terrorism in other countries.”²²

Berezovsky responded to Straw’s warning in early March, with a letter in which he walked back his statements about overthrowing Russia’s government by claiming they had been misconstrued. “In none of the interviews I have given or published articles have I supported a ‘violent coup’ and even less ‘instigation of violent riots or terrorism,’” he wrote. “In the interview you mentioned, I used the expression ‘forceful interception of power,’ which accurately reflects the meaning of bloodless ways to replace authoritarian political regimes with democratic ones, as happened, for example, in Georgia and Ukraine.” Berezovsky went on to say: “I highly appreciate the decision of Her Majesty’s Government to grant me political asylum in the United Kingdom, but I do not perceive, I hope, like you, that this dooms me to a vow of silence about the unconstitutional actions of the Putin regime.”²³

Meanwhile, the Kremlin lashed out against Berezovsky as never before. On March 2, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office announced criminal charges against him under article 278 of the Russian Criminal Code, which prohibits “actions aimed at the forcible seizure of power.” New documents requesting his extradition had been conveyed to the Home Office a day earlier.²⁴ The Russian media dutifully chimed in. At the end of February, the state television’s First Channel aired a press conference held by Alu Alkhanov, president of the Chechen Republic and a Kremlin ally, who accused Berezovsky of financing Chechen terrorists. Izvestiia speculated that Berezovsky would face a British court for promoting a violent government overthrow and could be extradited to Russia as a result. And Moskovskii komsomolets raised questions about Berezovsky’s mental health.²⁵

With his business investments at increasing risk after his January remarks, Berezovsky announced in mid-February 2006 that he intended to sell his ownership in the Kommersant Publishing House to his partner Badri Patarkatsishvili. He told The New York Times that pressure from the Putin government had made it impossible for him to operate business in Russia.²⁶ Just months later, Patarkatsishvili would sell Kommersant to Alisher Usmanov, a metals magnate with close Kremlin ties. Although Patarkatsishvili insisted that there was “no political subtext” involved in the $300 million deal, media observers saw the sale as a move by the Kremlin to gain control over independent media outlets ahead of the 2007–8 elections.²⁷

In the end, the Kremlin’s persistence in pressuring the UK government to extradite Berezovsky proved futile. On June 1, 2006, Judge Timothy Workman issued a judgment in which he denied the Russian prosecutor’s March request because, he said, Berezovsky had political asylum in the UK and returning him to Russia would violate provisions of the Geneva Convention that protected those with asylum status.²⁸

The Kremlin Unleashes Its Fire

The Russian government did not comment on the Berezovsky ruling, but Putin and his team were not standing idly by. If British authorities would not cooperate with Moscow in pursuing those labeled criminals and terrorists by Russia, another strategy was needed, and this entailed enacting laws that would provide the Kremlin with a legal justification for retribution against enemies outside Russia. In March 2006, the Russian parliament approved an antiterrorism law that authorized both the armed forces and the FSB to take action against terrorists abroad. This law was followed in July 2006 by an amendment to the law against so-called extremism that expanded the list of actions constituting extremism to include not only terrorist activity but a wide range of other offenses, such as slander and advocating violence against Russia’s territorial integrity.²⁹

The vague language of these laws gave the FSB license to act without constraint beyond Russia’s borders, alarming Russians exiled in Britain who feared that they might be on the Kremlin’s hit list. The famed Soviet-era dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky drew attention to the danger in a letter to The Times in July 2006: “The stage is set for any critic of Putin’s regime here, especially those campaigning against Russian genocide in Chechnya, to have an appointment with a poison-tipped umbrella [a reference to Georgii Markov, a Bulgarian dissident who was stabbed with an umbrella in London in 1978].”³⁰

As one of Putin’s fiercest critics and an outspoken advocate of the Chechen cause, Litvinenko was especially concerned. Berezovsky later told British police: “Sasha mentioned loads of times that this legislation of course was designed in the first place to get rid of us—him, Zakaev and myself.”³¹ Russian authorities had filed new criminal charges against Litvinenko in June 2002—for allegedly committing illegal acts of violence when he was serving as an FSB counterterrorism officer—and they reportedly made one unsuccessful attempt to extradite him before he gained British citizenship in 2005. Sir Robert Owen, who presided over the 2015 Litvinenko inquiry, would later observe: “Just as the evidence suggests that the FSB’s anger at what some at least of its members appear to have regarded as Mr. Litvinenko’s betrayal of his old organization did not diminish on his departure from Russia, so it is reasonable to speculate that such feelings of betrayal in fact increased over the following years.”³²

This was an understatement. Not only did Litvinenko co-author two books (financed by Berezovsky), one accusing the FSB of organizing the 1999 bombings and the second, The Gang from Lubianka, documenting the FSB’s involvement in organized crime and terrorism; he was also consulting for British intelligence, MI6, and helping Spanish authorities gather evidence on Russian mafia figures in Spain. Worst of all, Litvinenko published an article for the Chechen Press in July 2006 in which he claimed that Putin was a pedophile and had destroyed tapes of himself having sex with underage boys. It is no small wonder that Litvinenko’s photograph was being used for target practice at a Russian special forces training center.³³

Litvinenko was deeply shaken by the murder of the crusading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow on October 7, 2006. Politkovskaya, who had visited Litvinenko in London not long before she was killed, shared his deep contempt for Putin and his strong sympathy for the Chechens. She campaigned relentlessly in her writings against the unspeakable horrors that the Russian military inflicted on the Chechen people. Speaking at London’s Frontline Club on October 19, Litvinenko told his audience: “I know for certain that the murder of a journalist as prominent as Politkovskaya could only have been ordered by one person, Putin.”³⁴

Although Litvinenko worried that he might be the Kremlin’s next victim, he did not suspect that Andrei Lugovoi, who had been a part of Berezovsky’s circle for a long time, was the designated hit man. A former KGB officer, Lugovoi had first met Berezovsky in 1993, while working for Yeltsin’s guard agency and providing security for Deputy Prime Minister Egor Gaidar. In 1996, Berezovsky hired Lugovoi to oversee security for his television station, ORT, where Patarkatsishvili was deputy director. In the summer of 1998, Lugovoi accompanied Berezovsky to Chechnya, where Berezovsky negotiated for the release of hostages, and in 1999 he was at Berezovsky’s side, along with Litvinenko, when Berezovsky campaigned for election to the Duma in the North Caucasus.³⁵

After he left ORT in 2001 to start a private security business, Lugovoi visited Berezovsky at Cap d’Antibes on numerous occasions to organize security and later provided similar services for members of Berezovsky’s family, including his son-in-law Egor Shuppe. Lugovoi also assumed protection for Patarkatsishvili when the latter was at his residence in Georgia. In July 2004, Lugovoi visited Berezovsky in London and the following year traveled with him to Israel and Kyiv. According to Lugovoi: “For a long period of time I was at the heart of Mr. Berezovsky’s and Mr. Patarkatsishvili’s life. Mr. Berezovsky has not denied this, and neither could he. I was entrusted to carry out many covert surveillance and other sensitive tasks relating to Mr. Berezovsky’s personal and romantic life, even his medical affairs—liaising for him with doctors and the like.”³⁶ Lugovoi had even flown to London for Berezovsky’s sixtieth birthday on the oligarch’s private plane and shared a table with Litvinenko and his wife, along with Goldfarb and Akhmed Zakaev.

By 2006, Lugovoi was traveling to London regularly and meeting with Litvinenko to discuss various business plans. It is not clear when Lugovoi had been enlisted to work secretly for the FSB, but it was probably not long after Berezovsky’s falling-out with Putin and involved a seemingly fabricated story about Lugovoi’s arrest. Lugovoi claimed that he had served jail time for trying to assist Berezovsky’s colleague Glushkov escape from prison in 2001. But Glushkov had long suspected that Lugovoi was part of a plot to keep him behind bars longer, while making Lugovoi trusted by the Berezovsky camp. The ruse clearly worked, enabling Lugovoi to further insinuate himself into Berezovsky’s circle and eventually forge a friendship with Litvinenko. When former KGB officer Yuri Shvets tried to warn him about Lugovoi, Litvinenko had responded that he trusted Lugovoi because “he served time in jail for Boris Berezovsky.”³⁷

When Litvinenko met Lugovoi and his accomplice Dmitrii Kovtun in the Pine Bar of London’s Millennium Hotel on the afternoon of November 1, 2006, a pot of green tea was sitting on the table. Unbeknownst to Litvinenko as he poured the tea into a cup, one of the two men had slipped drops of polonium-210, a highly lethal poison, into the pot. The rest of this tragic story is well known. Litvinenko became violently ill and died in the hospital, after three weeks of agony, on November 23. It did not take long for the police to identify Lugovoi and Kovtun as the probable killers, but they had already fled to Russia.³⁸

Aftermath

For Berezovsky, the ramifications of Litvinenko’s poisoning were huge. Having brought Litvinenko and Lugovoi together, he probably felt remorse, along with fear that he was next in line to be killed. As it turned out, earlier on the day of the poisoning Litvinenko had met with an Italian associate named Mario Scaramella, who had been working with him on the investigation of Russian organized crime in Spain. Scaramella had given Litvinenko emails from a Russian intelligence source indicating that the Kremlin was behind the recent slaying of Politkovskaya and was planning also to kill Litvinenko and Berezovsky. Suddenly realizing the significance of the emails after he left the Millennium Hotel, Litvinenko went to Berezovsky’s office to photocopy them. He then urged Berezovsky to have a look at the copied messages, but Berezovsky was hurriedly preparing to fly off to South Africa that night and was too rushed to give them attention.³⁹

While still in South Africa, Berezovsky learned of Litvinenko’s illness and, after speaking on the telephone with both Litvinenko and his wife, understood that his friend was in grave condition. The day after his return to London in mid-November, Berezovsky went to the hospital to visit Litvinenko with Goldfarb, and his worst fears were confirmed. Litvinenko’s hair was falling out, and he was in terrible pain, barely able to speak. A toxicology report confirmed that Litvinenko had been poisoned, but it was not until after Goldfarb enlisted a renowned toxicologist that polonium-210 was discovered to be the culprit.

Polonium-210, a highly radioactive substance, was the smoking gun in Litvinenko’s case. Undetectable by ordinary Geiger counters because it emits alpha, as opposed to gamma, radiation, the poison is extremely difficult and dangerous to produce. In Russia it was made and stored at only one nuclear facility, which was guarded by the FSB. The fact that Lugovoi and Kovtun left traces of polonium—detected by special instruments—everywhere they had been during their London visit confirmed that they were the FSB-enlisted poisoners of Litvinenko. Lugovoi had even contaminated two chairs in Berezovsky’s office when he stopped by to pick up football tickets that Egor Shuppe had procured for him on October 31 and had a glass of wine with Berezovsky.⁴⁰ The Kremlin denied involvement in the poisoning and later refused to allow Lugovoi to be extradited to the UK for prosecution, thus plunging relations with the British government, which were already sour, to a new low.

In early February 2007, Berezovsky received a telephone call from Lugovoi, who had been named publicly as a suspect in Litvinenko’s murder immediately after the latter’s death. (Lugovoi and Kovtun gave a press conference in Moscow on November 24, denying their culpability.) Lugovoi asked Berezovsky if he believed the accusations against him. Berezovsky was noncommittal, suggesting that Lugovoi should come to London and talk to the police in order to resolve the matter and offering to pay for a lawyer. Lugovoi not only refused the offer but also turned the tables on Berezovsky. In May 2007, after the British had issued an international warrant for his arrest, Lugovoi gave another press conference with Kovtun, in which he announced that Berezovsky had poisoned Litvinenko in collusion with MI6 because Litvinenko was blackmailing the oligarch with threats to reveal that he was a secret MI6 spy. He also claimed that he and Kovtun had been framed by being contaminated with polonium.⁴¹

The theme of Berezovsky’s alleged connivance in Russian murders was, of course, not new. Even Putin, when asked about the Litvinenko murder during a February press conference, had hinted that Berezovsky was involved by saying that “runway oligarchs hiding in Western Europe” who sought to harm Russia were the real enemies.⁴² The idea that Berezovsky would have Litvinenko poisoned, let alone by polonium, was laughable. True, Berezovsky’s relationship with Litvinenko had been under strain because, when Litvinenko began to do work with MI6, Berezovsky had ceased paying him. Litvinenko was unhappy about Berezovsky’s decision, but the two were by no means estranged. The Litvinenkos continued to live in the house Berezovsky provided for them, and Berezovsky carried on paying Anatoly Litvinenko’s tuition at the City of London School. Litvinenko stopped by Berezovsky’s office at least once a month.⁴³ As Berezovsky suggested in a later interview, Lugovoi could have easily poured polonium into his wine glass when he visited Berezovsky’s office the day before Litvinenko’s poisoning, but the Kremlin wanted Berezovsky to be a villain, rather than a victim: “they needed a demon, who is behind all the conspiracies, on whom any political assassination can be blamed.”⁴⁴

In fact, Egor Gaidar, the architect of Yeltsin’s liberal economic reforms, had already laid the groundwork for the Kremlin’s version of Litvinenko’s death—that the poisoning was a provocation against Russia, which had nothing to gain by Litvinenko’s death. On November 24, just a day after Litvinenko died, Gaidar fell ill while attending a conference in Dublin. He spent the night in the hospital, where doctors suspected either gastroenteritis or complications from diabetes, and returned a day later to Moscow to receive additional medical treatment. Then, on November 29, when news of Gaidar’s hospitalization broke, Anatoly Chubais told journalists that he was certain that Gaidar had been poisoned because his death, like the deaths of Politkovskaya and Litvinenko, “would be highly favorable to supporters of an anticonstitutional change of power in Russia.”⁴⁵ That same day, in response to get-well wishes from George Soros, Gaidar faxed a letter to him (published later on a Russian website), in which he noted that Berezovsky had advocated cooperation with international terrorists and was intent on damaging Russia’s relations with the West as a means of undermining Putin’s power. Gaidar suggested that Soros remind people in the West about Berezovsky’s ruthlessness and immorality.⁴⁶

A week later, Gaidar wrote a piece in The Financial Times saying that “adversaries of the Russian regime” were behind his poisoning.⁴⁷ Other politicians chimed in to agree, linking the crime to the murders of Politkovskaya and Litvinenko. And all repeated the same Kremlin line—that such crimes could not be attributed to the Russian leadership because they damaged the Kremlin’s interests. Berezovsky’s name was not mentioned publicly until Russian television journalist Nikolai Svanidze revealed that Gaidar had told him that Berezovsky was the adversary of the Kremlin who had carried out these crimes. This prompted a harsh rebuke from Alex Goldfarb, who said that the Kremlin had been caught red-handed in the Litvinenko case and that it was regrettable that a respected economist like Gaidar would be helping the Kremlin to deceive people with false propaganda. In an interview with Yevgenia Albats in June 2007, Gaidar got his revenge on Goldfarb by saying, falsely, that Goldfarb was an expert in nuclear chemistry and thus had probably poisoned Litvinenko himself. A Kremlin campaign against Goldfarb would continue for years.⁴⁸

As the Russian commentator Andrei Illarionov pointed out, the version of Berezovsky as the culprit in Gaidar’s illness was far-fetched. Why did it take several days for the alleged poisoning to become known? Why were there no comments or reports about the episode by doctors, either in Dublin or Moscow? Why did both the Irish police and Ireland’s Foreign Office insist that there was no reason to think that Gaidar’s illness had resulted from foul play? And if he had been severely ill from poisoning, why was Gaidar back in his office two days after he returned to Moscow? Illarionov concluded that there was no poisoning. Chubais and Gaidar had come up with this false story in order to demonstrate their loyalty, as leaders of the Union of Right Forces (SPS) Party, to Putin.⁴⁹

Putin’s Iron Fist

Gaidar’s emergence as an outspoken promoter of the Kremlin’s line was indicative of the insidious nature of Putin’s authoritarian rule as it turned democrats into sycophants. Under Yeltsin, Gaidar had been a vigorous and courageous defender of Western political and economic ideals, even criticizing the war in Chechnya. But he was silent when Putin began dismantling democratic reforms and moved against Khodorkovsky. As sociologist Vladimir Shlapentokh observed: “The political evolution of Gaidar as a public figure from a champion of democracy and Western values to a pitiful advocate of any move in the Kremlin is a sad story … Gaidar’s recent public behavior reveals how far Putin’s regime will go in order to intimidate the cream of the Russian people.”⁵⁰

Nonetheless, there were those like Boris Nemtsov, who had become a scathing public critic of Putin and his regime. In a July 2007 article for Vedomosti, for example, Nemtsov enumerated the reasons why life in Putin’s Russia had become “disgusting”: the suppression of the media, shameful government corruption, violence against protestors, rigged elections, and the promotion of an arms race with the West. What’s worse, Nemtsov wrote, the regime had done this with the approval of the majority of Russian people, who were content because they were materially better off than they had been before Putin.⁵¹ Nemtsov had left the Union of Right Forces (SPS) Party in 2004 and would found the Solidarity opposition movement with Garry Kasparov in 2008. Beginning with his arrest for participating in a November 2007 protest, Nemtsov faced continued legal harassment from the authorities until he was tragically gunned down outside the Kremlin in February 2015.⁵²

Nemtsov had courageously remained in Russia, but, as shown by Litvinenko’s killing, even residence abroad was not a protection. This obvious danger did not prevent Berezovsky from continuing to recklessly challenge the Kremlin at every opportunity. In April 2007, Berezovsky, perhaps emboldened by Russia’s pariah status in the UK, told The Guardian that he was planning the violent overthrow of Putin and had forged close ties with members of Russia’s ruling elite, who planned a palace coup. Berezovsky put it bluntly: “We need to use force to change this regime. It isn’t possible to change this regime through democratic means.” In addition to offering ideological guidance, Berezovsky said that he would be financing the coup plotters.⁵³ The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office responded to Berezovsky’s statements by issuing new criminal charges against him for conspiring to seize power.⁵⁴

Berezovsky backed off his April statements when asked about his plans for a revolution in Russia during a lengthy interview at the Frontline Club in early June 2007.⁵⁵ He said that the revolution would not necessarily be bloody but did not explain the specifics and was vague when asked how the Russian people could be convinced that they need political change. Asked if he feared for his life now, he responded: “If the Kremlin decides to kill me, I do not have any chance to survive … But I am strong psychologically and I sleep well.”

Ironically, not long after his Frontline appearance Berezovsky was again targeted for assassination. In June 2007, Scotland Yard learned of a plot to kill Berezovsky, and police later arrested an armed hitman, an ethnic Chechen named Movladi Atlangeriev, in the lobby of Berezovsky’s office building. The incident reportedly caused an uproar in Whitehall. But because of concerns about a further deterioration in relations with the Kremlin, it was decided to simply expel Atlangeriev, who had known ties to the FSB, back to Russia. Later, after being kidnapped and beaten in Moscow, he disappeared.⁵⁶

By this time, relations between Russia and Britain had deteriorated further. When Putin first became Russia’s president, the official British assessment had been that “he was essentially a liberal modernizer by instinct who may at times be inclined to use authoritarian methods.” But this assessment, of course, had proved wrong. Russia’s continued attempts to have Berezovsky and Zakaev extradited and its refusal to cooperate with the British investigation of the Litvinenko poisoning were key sources of tension between the two countries, causing Britain to expel four Russian diplomats in July 2007, after which the Kremlin retaliated by ordering four British diplomats to leave Russia.⁵⁷

Russia’s tensions with Britain reflected the growing belligerence toward the West on Putin’s part. Thanks to high oil and gas prices, his country’s economic growth had been robust for several years, contributing to a new confidence within the Kremlin about Russia’s role as a global actor. At the same time, “color revolutions” in former Soviet states, along with the expansion of NATO, had led Putin and his colleagues to increasingly see the West, in particular the United States, as a threat to Russia. Putin’s landmark speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007—defensive and confrontational at the same time—expressed a litany of complaints about the US domination of world affairs, ranging from its ballistic missile defenses to the inclusion of the Baltics in NATO and Western financial support of Russian political opposition groups.⁵⁸

Meanwhile, Putin was managing a conflict over power and profits between the two main siloviki clans that erupted openly in October 2007 when FSB officers arrested a senior deputy to Viktor Cherkesov, head of the antinarcotics agency. Cherkesov, who was allied with Putin’s bodyguard Viktor Zolotov, had come under attack by a rival group headed by Patrushev and Igor Sechin. His response was to write an open letter, which appeared in Kommersant, in which he deplored the fighting among Russia’s security services, saying that it threatened the stability of the regime. In a subsequent interview, Putin rebuked Cherkesov (without mentioning his name) for airing his grievances publicly, and Cherkesov was eventually moved to a lesser post. By 2008, the clan warfare had died down, but it had left scars.⁵⁹

Part of what had fueled the siloviki conflict was uncertainty over the scheduled presidential elections in March 2008. Some hardliners wanted Putin to have the Duma change the constitution so that he could run for a third term, while others had their preferred candidates to succeed Putin. In the end, Putin chose his loyal protégé Dmitry Medvedev to run for the presidency, and Medvedev then announced that his prime minister would be none other than Putin. Not surprisingly, forty-three-year-old Medvedev had a difficult time extending his authority over the government. As Myers writes, “the entire system—the bureaucracy, the military, the media—had become so conditioned to [Putin’s] role as paramount leader that it struggled to preserve the appearance that Medvedev was in charge.”⁶⁰

In conducting foreign affairs, Medvedev was also constrained by Putin, who vetted most of his decisions. To be sure, Medvedev had his own views and was more open to improved relations with the West than Putin was. He even dared not to veto a UN Security Council resolution in March 2011 authorizing military intervention in Libya, which made Putin furious. But, as Putin later revealed, Medvedev had agreed with him before the 2008 election that he, not Medvedev, would run again for the presidency in March 2012. This rendered Medvedev a lame duck president, with Putin waiting in the wings.⁶¹ As Berezovsky observed: “Having no control over either the government or the parliament, Medvedev will one day ask: ‘what, in fact, are my powers?’ And at that moment, Sechin will doubtless respond: ‘Ah, I warned you!’”⁶²

Medvedev’s tenure as Russia’s president was not a reprieve for Berezovsky. The campaign of Kremlin lies against him continued. Just after Medvedev’s 2008 election, a former official on the Prosecutor’s Investigative Committee claimed in an interview that Berezovsky had ordered the killing of Anna Politkovskaya.⁶³ Prosecutor General Chaika had hinted months before that Berezovsky was the culprit when he said that the person who ordered the crime lived abroad and was trying to “destabilize the leadership of Russia.” But this was the first time Berezovsky was publicly accused by a law enforcement source of being behind Politkovskaya’s death.

Politkovskaya’s son, Ilya Politkovskii, would later say that Russian investigators had pressured him and his sister Vera to endorse their allegations about Berezovsky, so that he could be extradited to Russia. But they resisted, knowing that Berezovsky was being used as a scapegoat. Although Politkovskaya’s five hired killers were eventually rounded up and convicted, the zakazchik would never be found. As Vera Politkovskaya observed: “The person who ordered the murder will not be revealed until there is a change of regime in Russia.”⁶⁴ But that possibility was becoming increasingly remote.