Putin Asserts His Grip

Putin had seen the crucial role that television played in shaping public opinion during the year leading up to his election and, particularly after the Kursk affair, he realized that control over television was now essential to preserving his political power. Russia’s newspapers and Internet media outlets were independent and freely criticized the Kremlin, but a majority of Russians got their news from television. The Russian president and his supporters moved in on the networks. Once Abramovich had gained Berezovsky’s 49 percent stake in ORT, he apparently ceded his authority over the station to the Kremlin. The state gas monopoly Gazprom managed to gain control of NTV in 2001 by calling in a $281 million loan it had given to Gusinsky in 1998. And the only other independent station, TV6, which was owned largely by Berezovsky, was shut down by the Kremlin in January 2002 for alleged financial violations.⁸ Unlike Yeltsin, who had often been the victim of merciless television coverage, Putin would not only be protected from negative publicity; he would use television as a propaganda tool to promote his personality cult, which was well underway by the end of 2001.

The cult of Putin was furthered in other ways. Portraits of the president appeared in all military bases and government offices, and new textbooks describing Putin’s childhood were introduced in Russian classrooms. As Shevtsova noted, “Putinomania gradually became an element of Russian life.”⁹ None of this had happened under Yeltsin, whose tenure as Russian leader was a marked departure from this Soviet tradition of leadership cults.

Putin also had a firm grip on the Kremlin power organs—run by the so-called siloviki—which were crucial to keeping his people in line at all levels. Patrushev’s FSB was filled with Putin loyalists from the Leningrad/St. Petersburg security services in its senior ranks. The agency’s role was not confined to counterintelligence and counterterrorism but also included investigating economic crimes, and corruption allegations were a powerful tool for going after political enemies. The Prosecutor General’s Office was in the safe hands of Vladimir Ustinov, unswervingly loyal to the new Putin regime. As one source expressed it: “Vladimir Ustinov turned out to be a very useful Prosecutor General for Vladimir Putin and his entourage. Unlike his predecessor, Iurii Skuratov, he did not show any attempts to investigate the activities of the highest state officials and clearly followed the changing environment … Under Vladimir Ustinov, the prosecutor’s office turned into an obedient instrument of the ruling regime.”¹⁰ In addition to closing the Mabetex case and going after Gusinsky’s NTV, Ustinov took charge of investigations of the 1999 apartment bombings, the Kursk tragedy, and major terrorist incidents that occurred later.

Putin’s close ally, St. Petersburg KGB veteran Evgenii Murov, was placed in charge of the Federal Guard Service (FSO), the agency that protected the Kremlin. Under Murov, who would hold his post for the next sixteen years, the FSO could be counted on to be loyal to Putin. Within the FSO was the Presidential Security Service (SBP), the personal guard of Putin, led by Viktor Zolotov, who had protected Anatoly Sobchak before going into private security. Zolotov, a KGB offspring whose connections with the St. Petersburg mafia were widely known, reportedly was a judo partner of Putin’s when the latter was at the mayor’s office, and the two became close. In 2016, Putin would appoint Zolotov chief of the newly created National Guard, with close to 340,000 troops under him.¹¹

Leningrad native Igor Sechin, perhaps the closest to Putin of all his associates, could be considered a silovik because he served as a military translator in Africa in the late 1980s, when such positions were undercover for the Soviet intelligence services, and he subsequently allied himself with the hardliners on Putin’s team. After working under Putin in Sobchak’s office, Sechin had followed him to Moscow in 1996 and occupied various positions, some directly under Putin, in the Yeltsin administration. According to the author Thane Gustafson: “In every one of Putin’s jobs, as Putin moved up the hierarchy, Sechin was there, guarding the entrance to his office, managing Putin’s life.”¹²

Once Putin became president, he appointed Sechin deputy chief of the Presidential Administration and in 2004, Sechin also became chairman of the board of directors of Rosneft. Former KGB officer Yuri Shvets described Sechin as “a secretive and mistrustful person who has a peculiar habit of turning documents on the table upside down when somebody enters his office.”¹³ Mikhail Zygar noted that Sechin was the “spiritual leader” of the siloviki and added: “Sechin understood better than anyone Putin’s psychology. He knew that for Putin there was nothing worse than a traitor. To betray him personally and to betray Russia were for Putin almost the same.”¹⁴

As for the military, in March 2001 Putin took the bold step of appointing a civilian, Sergei Ivanov, as minister of defense. A trusted friend of the president, Ivanov hailed from St. Petersburg, where he had worked with Putin in the KGB during the 1970s. Ivanov spent the bulk of his career in the Foreign Intelligence Service before being appointed by Putin to serve as his deputy when Putin headed the FSB in 1998. Looking back on Putin’s early presidency, the political scientist Richard Sakwa observed: “Under Putin, the siloviki flaunted themselves as the guardians of Russian state interests, and their influence seeped out of narrowly defined security matters into business relations and the information sphere, as well as into foreign policy.”¹⁵

Approaches to the West

Although Putin seemed an unlikely world leader when he first appeared to the public as prime minister in August 1999, he soon made his mark on the global stage, traveling to eighteen countries in his first year as president, often with Liudmila in tow. A high point on his path to international prominence came when Putin met US president George Bush in Slovenia in June 2001. The two got on so well that Bush famously said of Putin: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”¹⁶

Later, after the September 11 World Trade Center bombings, Putin gained even more of Bush’s trust when he telephoned the US president and offered help in the fight against terrorism. In November 2001, Putin and Liudmila paid a visit to the Bushes at their ranch in Texas, where Putin continued with his charm offensive: “Being here I can feel the will of these people, the will to cooperate with the Russian Federation, the will to cooperate with Russia. And I can assure you that the Russian people fully share this commitment and is also committed to fully cooperating with the American people.”¹⁷Time Magazine observed in December 2001: “The West now seems infatuated with Putin. The Russian President appears a paragon of liberalism, democracy, sophistication and championship of human rights. Nice to have such an ally.”¹⁸

It did seem, at this point, that Putin was not merely playacting, that, despite his initial antidemocratic reforms and the brutal war in Chechnya, he was enticed by the idea of Russia cooperating with the West in pursuit of a stabilized world order, with the Cold War far behind. After all, he had even mentioned the possibility of Russia joining NATO shortly before the Russian presidential elections in March 2000.¹⁹ Richard Sakwa observed that Putin initially faced the same choice that Gorbachev and Yeltsin faced when they assumed Russia’s leadership: “Would Russia join the existing US-led liberal international order, adapt to its norms, conventions and power hierarchy, or would it try to maintain its autonomy as a great power and separate political civilization, even if this generated conflict with the dominant power system?”²⁰

If Putin really was considering the idea of a rapprochement with the West, he would have soon realized that it was completely incongruous with the type of regime he was creating. US efforts to nurture democracy in the former Soviet Bloc and discussions of including Eastern European nations in NATO were an anathema to the Kremlin, which had no intention of establishing political pluralism or a strong civil society in Russia. After Yeltsin’s chaotic attempts at democracy, Russian people were not demanding such changes, as long as they did not suffer economically. They preferred stability above all. It would not be long before Putin and his team would consider NATO to be Russia’s greatest threat.

In contrast to Putin, Berezovsky’s image in the West—just as in Russia—was that of a corrupt oligarch, a self-promoter, and a has-been Kremlin powerbroker. The New York Times described him in early 2003 as a “Soviet-era mathematician and oligarch of robber-baron capitalism, onetime Kremlin kingmaker and now plain old self-exiled billionaire.”²¹ Some, such as George Soros, thought even worse of Berezovsky. In a lengthy 2000 article, Soros even suggested that Berezovsky was behind the September 1999 bombings: “From Berezovsky’s point of view the bombings made perfect sense. Not only would such attacks help to elect a president who would provide immunity to Yeltsin and his family but it would also give him, Berezovsky, a hold over Putin.”²²

Not long after the World Trade Center attack, Goldfarb and Berezovsky went to Washington, DC, to promote their new International Civil Liberties Foundation and Berezovsky’s efforts to form a liberal political movement against Putin. There they experienced firsthand the impact of Putin’s alliance against terror with the Bush administration. Goldfarb recalled, “It was clear to me that from now on, we would be viewed in Washington as an enemy of a friend.” As they were leaving the State Department, Berezovsky lamented Putin’s good luck and opined: “I wonder whether the Americans understand that he is not their friend at all. He will play them and the Muslims against each other, exploring every weakness to his advantage.”²³

The Bombings Revisited

In October 2001, Berezovsky moved with Gorbunova and their children into a seven-bedroom, ten-thousand-square-foot mansion in Surrey, and Berezovsky established offices at 5 Savile Row, in London’s Mayfair district, about a forty-five-minute commute from his home. (That same month, Berezovsky’s name was put on Russia’s list of wanted criminals in connection with the Aeroflot case.) Berezovsky later told The New York Times that since fleeing Russia he had been able to spend more time with his children, after years as “not a very good father”: “For the first time in my life I visit their school. I know exactly what my five-year-old boy and seven-year-old girl are doing.”²⁴

According to his son Gleb, he and Berezovsky’s other children found their father to be “always an attentive listener, who at the same time tried to impart his knowledge to us.”²⁵ But Berezovsky devoted most of his time to his all-consuming cause of bringing about Putin’s downfall. Having played an outsized role in Kremlin politics for several years, he apparently could not resign himself to the obscurity of exile, helplessly watching the man who had forced him out of Russia accumulate power. In May 2001, Berezovsky had hosted the liberal Duma deputy Sergei Iushenkov at his French villa, along with another prominent parliamentarian, Vladimir Golovlev, to discuss the formation of a new Russian opposition party, Liberal Russia. The party would sponsor candidates for the 2003 Duma elections who would run on an anti-Putin platform. At the first congress of Liberal Russia, held in Moscow in December 2001, Berezovsky was elected in absentia as one of the co-chairmen of the party, along with Iushenkov and others. He would also provide several million dollars in financing.²⁶

Berezovsky began seeing a lot of Litvinenko, who, together with Yuri Felshtinsky, was finishing a sensational book, FSB vzyrvaet Rossiiu (published in English as Blowing Up Russia) about the FSB and its history of terrorism, including the September 1999 bombings. Excerpts from the book, which would appear in Russian and English in early 2002, were published in Novaia gazeta on August 27, 2001, creating a sensation.²⁷ (In Russia itself the book was banned, so it could only be accessed online, at the website Grani.ru.) Although the book did not provide definitive proof that the FSB was behind the bombings, it provided persuasive circumstantial evidence of FSB involvement.

Even the cautious, respected human rights advocate Sergei Kovalev, while concurring with others that the book’s sources were often unverified, had praise: “We undoubtedly need the book; it is more than useful, it is simply necessary … As for the version about the participation of special services in these explosions, about the organization, I’m afraid to believe in this version, but this does not mean that we reject it … I must say that the Ryazan episode is indeed the best chapter in the book; it is a very neatly made compendium of all existing public statements of this kind and a completely logical analysis.”²⁸

Berezovsky had hitherto refused to say, publicly at least, that the FSB was behind the bombings. This was hardly surprising, given that he had been one of Putin’s main supporters in his ascent to the presidency. Also, Berezovsky had been credibly accused of encouraging the incursion of Chechen rebels into Dagestan in August 1999, which was seen as a precursor to the bombings. So he was treading on thin ice when, on December 14, 2001, he appeared via video from London at a conference in Moscow sponsored by his International Civil Liberties Foundation and stated that he was now convinced of the FSB’s culpability in the 1999 acts of terrorism. But he did not go so far as to blame Putin: “The only thing I cannot tell for sure is whether or not Putin gave the orders in those operations or commanded them.”²⁹

While Berezovsky’s comments drew a lot of attention, they were greeted with the usual skepticism. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Observers say this latest salvo in Mr. Berezovsky’s increasingly quixotic campaign against the Kremlin reveals the desperation of a man who once was one of the most powerful players in Russian politics, but has seen his influence wane under Mr. Putin.”³⁰The New York Times interviewed Berezovsky about his claims in February 2002, a week after FSB chief Patrushev had accused him of providing financial support to Russian terrorists. Berezovsky said that Patrushev’s accusations were made in response to the investigations of the 1999 bombings and promised that within weeks he would have documentary evidence of the FSB’s complicity. Noting that “the unsolved explosions that brought terror to Russia … stand as an enduring and troubling mystery,” The New York Times speculated on whether “Mr. Berezovsky is simply trying to orchestrate a political crisis for Mr. Putin to win political asylum in Britain.”³¹

The next month, on March 5, Berezovsky appeared at a large gathering in a London auditorium to present the documentary film The Assassination of Russia, based on the book by Litvinenko and Felshtinsky and produced by two Frenchmen with his financial help.³² Elena Bonner introduced the film, emphasizing its importance for a debate about what had actually occurred in the Ryazan incident. The powerful film focused on what was described convincingly as a planned terrorist bombing of an apartment building by the FSB that was inadvertently thwarted by the building’s inhabitants. Several of those who lived in the building were interviewed for the film and vigorously objected to the FSB’s claim that it had only been carrying out a “training exercise.” Also, the film made it clear that, despite the assertions of Russian authorities that Chechen terrorists had carried out the apartment bombings, two years later they had come up with no proof of Chechen involvement. Putin, the film’s narrator said, could get to the bottom of the mystery by ordering an official investigation, but that could threaten the legitimacy of all those in power in Russia, including Putin himself.

Reviews of the film in Russia were predictably mixed. Moskovskii komsomolets, long a fierce Berezovsky critic, scorned the film: “The grandiose revelations advertised by Berezovsky turned out to be another bluff. Despite his sworn promises, the oligarch did not provide any real evidence of the involvement of the FSB in the explosions of houses in Moscow.”³³ Not surprisingly, Berezovsky’s newspaper Kommersant considered the film significant: “For the first time, documentarians brought together all the facts and details related to the ‘Ryazan case,’ lined them up chronologically, and gave back-to-back contradictory ‘testimonies’ in this case of the country’s top officials, including the then Prime Minister Putin.”³⁴

Among those who attended the London screening were Iushenkov and another prominent parliamentarian, Iulii Rybakov, who was not a member of Liberal Russia. The men hoped to distribute the film in Russia and perhaps even find a television channel that was willing to air it. Their plans were thwarted at every turn. Russian customs officials confiscated the hundred copies that Rybakov brought with him from London, and he subsequently received death threats. No Russian television had the courage to show the film, although it did make it into the hands of eager Duma deputies, and there was considerable demand on the street for the thousands of pirated copies.³⁵

In April 2002, Iushenkov went to Washington, DC, where he and Goldfarb distributed the film and screened it for the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Kennan Institute, part of the Woodrow Wilson Center. After they got a less than lukewarm reception at the State Department, Iushenkov told Goldfarb: “This is to be expected. Just imagine that we’d come to Washington, say in 1944, to complain about Stalin. We wouldn’t get a sympathetic hearing, would we? Uncle Joe was Roosevelt’s favorite ally, so he could get away with anything.”³⁶ With Putin on the side of the United States in the war on terror the Americans were not about to rock the boat because of allegations about Putin’s possible crimes.

However circumstantial the evidence against the FSB, the Putin regime was unable to refute it. And, for all its forensic skill and investigatory power, the FSB had arrested and prosecuted only two persons, both from Karachaevo-Cherkessia, who had acted as paid middlemen in transporting the explosives. The organizers and perpetrators of the plot were never found, and the alleged zakazchik (the one who gave the order), the ethnic Saudi jihadist al-Khattab, who resided in Chechnya, had no apparent motive. As General Lebed had earlier pointed out, it was not in the interests of radical Islamic leaders to bomb apartment buildings housing poor Russian citizens.³⁷

Violence in Russia

Equally damning for the FSB were the murders of those who publicly questioned the official line. Iushenkov, who, as co-chairman of the Kovalev Commission, had pressured the Kremlin to furnish answers about the bombings, was shot to death outside his apartment building in April 2003 by a gunman who claimed that he had been hired by a leader of Liberal Russia named Mikhail Kodanev.³⁸ Earlier, a split had arisen in the party when Berezovsky made overtures to the Communists, which Iushenkov and his supporters opposed, and Kodanev had sided with Berezovsky. Also, Iushenkov was warned by a high government official that the Kremlin would not allow the party to register for the 2003 elections if Berezovsky was a member. All of these circumstances supposedly provided Kodanev with a motive to kill Iushenkov. But Berezovsky later explained that there was no rift between them, and that Iushenkov, with Berezovsky’s agreement, had deliberately publicized the conflict so that Liberal Russia would not have problems registering for the elections.³⁹ Kodanev maintained his innocence, and the case against him was flimsy, to say the least. Berezovsky said the murder charges were “just like something out of 1937.”⁴⁰ Nonetheless, Kodanev received a twenty-year prison sentence. In 2018, he was released from prison after publicly saying that Berezovsky had ordered Iushenkov’s murder, adding to the string of killings that the Kremlin had attributed to the oligarch by this time.⁴¹

Iushenkov’s murder was not an isolated case. Vladimir Golovlev, who had visited Berezovsky in France along with Iushenkov, was walking his dog on a street near his Moscow home when he was shot dead by an unidentified assailant in August 2002. Berezovsky’s reaction was immediate. The murder, he said, “is a message to the political classes of Russia that anyone who crosses the red flags of the existing powers will be killed.”⁴² Just two months after Iushenkov’s death, in June 2003, another member of the Kovalev Commission, Duma deputy and investigative journalist Iurii Shchekochikhin fell violently ill from a substance that eventually caused all of his organs to fail and his skin and hair to peel off. He died on July 3. Because the doctors withheld his medical records, Shchekochikhin’s family was never able to learn more about the poisonous substance and how it entered his body.⁴³

The deaths of these two key members were a huge setback for Kovalev’s commission, which already faced obstacles in being denied access to key witnesses and documents. Then, in October 2003, the commission’s attorney and key investigator, Mikhail Trepashkin, was arrested after the Russian press reported on a discovery that he had made. The FSB had claimed that the perpetrator of the Moscow apartment bombings was a man from Karachaevo-Cherkessia named Achemez Gochiiaev, who had fled into hiding. Trepashkin found out that Gochiiaev was the wrong man, and the actual criminal—described by Dunlop as the “Mohamed Atta in the Moscow bombings”—was a former FSB officer who was conveniently killed in a car accident in Cyprus after Trepashkin located him.⁴⁴ As a result of these misfortunes, Kovalev’s work ground to a halt, although Litvinenko and Felshtinsky, who had collaborated with Trepashkin on the bombings case, continued to probe the matter, with Berezovsky supporting them.

Litvinenko and his family had received formal political asylum in Britain in May 2001, but Berezovsky’s status was still uncertain, and Russian authorities were hounding him. In October 2002, the Russian prosecutor general charged Berezovsky, Patarkatsishvili and their former business associate Iulii Dubov with fraud relating to a purchase by LogoVAZ of thousands of cars from AvtoVAZ in 1994–95. A month later the Russian government officially requested Berezovsky’s extradition from Britain to face the charges. After further pressure from Russia, Berezovsky was very briefly arrested in March 2003 by British authorities, along with Dubov. The two claimed the charges were politically motivated and were released after each paid $160,000 in bail pending a court hearing, which took place on April 2. During the brief court hearing, which extended the proceedings until May, Berezovsky learned that his asylum appeal had been denied by the Home Office because of the extradition demands.⁴⁵

Russia’s decision to request Berezovsky’s extradition may have been spurred on by his announcement on November 1, 2002, that his International Civil Liberties Foundation would support Akhmed Zakaev, a representative of the Chechen government in exile, who was also facing extradition from Britain to Russia. Zakaev, accused by the Kremlin of terrorism and mass murder because of his support for the Chechen cause, was released from custody by a British court after putting up bail in December 2002 and, like Berezovsky, had to go through an extradition hearing. Then, suddenly, the unexpected happened. In September 2003, the judge in Berezovsky’s case announced that Berezovsky had been granted asylum, and the Russian extradition request was denied. MI5 had learned of a plot to kill Berezovsky by stabbing him with a poison pen. The man who had been recruited by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service as the assassin, Vladimir Terluk, had approached Goldfarb and Litvinenko in London in March 2003 and told them of the plot, asking them to provide him with financial assistance and help in gaining asylum in Britain. Terluk later confirmed his story to British police.⁴⁶ To protect Berezovsky when he traveled outside Britain, the Home Office provided him with an alias identity—Platon Elenin.

In Zakaev’s case, a key prosecution witness made a surprise appearance in court to announce that he had been tortured by the FSB into making false accusations against the Chechen leader. Another accuser was shown by Zakaev’s lawyers to be lying on the witness stand. In November 2003, Judge Timothy Workman threw out the extradition case against Zakaev, concluding that the Russian government was not pursuing an antiterrorist operation in Chechnya but a war, and it was seeking Zakaev’s extradition to prevent him from negotiating a peace deal.⁴⁷ According to Mikhail Zygar, the British decision to refuse the extradition of Berezovsky and Zakaev was a heavy blow to Putin, especially given his cordial relations with Prime Minister Tony Blair: “Putin simply could not believe that Blair had no influence over the British judicial system.”⁴⁸

Putin may have been especially sensitive to condemnation from the Berezovsky camp abroad because of the challenges he was facing at home. On October 23, 2002, forty Chechen terrorists stormed the Dubrovka Theater in central Moscow, taking over nine hundred hostages. Three days later, without the government having conducted serious negotiations with the terrorists, Russian special forces pumped poisonous gas into the theater, killing close to two hundred hostages, along with their captors. Questions were raised immediately in the Russian press about the regime’s handling of the incident, including how a band of terrorists with explosives had gathered in Moscow unnoticed by the security police.⁴⁹ According to Zygar: “For Putin this was a catastrophe. Not only was the war he had promised to end three years earlier not over, but it had come to the capital. People close to him recalled that Putin was not only upset—he was convinced that this was the end of his political career.”⁵⁰ But instead of incurring political damage, Putin saw his approval rating increase from 77 percent in October to 82 percent in December.⁵¹ The public was apparently so outraged by Chechen terrorism that its support for Putin and military action in Chechnya became stronger.

Two years later, on September 1, 2004, militants under the direction of Shamil Basaev seized some 1,200 children, parents, and teachers in a middle school in Beslan, a town in the southern republic of Ossetia. Again, the crisis was mishandled terribly by the FSB. Instead of earnestly pursuing negotiations with the hostage takers, the FSB ended the standoff by opening fire on them, causing 333 deaths, including 186 children. The authorities were later criticized for allowing the attackers to get through checkpoints and for using excessive force when they ended the siege. But, as the former Kremlin foreign policy official Andrei Kovalev noted, Putin again turned the tragedy to his advantage: “He used it both to ratchet up tension inside Russia and in international affairs and to launch a further assault on democracy. ‘We are dealing,’ he [Putin] declared, ‘with the direct intervention of foreign terrorism against Russia. With total, brutal, and full-scale war.’”⁵²

In its 2004 annual report on Russia, the Committee to Protect Journalists noted “an alarming suppression of news coverage during the Beslan crisis” and reported that several journalists were prevented by security agents from going to Beslan, including Anna Politkovskaya. Politkovskaya was on her way to cover the crisis for Novaia gazeta when she drank tea that had been poisoned on the flight and became so violently ill that she had to be hospitalized. According to the report, this reflected a larger trend of media suppression by the Putin regime: “Using intelligence agents and an array of politicized state agencies, Putin pushed for an obedient and patriotic press in keeping with his ever tightening grip on Russia’s deteriorating democracy … Critical reporting on the president’s record, government corruption, terrorism, and the war in Chechnya has become rare since Putin took office. Overt pressure by the Federal Security Service (FSB), bureaucratic obstruction, politicized lawsuits, and hostile corporate takeovers have enabled the Kremlin to intimidate and silence many of its critics.”⁵³

Kremlin control over the media had helped to ensure Putin’s victory in the March 2004 presidential elections with 71.9 percent of the vote. (The Communist candidate, Nikolai Kharitonov, Putin’s closest challenger, received 13.8 percent.) On the surface, the election appeared democratic, but as Western election observers pointed out, “The state-controlled media comprehensively failed to meet its legal obligation to provide equal treatment to all candidates, displaying clear favouritism towards Mr. Putin.”⁵⁴ That said, Putin continued to enjoy genuine popularity in his country. His approval ratings in March 2004 were above 80 percent. Thanks to a surge in the price of oil, the Russian economy had rebounded solidly from the decline of the 1990s, with significant growth in income and consumption. Ordinary Russians, now better off, were grateful to their president.

The Downfall of Khodorkovsky

Putin had also achieved an important victory over the oligarchs with the arrest in October 2003 of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was viewed by the Russian president and his siloviki as a threat to their political and financial dominance. Born in 1963, Khodorkovsky, the owner of the oil company Yukos, was much younger and more financially successful than Berezovsky. (In 2003, his net worth was estimated by Forbes at $8 billion, making him the richest man in Russia.) But as with Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky’s ambitions went beyond wealth. Not only did he believe that the economy should be free from state control; he strove to extend his activities and those of Yukos into social and political spheres. In December 2001, Yukos established the Open Russia Foundation, which soon had branches all over the country. The aim of the foundation was to further the development of civil society in Russia by promoting social welfare, public health, and education. Khodorkovsky also made extensive donations to US nonprofit institutions and gave frequent lectures and speeches in Russia and abroad. Richard Sakwa, author of a book on the Yukos affair, writes, “The goal, as Khodorkovsky put it, was to help create a ‘normal country,’ but it also transformed his image from robber baron to international philanthropist.”⁵⁵

Yukos entered the media market in early 2003 when it purchased Moscow News and hired an outspoken Kremlin critic, Evgenii Kiselev, as its editor. In addition, Khodorkovsky donated millions of dollars to opposition political parties Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, as well as to the Communists. And he even had discussions with members of United Russia about the possibility of making changes in the constitution to introduce a “French-style presidential-parliamentary republic.” Not surprisingly, Khodorkovsky’s undertakings deeply rankled the Kremlin. Open Russia, Sakwa notes, “came to be seen as a type of opposition party … the regime feared that it could mobilize an anti-Putin movement.”⁵⁶ According to Zygar, “people close to Khodorkovsky said that he saw himself as a future prime minister inside a new government.”⁵⁷

Khodorkovsky’s relations with Putin became especially strained after a televised meeting between Putin and business leaders in the Kremlin on February 19, 2003. With the approval of Voloshin, still head of the Presidential Administration, and the meeting’s organizer, Gazprom chairman Dmitrii Medvedev, Khodorkovsky gave a presentation titled “Corruption in Russia: A Brake on Economic Growth.” Claiming that the country’s corruption was systemic, amounting to $30 billion a year, he noted that it was prevalent in transactions between the government and private business and cited as an example the acquisition by Rosneft of the oil company Severnaia Neft. According to Khodorkovsky, the state grossly overpaid for the company, and the surplus payment went as kickbacks to those involved in the transaction, including government officials. The Russian president was visibly angry. This amounted to a direct attack on his government and business elite. Khodorkovsky’s advisor, former KGB general Aleksei Kondaurov, recalled: “If it were not for Mikhail Borisovich’s speech at a meeting with Putin in February 2003, I don’t exclude the possibility that our fate might have turned out differently. I don’t blame Khodorkovsky. He did as he saw fit. He understood the risks, and so did I. I thought the risks were more serious than he thought.”⁵⁸

As with Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky’s boldness had severe consequences. After the meeting, the FSB, in collaboration with Prosecutor General Ustinov, stepped up an investigation of Yukos begun in 2002, with a focus on gathering kompromat. Igor Sechin, who would become chairman of Rosneft’s board of directors in 2004, was reportedly orchestrating these efforts behind the scenes. He had been involved with the Rosneft deal to acquire Severnaia Neft and so naturally took umbrage at Khodorkovsky’s criticism of the transaction. Sechin also led the siloviki faction of Putin’s team that backed more state control over the economy. With Khodorkovsky out of the picture, Rosneft would be able to snap up Yukos assets, which is in fact what happened.⁵⁹

While Khodorkovsky was determinedly pursuing financial deals, including a proposed merger of Yukos with Abramovich’s Sibneft, danger signs appeared. First came the publication in May of a report by Stanislav Belkovsky, head of the Council on National Strategy, titled “The State and the Oligarchy.” The report claimed, among other things, that Khodorkovsky was organizing a coup with some other oligarchs. In June 2003, Aleksei Pichugin, a former KGB officer responsible for economic security at Yukos, was arrested on what later proved to be spurious murder charges, and at the end of the month prosecutors searched the Moscow headquarters of Yukos. A few days later Platon Lebedev, chairman of Khodorkovsky’s Menatep Group, which owned Yukos, was seized by police from his hospital bed and charged with fraud and tax evasion. Searches continued throughout the summer, and Khodorkovsky was called for questioning as a witness.⁶⁰

When Berezovsky had faced a criminal investigation and aggressive calls from prosecutors to report for questioning, he knew that his arrest was imminent and fled Russia. But Khodorkovsky had reason to believe that he could stay in the country without being arrested. In contrast to Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky had a highly favorable image in the West and a lot of support from Western policy makers, especially in the United States. He spoke in Washington at both the US-Russia Business Council and the Carnegie Endowment on October 9, 2003, appearing confident and assured. He also had been told (falsely, it turns out) that President Bush had raised the Yukos case with Putin at the Camp David summit in September. In addition, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov had informed Khodorkovsky after Lebedev was arrested that Putin wanted him to know that he, Khodorkovsky, had no reason to worry. Voloshin had also assured Khodorkovsky that he was safe from arrest. Apparently both these men had underestimated the authority of Sechin, the prime mover against Khodorkovsky.⁶¹

As it was under Yeltsin, accusations of financial malfeasance, or other criminal acts, served as weapons to fight political enemies. But, unlike Yeltsin, Putin had complete dominance over the law enforcement agencies, so the accused had no recourse. Khodorkovsky was a sitting duck. At dawn on October 25, the FSB’s antiterrorist unit, Alpha, conducted a raid on Khodorkovsky’s private jet as it made a stop to refuel in Novosibirsk. Khodorkovsky was taken into custody for allegedly not complying with a summons to appear at the prosecutor’s office. After being flown to Moscow, Khodorkovsky was imprisoned without bail to await his June 2004 trial for tax evasion, embezzlement, and other offenses. In May 2005, a Moscow court sentenced him to nine years in a labor colony. (The sentence was later reduced to eight years.) As for Yukos, after the Russian government claimed the company owed $27 billion in taxes and froze its assets, most of it was eventually acquired by Rosneft.⁶²

Predictably, Berezovsky portrayed Khodorkovsky’s arrest as a cause for alarm in the West over the increasingly dictatorial nature of the Putin regime. In early November, just as Putin was about to attend a summit of the European Union in Rome, Berezovsky urged Western leaders to speak out against Putin’s lawlessness. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, he pointed out that “the West needs to pay equal attention to Mr. Putin’s attacks on democratic institutions in Russia as it does to the fight for global security.”⁶³ Later that month, he wrote in Le Monde that Western statesmen should stop giving legitimacy to Putin as a leader and compared him to Stalin: “At one time, the West supported Stalin. Everyone remembers what the consequences of that policy were for the West and the consequences for us.”⁶⁴

Berezovsky was preaching largely to deaf ears. However much Western leaders might have liked to see democracy in Russia, regime change was not on their agenda. Senator John McCain spoke out fiercely against the Russian president after Khodorkovsky’s arrest, urging President Bush to rescind Putin’s invitation to the June 2004 G8 summit in King Island, Georgia.⁶⁵ But McCain’s advice was ignored. Putin attended the summit, and while encouraging the Russian president to see the benefits of becoming a cooperative global partner by respecting human rights in his county, Western leaders appeared to accept Putin for what he was.