Official Narrative Challenged

Although Tretiakov made of point of noting that apartment bombings were not part of the Kremlin plan, others conflated the Dagestan incursion and the subsequent terrorist attacks, attributing both to the Kremlin. Thus Aleksandr Lebed, who had brokered the Khasavyurt Accords, and was now governor of Krasnoyarsk, told the Paris newspaper Le Figaro on September 29 that he was “convinced” that the Yeltsin government was behind the apartment bombings: “Any Chechen field commander set on revenge would have started blowing up generals,” Lebed said. “Or he’d have started striking Internal Affairs Ministry and Federal Security Service buildings, military stockpiles, or nuclear power plants. He wouldn’t have targeted ordinary, innocent people. The goal is to sow mass terror and create conditions for destabilization, so as to be able to say when the time comes, ‘You shouldn’t go to the polls, or you’ll risk being blown up along with the ballot box.’”¹³

Russian journalists were also questioning the official version that Chechens had masterminded the bombings, in part because of evidence that the Russian security services had received advanced warning of the attacks. Novaia gazeta reported that on September 8, its offices had received detailed information about the planned bombings and passed it on immediately to the MVD, to no avail. And a journalist for Obshschaia gazeta reported on September 16 that the respected State Duma deputy Konstantin Borovoi had received directly from a GRU officer on September 9 details of plans, including several names, for further terrorist bombings in the wake of the explosion that had just occurred. Borovoi conveyed the information to the FSB and the National Security Council, but there was no response.¹⁴

As John Dunlop pointed out, the anti-Yeltsin newspaper Moskovskii komsomolets was in the forefront of reporting that questioned the official version, arguing in a series of articles that the execution of the attacks required such lengthy planning and expertise that it had to have been carried out by professionals from the security services rather than rebels from the North Caucasus.¹⁵ Questions were also raised in the press about the explosive material, which the authorities initially said contained hexogen (in bags marked as sugar) as the key ingredient, although they later denied this. Hexogen, as journalists pointed out, could be obtained only from facilities that were closely guarded by the FSB and other law enforcement agencies. Then there was the revelation that a man identified by authorities as having rented storage space for explosives in Moscow had been operating under the false identity of a dead man from the Karachaevo-Cherkessia region of the North Caucasus. This led to speculation that the security services had helped the actual alleged terrorist, Achimez Gochiiaev, with the production of his false documents.¹⁶

Then came a bizarre incident in Ryazan on September 22, when a powerful bomb was discovered unexpectedly by residents of an apartment building. The bomb, in the form of three sacks of explosives and a detonator, was confirmed by local FSB experts as containing the explosive hexogen. The three individuals who planted the bomb and drove away in a white Zhiguli were soon apprehended, and local law enforcement officials were celebrated on nation-wide television for saving so many lives. But after it was revealed that the would-be bombers were Moscow-based FSB agents, who were subsequently released and disappeared, the story changed. FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev claimed that the sacks of apparent explosives, which had been hastily transported to Moscow, actually contained only sugar and were placed in the building as part of a “training exercise” to test the vigilance of the local citizens.¹⁷

Not surprisingly, the press voiced skepticism, especially because the local Ryazan authorities continued to insist that the bags of sugar had contained hexogen. As the popular online newspaper Lenta.ru observed, “One can only guess what the inhabitants of the ‘mined’ Ryazan apartment house think about such ‘exercises,’ and how many more reports about the heroic prevention of explosions, the detection of weapons, etc., refer to ‘exercises’ and not to real terrorists.”¹⁸ The Ryazan fiasco clearly lent credence to the theory of FSB involvement in the bombings. In the scathing words of Andrei Piontkovsky: “After the ‘exercises’ in Ryazan, no one can say where the line is between training and provocation, between provocation and terrorist attack. But it is obvious that the [apartment] explosions achieved the goals set by their authors.” He added that “the lieutenant colonel of the KGB with thieves’ vocabulary, who miraculously ended up at the head of a great country, is in a hurry to take advantage of the effect produced … Putin is deliberately bombing Grozny in order to make it impossible to negotiate with Maskhadov, in order to make all Chechens, one and the same, enemies of Russia.”¹⁹

Despite the serious questions about the incident raised in the press, the public—and even politicians opposed to Yeltsin—seemed willing to go along with the official version. It was as if the horror of the FSB actually planning to murder so many innocent people in Ryazan—and the logical inference that the FSB had therefore orchestrated the earlier bombings—was too much to contemplate. Although no Chechens had been identified among the alleged perpetrators of any of the attacks, the results of a poll published on September 28 showed that 64 percent of the respondents favored a massive bombardment of Chechnya if there were further terrorist acts.²⁰

Residents of the Ryazan apartment building who tried to take the matter to court were successfully deterred from doing so by the FSB, and a brief investigation by the Prosecutor General’s Office ended without conclusion in early 2000. There would be subsequent probes by determined Russian journalists such as Pavel Voloshin, a reporter for Novaia gazeta. Among his many discoveries, Voloshin was able to identify a Russian soldier who claimed that before the bombings he had been assigned to guard a military warehouse near Ryazan that stored sacks of hexogen.²¹ Responding to Voloshin’s revelations, some members of the Duma called for an investigation of the September attacks, but the Duma voted against the proposal in March 2000. Duma deputy and human rights activist Sergei Kovalev would later, in 2002, create an independent investigative commission, but with no results in the end.²²

Berezovsky’s Brainchild

Did Berezovsky suspect that the FSB was behind the apartment bombings? Although he would eventually accuse Putin publicly of orchestrating the attacks, while still in Russia Berezovsky did not question the official narrative. He even gushed about Putin’s remarkable character and abilities, telling journalist Nataliya Gevorkyan in late November 1999: “I believe Putin has two qualities that will enable him to become Russia’s leader. In the first place, he upholds and tries to promote liberalism in Russia. Secondly, he is a man of great willpower.”²³

The Family’s silence in the face of allegations of FSB involvement in the bombings convinced journalist Iulia Latynina that suspicions about Putin were unfounded: “There is one simple consideration: it was not the Lubianka [FSB headquarters] that staged Putin. Putin was brought on by the Family, incl. Boris Abramovich Berezovsky. He was presented as a submissive puppet, and if at that moment [Roman] Abramovich, Yeltsin, [Tatiana] D’iachenko, Iumashev, or Berezovsky suspected even for a second that there was a force of such magnitude behind Putin that was blowing up houses, they would have thrown him out like hot potatoes.”²⁴ But if the Family had addressed the evidence of Putin’s culpability and “thrown him out,” they would have suffered grave consequences. Not only would they have handed the Primakov-Luzhkov alliance a victory in the Duma elections; they would have lost their handpicked heir to the presidency, whom they needed desperately to protect them from the legal consequences of their corruption.

And the corruption allegations were not going away. Skuratov was still at bay, although he was under severe pressure—including police searches and interrogations—to stop talking publicly about the scandals. In a mid-September interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, he confirmed reports that Mabetex had paid $10 million in kickbacks for its Kremlin renovation contract and that billions of dollars from an IMF bailout in 1998 had been sold to a small group of Russian private banks at preferential exchange rates.²⁵ Yeltsin’s repeated efforts to fire Skuratov were stymied by the Federation Council, which on October 14, 1999, refused to sack him for the third time.²⁶ Even worse, on that very day, a spokesperson from the Banca del Gottardo announced that, at the request of the Mabetex construction company, the bank had acted as a guarantor of credit cards issued to Yeltsin and his two daughters.²⁷

Meanwhile, the US press had reported that Yeltsin’s then son-in-law Leonid D’iachenko—whom Skuratov had been investigating—held two Bank of New York accounts in the Cayman Islands, containing more than $2 million. According to one American official: “This isn’t the end of the embarrassing kompromat likely to emerge in this case. It’s likely just the beginning.”²⁸ In early October, The New York Times added more to the story: “Dyachenko is an oil trader. But he is more than that. He is a participant—if not a key figure—in a network of politically blessed companies that ship Siberian oil products to Ukraine and to Eastern Europe … The officials of those companies, and Mr. Dyachenko’s benefactors, include two Russian tycoons who are among Mr. Yeltsin’s strongest supporters, Boris A. Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich.”²⁹

Duma Deputy Iurii Shchekochikhin was so scandalized by the revelations that he wrote an open letter to Tatiana D’iachenko, published in Novaia gazeta on October 11: “Recently, I was a witness at a hearing in the US Congress on corruption in Russia, and, believe me, I felt embarrassed when the president of the Bank of New York said that your husband has two accounts with this bank for about two million dollars … It was a shame to remember how the Presidential Administration had assured us that the Family did not have a single penny abroad.”³⁰ Chubais was also singled out for attack. In early October, Moskovskii komsomolets featured a scathing article that portrayed him as the creator of Russia’s “bandit capitalism” by monopolizing the American aid allocated for the implementation of privatization.³¹

Taken together with the formidable political force of the Fatherland-All Russia coalition, the corruption allegations put the Family’s succession plans in jeopardy, even as Putin was demonstrating his might against the Chechens. But Berezovsky had already been devising a rescue plan. As he lay in the hospital with hepatitis in September, Berezovsky called in his aides, along with Sergei Dorenko, to devise a plan for creating a new political party that would ally itself with the Kremlin. Berezovsky then met with Yeltsin’s team at Aleksandr Voloshin’s dacha to present his project. Writing a decade later, Yeltsin’s daughter Tatiana—now Tatiana Iumasheva, having married Valentin Iumashev in 2001—described Berezovsky’s pitch: “Berezovsky zealously, noisily, and emotionally convinced us that the future president could not cope without a party, that every president should have a party. And one of Yeltsin’s serious mistakes was that he did not make his own party.”³² Voloshin was resistant to the idea, but finally was persuaded and asked his first deputy to assist with the project on behalf of the Kremlin.³³

Thanks to Berezovsky’s initiative, a new, pro-Kremlin political movement, Unity, was formed by thirty-nine provincial governors on September 22, 1999. It would be the forerunner of what today is Putin’s United Russia party. Tatiana Iumasheva observed: “United Russia doesn’t like to remember Berezovsky’s role in the emergence of Unity. But history is history. We must not forget those who stood at its origins. Otherwise it resembles the History of the CPSU [Soviet Communist Party], which was painstakingly rewritten every time its next founder turned out to be an enemy of the people.”³⁴ Berezovsky and his men had personally approached regional leaders and persuaded them that it would be a mistake to have Primakov as president because he would turn Russia back into a Communist state. As Goldfarb noted, they had the same message in every provincial capital: “Just wait until Primus [Primakov] gets into the Kremlin! He will bring back his Soviet cohorts, the old-time apparatchiks, the veterans of central planning, the bureaucrats. He will take away your local elections, your rights and privileges.”³⁵

The founders of Unity decided that it was too early to enlist Putin as its leader; they would wait until the bloc gained political momentum. So they chose Sergei Shoigu, minister for emergency situations, who announced at Unity’s first congress on October 2 that the party’s goal was to hand power over “to real representatives of Russia’s regions and therefore of Russia itself, to sweep away Moscow-dwelling politicians.” The bloc was built, he said, “by people who are tired of hypocrisy and lies.”³⁶ But, as Henry Hale pointed out, Unity was different from traditional political parties: “Unity’s chief aim was not to provide representation for the president in the parliament but to be a decoy in the war to defeat the virulently anti-Kremlin Fatherland-All Russia Party, drawing away enough votes for the latter to finish below political expectations [in the Duma elections]. That is, Unity was a presidential election tactic, not primarily a parliamentary party project.”³⁷

Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich provided the main funds for Unity, although other wealthy businessmen contributed hefty amounts. According to Zygar, “the average check from an oligarch was for $10 million, and Unity raised a total of about $170 million.”³⁸ Both Berezovsky and Abramovich also registered in October as independent candidates for the Duma—Abramovich from the remote arctic Chukotka district and Berezovsky from the North Caucasian republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia, which was impoverished but rich in mineral resources. Berezovsky had established relationships with numerous businessmen there and presented himself to voters as a successful capitalist who could turn their economy around. He promised to build a new ski resort, a car assembly plant, and construction companies, as well as to establish a charitable foundation to support the republic’s poor. Berezovsky told potential voters at one meeting: “I came here with one purpose—to help not only you but me. Because rich people can’t live where there are a lot of poor people.” To demonstrate his commitment to the area, he bought a two-story house in Cherkessia. An added bonus for both Berezovsky and Abramovich was that Duma deputies had immunity from prosecution.³⁹

Although not led by Putin, Unity’s message was clear: support the prime minister because he is leading the struggle against Chechen terrorists. And because Putin had de facto assumed the functions of supreme commander of the military, he was not only defeating the terrorist enemies, he was restoring Russia’s sense of national pride. Putin’s image of toughness reinforced this message. Young and physically fit, he was the direct opposite of the ailing, alcoholic Yeltsin. Putin also had another advantage, noted by Steven Myers: “Although he owed his career to Yeltsin and the ‘Family,’ the fact that he had mostly worked on the margins of public scrutiny since 1996 meant he was not associated with the Kremlin’s multiple failings and scandals.”⁴⁰

The Russian Media Delivers

In early October, Putin summoned top media executives to urge their support for the invasion of Chechnya; they seemed to need little persuasion. The businesses and corporations that had acquired controlling shares in print and electronic media depended on good relations with government officials. In contrast to the highly critical coverage of the first Chechen war, both television and newspapers focused on the successes of the Russian military advance rather than on the devastation of Chechen towns and villages, the waves of refugees, and the civilian death toll. According to the analyst Laura Belin: “Only a handful of publications, such as Novaya gazeta and Obshchaya gazeta, questioned the wisdom or morality of the Russian military strategy. Some newspapers that had been hostile toward the armed forces during the first war now concentrated on the same upbeat themes that dominated television newscasts. Destroyed Chechen towns and the wave of refugees fleeing the republic received far less column space.” Belin added that “evidence suggests that those who set editorial policy at ORT and RTR (Russia-1) deliberately crafted Chechnya coverage so as to encourage voters to connect their approval of the war with support for Putin.”⁴¹

ORT’s Sunday evening program, The Sergei Dorenko Show, which was Berezovsky’s brainchild, doubtless made the greatest contribution to the political rise of Unity and Putin. As mentioned above, Dorenko and Berezovsky had been planning a news program that would rival NTV’s highly popular program Itogi, hosted by Evgenii Kiselev, which presented sharply critical news coverage of the Family, including about corruption. The plan was to first go after Luzhkov, the lower-hanging fruit, with devastating attacks and later to move against Primakov more subtly. From the moment that Dorenko’s weekly show first aired on prime time in early September, his brutal, slanderous allegations against Luzhkov created a sensation, and the show soon outstripped Itogi in ratings. As Hale described it, “During the weeks of the campaign, Dorenko, in his trademark smirking baritone, lambasted Luzhkov for alleged misdeeds ranging from the plausible, that there is corruption in Luzhkov’s Moscow bureaucracy, to the outrageous, that Luzhkov was an accomplice to the 1996 murder of US businessman Paul Tatum, to the just plain ridiculous, that he had ties to the deadly Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult.”⁴²

Dorenko’s smears against Primakov focused on his age, with suggestions of ill health, and his ties with the dubious spying operations of the Foreign Intelligence Service. The show’s host also repeated false accusations by the Georgian security services that linked Primakov to an assassination attempt on Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze. Noting that “in some sense Itogi was getting a taste of its own medicine, but a much deadlier dose,” Hale points out that NTV refused to stoop to the level of the Dorenko show with similar slander. But amazingly, polls found that viewers actually trusted Dorenko more than they did Itogi’s commentators. “Itogi was the unrivaled master of television news analysis prior to September 1999,” Hale writes. “Dorenko’s growling hatchet job worked, not because there was no alternative, but because it won the ratings battle, going head-to-head with Itogi.”⁴³

Moskovskii komsomolets, one of the Yeltsin team’s harshest critics, lamented in October: “Dorenko has achieved his goal: they talk about him in the metro, in the Duma, at the market. He is, without a doubt, a boor and a talker who plays politics. How long will all this continue and who or what will stop Dorenko and his ilk?”⁴⁴ Berezovsky was elated. Dorenko later recalled: “Berezovsky praised my work and praised it enthusiastically. He called me after almost every transmission, wailing and shouting, ‘You are a genius!’”⁴⁵

In his public comments, Berezovsky gave the impression that he had nothing to do with the content of the Dorenko show, but that was not true. Just before the December Duma elections, Novaia gazeta published excerpts of a bugged telephone conversation between Berezovsky and Dorenko in which they were discussing the details of the next program. In particular, Berezovsky reminded Dorenko, whom he addressed familiarly as “Seryozha,” of a scheduled press conference by lawyers for the family of Paul Tatum. Tatum’s family was suing Luzhkov for allegedly protecting the perpetrators of his murder by hindering an investigation. Berezovsky told Dorenko how he should explain the case to his audience and even suggested mentioning that former FSB employees were involved. But he made a point of telling Dorenko to make sure he “cut Putin off from this whole story.”⁴⁶ Berezovsky would later brag: “Everyone was sure that Primakov would become Russia’s next president, but nobody actually wanted him. It was my personal task to anticipate this and help the society. My instrument was the ORT channel.”⁴⁷

The combination of Putin’s forceful response to the terrorist bombings, the emergence of Unity to challenge Primakov and Luzhkov’s Fatherland-All Russia Party, and the brilliantly effective propaganda spewed out weekly by Dorenko caused Putin’s popularity to skyrocket. Whereas September opinion polls showed that 21 percent of the population approved of his government, by mid-November the government’s approval rating was 74 percent.⁴⁸ And Putin’s personal approval ratings rose to 80 percent.⁴⁹ This meant that Putin’s endorsement of Unity would provide the party with a huge boost in the upcoming Duma elections. So, on November 24, Putin appeared publicly to announce that “out of all the current election blocs” he would vote for Unity. Admitting that, as prime minister, he should not “state his political preferences,” Putin said that, as an ordinary citizen and friend of Minister of Emergency Situations Shoigu, he could not help but respond to Unity’s promise “to support the current government.”⁵⁰

A Victory for the Family

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, led by Gennady Zyuganov, dominated the legislative process in the Duma and was the front-runner for delegates in the forthcoming elections. But with the backing of the popular prime minister, Unity emerged as a serious contender. In mid-November, before Putin’s announcement, Unity had the support of 7 percent of the electorate and Fatherland-All Russia 20 percent. When the results of the Duma vote on December 19 came in, Unity had managed to capture 23.3. percent, second in place to the Communist Party, which won 24.3 percent, while Fatherland won only 13.3 percent. The Family’s expectations for Putin had been confirmed.

Yeltsin, who had fallen asleep before the vote tally was complete, woke up the next morning to the good news: “The results of the vote confirmed what I had thought all these weeks: Vladimir Putin has an enormous reserve of credibility … We now had a very new picture. The leftist forces had ceased to be a majority in parliament.”⁵¹ Berezovsky was among the new deputies, having won a whopping 45 percent of the vote in Karachaevo-Cherkessia, where he had spent six weeks campaigning. He told the press that he intended to revive the republic’s economy by lobbying for funds from the Kremlin and getting contracts for the republic’s construction industry.⁵² In early February 2000, he became a member of the Duma Committee on International Affairs.

By this time Yeltsin had already decided that he would step down before his term ended in July 2000. On December 14, five days before the Duma elections, he called Putin to his office and told him that he intended to resign at the end of the year. According to Yeltsin, Putin said he was not ready to take over the presidency and suggested that Yeltsin stay until the end of his term, but then agreed with the plan.⁵³ Putin, in First Person, gives the impression that he was caught completely off guard and did not want the job at all: “On the whole, it was a depressing conversation. I had never thought seriously that I might become his successor, so when Boris Nikolayevich told me about his decision, I wasn’t really prepared for it.” He tried to get himself “off the hook,” Putin says, but it didn’t work.⁵⁴

Putin’s assertion that he had no idea that he was in line for the presidency is unconvincing. Yeltsin had said publicly when he appointed Putin as prime minister that Putin was his chosen successor. Also, there had been considerable speculation in the press that Yeltsin would step down early. Although he claimed to have no aspirations for the presidency, Putin must have realized that Yeltsin’s decision to resign all but assured his successful win in the presidential election. The elections had been scheduled for June 4, but Russian law required that an election had to take place three months after the presidential post was vacated. This moved the date to March 26, 2000, narrowing the window for a possible loss of support for Putin as a result of the Chechen war. As Masha Gessen pointed out at the time: “In a country fighting a war and forever vulnerable to economic collapse, six months is a long time. If the war bogs down in the Chechen mountains, public support for it will wane, as will Putin’s popularity. If the price of oil drops and takes Russia’s fragile economy down with it, Putin also stands to lose. In both respects, cutting in half the time left before Election Day lessens the possibility of a comeback by any of the Kremlin’s opponents, all of whom depleted their treasuries during December’s parliamentary election campaign.”⁵⁵

Shortly after the Duma elections, the Russian journalist Oleg Lur’e published a remarkable article in Novaia gazeta about a large volume of documents on high-level Kremlin corruption that were held in the Prosecutor General’s Office. Many of the documents had been assembled by Felipe Turover—a former employee of the Banco del Gottardo, which had handled accounts for Mabetex, and a key witness in the Swiss investigations. A Soviet émigré, Turover had collected debts for the bank in Russia and had an insider’s knowledge of those involved in Kremlin corruption, whose names he rattled off to Lur’e. When asked by Lur’e about Putin’s possible role, Turover described how Putin, while working in the Yeltsin administration in 1997, had “got his paws on” much of the property abroad that had belonged to the Soviet state and Communist Party and registered these assets to various front companies. According to Turover, “Property abroad was very thoroughly plucked before the state got its hands on it.”⁵⁶

The prosecutor’s office, Lur’e told his readers, had conveniently forgotten all about the incriminating documents that it possessed. Indeed, these documents would never see the light of day, and the accusations against the Family would fade away. Four days later, at noon on December 31, Yeltsin made his surprise announcement that he was resigning and delegating Putin to serve as acting president. Putin, whose first decision was to grant Yeltsin immunity, would remain prime minister. His path to the presidency, as political commentators concurred, was assured. As The New York Times noted: “In August, Mr. Putin was a political nonentity, with no party, no popular support and the backing of a deeply distrusted president. Four months later … Mr. Putin is Russia’s latest rising star, hailed at home as the architect of an uncompromising war that many Russians have welcomed as a belated if brutal attempt to restore the battered authority of the Russian state.”⁵⁷

Berezovsky, the man who deserved much of the credit for the turn of political events in Putin’s favor, had been basking in glory since the Duma victory of the Unity party. David Hoffman observed from Moscow that “the outcome of the elections demonstrated that Berezovsky has reclaimed his status as a Moscow power broker … Unity’s success may give Berezovsky a powerful new lever in Russian politics.”⁵⁸ But the Family did not see it that way. According to Elena Gorbunova, after the Duma elections Iumashev, Tatiana, and Voloshin gave Berezovsky an ultimatum, which Roman Abramovich, now a Kremlin insider, conveyed: he had to leave the country so that he would not be associated with Putin’s presidential campaign. They considered Berezovsky to be toxic, surrounded by scandal. “It wasn’t even an insult,” Gorbunova recalled. “Boria, of course, really wanted Putin to be elected.” So, according to Gorbunova, he made himself scarce, spending a lot of time abroad before the March election: “He did not take part [in the campaign], did not show up in any way. He only said, ‘here is your tool, ORT; use it, guys!’”⁵⁹ Zygar writes that the decision to “ditch” Berezovsky had been made in the autumn of 1999: “Berezovsky’s political vanities—and especially his never-ending interviews and sweeping comments—were beginning to irk Tanya, Valya, Voloshin and Abramovich, who decided that he was doing more harm than good. Once the threat of losing their power and freedom had receded, they began to sideline their former friend.”⁶⁰

What was Putin’s role in this decision? Berezovsky told Alex Goldfarb that Putin invited him to the Russian White House late on December 19, 1999, the day of the parliamentary elections, specifically to thank him for all he had done toward raising popular support for Unity and damaging the prospects of the Primakov-Luzhkov alliance. Putin’s emotional words rendered Berezovsky momentarily speechless: “I want to tell you, Boris, that what you have done is phenomenal … I am not given to melodrama, so what I am going to say is particularly significant. I do not have a brother, and neither do you. You should know that in me you have a brother, Boris. Coming from me, these are not empty words.” Berezovsky recalled that he was deeply touched and assured Putin enthusiastically that he would beat the political opposition and continue the work of Yeltsin as the new president.⁶¹

Given Berezovsky’s proclivity to embellish the truth, his account of this meeting cannot be taken at face value. But Putin may well have decided to mollify Berezovsky with a few kind comments to keep him in line until after the presidential election. Whatever transpired between the two men, Berezovsky’s role as kingmaker was over, and Putin knew this better than anyone.