The President-Elect

It is not surprising that Putin decided on a visit to Chechnya for his first public appearance as president. Although his approval ratings were still high, public enthusiasm for the war threatened to wane as casualties mounted, and the Russian military had reached an apparent impasse in Grozny.⁷ Western governments and human rights groups were expressing outrage about the devastating toll on Chechens.⁸ And the liberal Russian media was becoming increasingly critical of the Chechnya invasion as journalists reported on the spot about innocent civilians killed by air strikes or massacred by “wilding” Russian troops.

Writing for Novaia gazeta, Anna Politkovskaya described the daily horrors she saw as a reporter in Chechnya. In mid-December, she described a Chechen girl dying in a hospital in Ingushetia after being riddled with bullets from a Russian plane as she fled a village near Grozny in a car flying a white flag and filled with refugees: “Everyone looks away when, worn by her struggle to keep alive, this once cheerful and carefree fourth-year student in the languages faculty at Grozny University suddenly shifts her gaze from the ceiling and stares at them as they repeat their meaningless phrases.” Politkovskaya also reported on the slaughter of twenty-three farmers and their families at that same village, Alkhan-Yurt, during a Russian “check” on their residence documents. “So this is the ‘fierce struggle with the Chechen fighters,’” she wrote. “The army tells us ‘We are not shooting at people’s homes’ and the result is a devastated village and not one piece of evidence that the fighters have been there.”⁹

A journalist for Radio Liberty, Andrei Babitsky, reported from Grozny in late December 1999 that he saw at least eighty corpses of Russian soldiers after a recent battle in the city and said that he had video footage confirming the deaths of other Russian servicemen as they stormed Grozny.¹⁰ Given that the Kremlin sought to downplay Russian casualties, Babitsky’s reporting was unwelcome. Even worse, he seemed to defend the motives of the rebels. On January 16, 2000, Russian forces detained him as he was leaving Chechnya, on the grounds that he had violated the military’s prohibition against journalists being in the war zone. But they then denied that they knew his whereabouts to his family and colleagues, who were frantically trying to locate him. It was not until January 28 that Russian authorities admitted they had Babitsky in custody, but instead of releasing him, they claimed to have handed him over to Chechen warlords, purportedly in exchange for Russian soldiers who were held captive. Babitsky was released by his captors at the end of February, only to be arrested briefly by Russian police on charges of possessing a fake passport.¹¹

Meanwhile Babitsky’s cause had been taken up by the Americans, who funded Radio Liberty. The State Department condemned his treatment as a journalist and Secretary of State Madeline Albright personally intervened through her counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov. Despite the potential damage to his global image, Putin remained adamant that Babitsky was, in his view, a traitor because of his reporting: “He was working directly for the enemy. He was not a neutral source of information. He was working for the bandits.”¹² The Babitsky incident was a foretelling of how journalists would be treated under Putin’s presidency. As Gevorkyan said to Masha Gessen: “I knew that this was how he [Putin] understood the word patriotism—just the way he had been taught in all those KGB schools: the country is as great as the fear it inspires, and the media should be loyal.”¹³

A mid-January editorial in The Moscow Times summed up the folly of Putin’s Chechen military operations in no uncertain terms: “The aerial bombing campaigns, which have destroyed entire communities, have no clear military purpose. Instead, they are the equivalent of a terrorist factory—for what is more likely to produce a man willing to take up arms against the state than a state that kills his parents, his wife, his children? … As near as we can see, the only beneficiary of the war so far is Putin himself.”¹⁴

But while the West and the liberal Russian press raised alarm bells about Putin’s heavy-handed methods, the Russian political and business elite continued to rally around him. Chubais, for example, who earlier had opposed the choice of Putin as prime minister, had become one of his biggest fans. In an interview during a visit to Chechnya in late November 1999, Chubais said unequivocally, “If Putin asks me, I will do everything to support him,” and denied that Putin had initiated the war in order to boost his popular standing: “He believes that his personal, human duty is primarily connected with Chechnya. Vladimir Vladimirovich, it seems to me, perceives the Chechen problem as an absolutely personal mission. He seems to be internally hurt by the fact that they attacked Russia.”¹⁵ Chubais, who later became head of the state electricity monopoly RAO UES, was a leader of the Union of Right Forces (SPS), along with Boris Nemtsov, Egor Gaidar, and others. Nemtsov, who disliked Putin intensely and opposed their party’s support for him, was outnumbered when party leaders took a vote.¹⁶

Another Putin advocate was Anatoly Sobchak, who had returned from exile in Paris in July 1999 to announce that he would be running as a candidate to the Duma from St. Petersburg, representing the Right Cause (Pravoe delo) bloc. After encountering strong political opposition in St. Petersburg, Sobchak lost his election bid. In the words of historian Roy Medvedev, “this was a heavy blow for the brave but too restless, conceited, and ambitious politician.”¹⁷ Sobchak then volunteered to work on Putin’s presidential campaign, rallying voters in the northwest regions of Russia. But his support may have been a liability for Putin. The Russian press was merciless in attacking Sobchak with stories of his corruption as St. Petersburg mayor and suggestions that the 1997 diagnosis of his heart attack by his and Putin’s doctor friend Iurii Shevchenko was an excuse to get Sobchak out of the country.¹⁸

On February 15, 2000, Sobchak went to Kaliningrad to speak on Putin’s behalf. Four days later, he was found dead in his hotel room in the city of Svetlogorsk. He had died alone, reportedly of a heart attack. Putin sent a special plane to retrieve Sobchak’s body and in a telegram of condolence to Sobchak’s wife and daughter he wrote: “It is impossible for me to come to terms with this loss. Anatolii Aleksandrovich was very close to me, my teacher … He always served as an example of decency and firmness in his convictions.” At Sobchak’s funeral on February 24, which was attended by all of the Kremlin’s political elite, Putin, who delivered the eulogy, was seen shedding tears.¹⁹

Sobchak’s sudden death gave rise to theories that he had been murdered. The last people in his Kaliningrad hotel room were two mafia-connected businessmen who were later killed in showdowns. Two autopsies were done on Sobchak’s body, one in Kaliningrad and the other by Shevchenko, who had recently been appointed Russian minister of health. The cause of death was determined by Shevchenko to be a heart attack, but the Kaliningrad prosecutor’s office carried out a three-month investigation, which proved inconclusive, into a possible “premeditated murder with aggravating circumstances.” In 2012, Narusova said in an interview that her husband had not died of a heart attack and that those responsible for his death were still in power. She had documents that would prove that her husband was murdered, she added, but could not disclose them because she feared reprisals against her daughter, Ksenia.²⁰ Some suggested that Putin had his former mentor murdered because he knew a lot about Putin’s past criminal activities in St. Petersburg. The journalist Arkady Vaksberg, who had met with Sobchak during his time in Paris, was convinced that Sobchak was poisoned on Putin’s orders.²¹ Not surprisingly, the questions raised by Vaksberg and others came to nothing.

Dissent and Rebuke

Although Berezovsky had been instructed by the Family to lie low during the presidential campaign, it was not in his nature to keep quiet. He continued to give interviews to the Russian and Western media, never failing to voice his support for Putin. His newspaper Kommersant paid for the publication and distribution of Putin’s autobiography, First Person, which appeared just before the presidential election and portrayed Putin in the best possible light. But Berezovsky sometimes slipped and said things that appeared to demean the future president. In a late December interview, for example, Berezovsky was asked by the political strategist Stanislav Belkovsky whether Putin was another Andropov (the ruthless former KGB chairman who succeeded Brezhnev and portrayed himself as a reformer). He replied: “The present ‘successor’ is a child of the new system; he’ll hardly dare to cancel civil rights and freedoms. After all, he was just a lieutenant colonel under Soviet rule, not a field marshal.”²²

Berezovsky also began to suggest in the press that the war in Chechnya would not lead to success. Interviewed in January by Sergei Dorenko on ORT, he opined that an effective government should be able to resolve the Chechen situation by negotiations, rather than force.²³ And just before the March elections, Berezovsky told the newspaper Vedomosti that he and Putin assessed the situation in Chechnya completely differently and stressed again that negotiating with the Chechens was the only way forward.²⁴ In early April, he urged a cease-fire and political dialogue with Maskhadov, in order to keep the death toll from rising.²⁵

At least some of Berezovsky’s statements must have reached Putin, and he cannot have been pleased. On the eve of the Russian presidential election, The Economist published an article speculating on the relationship between Berezovsky and the acting president.²⁶ “Maybe Mr. Berezovsky’s number is up,” the magazine posited. “Mr. Putin’s austere, disciplined style is a world away from the indulgent, ostentatious cronyism of the Yeltsin era. Though he [Berezovsky] praises Mr. Putin publicly, the president-in-waiting has been noticeably cooler in return.” The article went on to quote Putin as saying, “beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” when Berezovsky endorsed him as president, but concluded: “So even if Mr. Putin loathes Mr. Berezovsky, as some say he does, and regards his influence as pernicious, there would be no point in turning on him and his chums until after the election.”

The March 26 presidential elections brought no surprises. Putin won with 53.4 percent of the vote, followed by Zyuganov, with 29.5 percent, and Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of Yabloko, with 5.9 percent. As Jonathan Steele predicted in The Guardian two days earlier: “A pseudo-democratic seal of approval will be stamped on the lucky man on Sunday, when those Russian voters strong enough to resist the crushing hands of apathy and disgust troop off to the polling booths. But the real election took place last August when a handful of men behind closed doors in the Kremlin chose a hard-nosed apparatchik, Vladimir Putin, to take over from Boris Yeltsin.”²⁷ Steele added that being the incumbent “in a society where authoritarian instincts run deep” gave Putin a huge advantage, especially with his backers controlling the television news. But what would happen to these wealthy supporters now that Putin’s position as leader was secure?

Putin had hinted publicly that, once elected president, he would place a distance between himself and powerful business tycoons. Just before the election he spoke in more ominous terms when asked in a radio interview about his intentions for the oligarchs: “If by oligarchs … we mean representatives of groups that are merging or are facilitating the merging of government with capital, there will be no such oligarchs as a class.”²⁸ The statement contrasted sharply with what Berezovsky said to the Duma just days later: “It is impossible to distance oligarchs from power. That is how the modern society is made. If he eliminates one oligarch, others will come.”²⁹

Putin wasted little time in going after business tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky, whose television channel, NTV, had been so critical of him, with such programs as the Kukly satire. Even worse, despite an admonition from the Kremlin, conveyed by Iumashev, NTV had aired a sensational talk show about the Ryazan bomb incident just two days before the presidential elections. The participants all agreed that the bomb was real, thus rekindling doubts about the official version of the September 1999 attacks.³⁰ On May 11, masked FSB commandos raided the offices of Gusinsky’s Media-Most empire as part of a criminal investigation opened by Russian prosecutors the previous month. On June 13, after openly criticizing Putin, Gusinsky was summoned to the prosecutor’s office, where he was promptly arrested and thrown into the brutal Butyrka prison without access to a lawyer for four days. The arrest prompted NTV’s president Igor Malashenko, vacationing in Spain at the time, to call a press conference in Madrid and announce: “Today Russia got its first political prisoner.”³¹

Putin, who was also in Spain on a postelection tour, claimed to know nothing of the arrest, but no one believed him. The Union of Russian Journalists issued a statement saying that the action against Media-Most was a politically motivated anticonstitutional act by the government with the goal of intimidating independent journalism.³² Sergei Dorenko, who had spent months promoting Putin and destroying his opponents on television, was so outraged over what happened to Gusinsky that he raced to the NTV studios and joined an evening broadcast to denounce the security services. Putin’s reaction was odd. He called Dorenko to his office a few days later and asked him “to join our team” for a large reward. Dorenko, incensed, declined the offer. On leaving Putin’s office he called Berezovsky on his cell phone to shout: “What have you done, Borya? What the fuck have you done?”³³

The condition for the Kremlin dropping charges against Gusinsky was conveyed to him by Mikhail Lesin, Putin’s press minister, who visited Gusinsky in jail: Gusinsky had to sell Media-Most to Gazprom, the state-owned gas monopoly. This left Gusinsky with no choice. He consented to Putin’s terms and was released from jail. As Gusinsky explained to David Hoffman: “I was indeed a hostage. When you have a gun to your head, you have two options: to meet the condition of the bandits or take a bullet in your head.”³⁴ On July 18, after agreeing to sell his empire for $300 million in exchange for forgiveness of his debts and the dismissal of criminal charges, Gusinsky left Russia for Spain. But he then had second thoughts and tried to back out of the deal. Finally, after months of negotiations and further arrest warrants issued from Russia, Gusinsky relented. By April 2001, NTV and the news publications Itogi and Segodnia were in the hands of Gazprom, which immediately closed Segodnia. Gusinsky never returned to Russia, making his home in Israel.³⁵

More Trouble in Paradise

After the March election, it had seemed to Berezovsky that Putin would pursue a democratic agenda in Russia, despite the war in Chechnya. Putin retained Yeltsin allies Chubais and Voloshin on his staff, and his new prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, was a respected technocrat and a free market economist. Berezovsky at some point ran into Boris Nemtsov and commented: “There is nothing left to do … Putin has been elected. Everything is under control. Now I am bored. I don’t know what to do with myself.” Nemtsov responded: “Boria, you shouldn’t be bored. Putin will change very quickly. He will never forgive you for the fact that you saw him as weak and helpless and graciously supported him.” Nemtsov recalled that “Berezovsky looked at me like I was crazy … But I think that he later cursed hundreds of times the day his decision to support a man from the FSB.”³⁶

As if fulfilling Nemtsov’s prophecy, Putin set out in the first week after his May inauguration to rein in the leaders of Russia’s eighty-nine regions by issuing a decree that organized the country into seven zones, with each supervised by a specially appointed presidential envoy. The significance of this bold plan could not be overstated. It seriously weakened the powers of the elected governors by giving Putin’s representatives control over regional bodies—such as defense, security, police, and justice—including appointing the heads of these bodies. In addition, the seven envoys would have oversight over the governors themselves and act as intermediaries between the Kremlin and regional leadership. As Kommersant noted, this reorganization was only the beginning; the next steps would involve giving the Kremlin the power to sack governors and deprive them of their automatic right to be members of the Duma’s upper house, the Federation Council.³⁷ Indeed, Putin then introduced a law that ended ex officio membership for regional executive and legislative heads in the Federation Council. The law was passed in July, with some compromise, against the strong objections from Federation Council members.³⁸

Berezovsky was alarmed when Putin announced his plan to overhaul Russia’s system of regional government. In France at the time, he called up Alex Goldfarb, who was in Moscow, and asked him to do some background research on the concepts of federalism and democracy. On his return to Moscow, Berezovsky got together with Goldfarb and other allies to draft a lengthy letter to Putin explaining that the planned reorganization was undemocratic and a throwback to Soviet times. On May 31, after going to see Putin and making no headway in convincing him against his plan, Berezovsky published the letter in Kommersant.³⁹ Goldfarb had warned Berezovsky not to do it: “Boris, if you go down this road, I predict in a year from now you will be an exile in your chateau, or worse, sitting in jail.”⁴⁰ But Berezovsky would not be dissuaded.

Berezovsky’s letter began respectfully: “As with many people in the country, I am convinced in the sincerity of your intentions and will to make Russia powerful and prosperous and create welfare and wellbeing for its citizens.” Berezovsky then went on to point out, with considerable detail and legal analysis, the ways in which Putin’s plans violated the constitution, breached democracy, and damaged Russia’s existing federal system. The letter was such a departure from Berezovsky’s enthusiastic support for Putin that Moskovskii komsomolets speculated that he was faking his opposition to the Putin plan: “Since it is customary among the people to believe that ‘what is good for Berezovsky is death for Russia,’ Boris Abramovich’s protest will be taken as a sign that the reform is useful after all.”⁴¹

Then came the news of Gusinsky’s arrest. According to Goldfarb: “It shook Boris more personally than the federalism fight. The latter might be an honest mistake by a president who wanted an efficient government. The former was clearly an act of revenge.” Once Putin had returned from Spain, Berezovsky went straight to see him, telling him that the arrest of Gusinsky was senseless vengeance that damaged Putin’s reputation internationally. But Putin’s only response was to remind Berezovsky that Gusinsky had been number one on Berezovsky’s enemies list.⁴²

In early July, Berezovsky, determined to rein in Putin, announced that he was forming a new political party and had already enlisted members of the Duma to join. Such a party was needed, he said, because the government was heading in an authoritarian direction.⁴³ In an interview with Time Magazine the next week, Berezovsky said he had no doubt of Putin’s desire to have Russia be a democratic country, but that “the route he has chosen for this is absolutely fallacious.” Therefore, Berezovsky went on, in order to limit Putin’s political power, it was necessary to create an opposition party composed of the business elite.⁴⁴

Repercussions against Berezovsky for his public criticisms of Putin were swift. A criminal case for tax evasion against AvtoVAZ was opened on July 12, 2000. Berezovsky claimed he no longer had a financial interest in the company, but he still had ties with its management, so the investigation was an indirect blow. Two days later, Berezovsky was called for questioning as a witness in the Aeroflot case, and Russia’s chief investigator in the case was reportedly going to Switzerland at the end of the month to get documents that Swiss authorities had seized from Andava and Forus, the two companies founded by Berezovsky that provided financial services for the airline.⁴⁵

Under increasing pressure, Berezovsky held a news conference in Moscow on July 17 to declare that he was resigning from the State Duma because he “did not want to participate in Russia’s destruction.” He outlined three reasons for his decision: (1) his disagreement with the Russian president’s attempt to tighten control over the regions; (2) the Kremlin’s lack of attention to the needs of Karachaevo-Cherkessia, where there was political conflict; and (3) Putin’s campaign against the business elite. Berezovsky made it clear that, by giving up his Duma seat, he would be on equal footing with other oligarchs who did not enjoy parliamentary immunity. He also said pointedly: “Putin believes that economic and political progress can be achieved by centralizing power. But this is fundamentally wrong.”⁴⁶ Khinshtein later observed that a turning point had come for Berezovsky and his relations with Putin: “Berezovsky outplayed himself. He did not notice how he finally crossed the Rubicon. From now on, a return to peaceful coexistence was no longer possible, and Berezovsky, reluctantly, rushed to the attack. On his last breath, he flew around to see a dozen governors, urging them to fight against the regime; he did not even hesitate to call—after everything that had happened between them—Luzhkov. (The mayor of the capital, with great pleasure, responded to Boris Abramovich by telling him what he thought about him; for censorship reasons, I will not quote this monologue.)”⁴⁷

Berezovsky and Gusinsky were not the only oligarchs under threat. The powerful tax police had opened a criminal case against Lukoil, headed by Vagit Alekperov, and was conducting sweeping inspections of Moscow banks. Vladimir Potanin’s mining company, Noril’sk Nikel’, was also being investigated by the prosecutor’s office. (Both Alekperov and Potanin had publicly protested Gusinsky’s arrest.)⁴⁸ Noting the growing number of cases, Moskovskii komsomolets observed in mid-July: “It looks like we are facing a ‘hot summer.’ According to our laws, it is very easy to imprison a person. The head of a large company can easily end up behind bars with no explanation. In the meantime, the ‘oligarch’ will languish in prison while the authorities try to concoct some sort of accusation.”⁴⁹

On July 29, Putin held a televised meeting at the Kremlin with twenty-one of Russia’s most powerful business tycoons. While he reassured the elite gathering that he did not intend to reverse the privatizations that took place under his predecessor, he said that there needed to be new rules and new understandings between the government and businesses because their relations had been “excessively politicized.” Putin spoke to the men in a mildly chiding tone: “I want to draw your attention to the fact that you built this state yourself, to a great degree through the political or semi-political structures under your control. So there is no point in blaming the reflection in the mirror. So let us get down to the point and be open and do what is necessary to do to make our relationship in this field civilized and transparent.”⁵⁰ The thrust of Putin’s message to the oligarchs could not have been clearer: stay out of politics or face serious repercussions.

Berezovsky was conspicuously absent from the Kremlin meeting. Instead he had an interview that day at the LogoVAZ Club with the Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats. Berezovsky was remarkably restrained when asked about Putin, insisting that the new president was a conscientious liberal politician who had simply made some mistakes because of his inexperience and retelling for the umpteenth time the story of Putin’s surprise appearance at his wife’s birthday party. “I have no doubts that Putin feels a moral obligation to those people he regards as his comrades or friends,” Berezovsky added. He also made a point of saying that businessmen had a responsibility to participate in politics, which was a direct contradiction of what Putin told those at the Kremlin gathering.⁵¹

True to his word, Berezovsky followed up on his plan to create a political movement with a statement, published on the front page of Izvestiia and signed by nine leading political and cultural figures, of “constructive opposition” to the Kremlin’s authoritarian tendencies. The specifics of the movement and its goals were not clear, but Berezovsky said that, with enough support, it could become a political party.⁵² Given Berezovsky’s much tainted reputation, it was doubtful that his movement would make much headway, but it was yet another thorn in Putin’s side.

A Submarine Goes Down

On August 12, 2000, the Kursk, a Russian nuclear submarine carrying cruise missiles, was eighty-five miles off the Murmansk coast of the Barents Sea when it sank to the bottom after an explosion resulting from the spontaneous discharge of a practice torpedo. After a second explosion occurred, only 23 sailors out of the 118 abroad were still alive. Putin’s inadequate response to the crisis was a public relations disaster. For several days, as the desperate sailors hoped to be rescued and their anxious families awaited news, Putin was seen on television enjoying a vacation at his Sochi residence, jet-skiing on the Black Sea, and hosting a barbecue.⁵³ Rescuers did not reach the Kursk until sixteen hours after the accident and then were unable to open the escape hatch. It was only after five days had passed that the Kremlin authorized the assistance of the British and Norwegians, who managed to open the hatch, but by this time all the sailors had died. According to Goldfarb, Berezovsky, who was at his Cap d’Antibes villa on the French Riviera at the time, reached Putin by phone on August 16 and urged him to go immediately to the submarine base on the Barents Sea, or at least back to Moscow, warning Putin that he could be seriously damaging his reputation. Putin was not receptive, waiting until August 19 to return to Moscow.⁵⁴

Meanwhile both ORT and NTV were broadcasting interviews with the distraught mothers of the dead sailors, along with reports of the Russian navy’s inadequacies and Kremlin indifference. Putin was furious. With Aleksandr Voloshin at his side, he met with Berezovsky in Moscow on August 20 to tell him that he needed to give control of ORT to the government and suggested that if Berezovsky did not comply, he would end up in prison like Gusinsky. Although earlier that summer he had said publicly that he would sell his ORT shares to the government, Berezovsky defiantly refused Putin’s demand. Noting that Yeltsin would never have shut off media critics, he added, “You are destroying Russia.” Finally, Putin turned his cold gaze on Berezovsky and said: “You were one of those who asked me to be president. So how can you complain?” This would be the last time that the two met.⁵⁵ (During testimony in 2011 at the London trial of Berezovsky’s case against Roman Abramovich, Voloshin would claim that neither he nor Putin pressured Berezovsky to sell his ORT shares.)⁵⁶

Afterwards Berezovsky went back to his office and wrote Putin a letter, pointing out the Russian leader’s mistakes yet again. Putin was becoming an autocrat, Berezovsky wrote, finding “solutions to complex problems by simple means,” but it would not work. On giving the letter to Voloshin, Berezovsky realized that his relationship with Putin had reached a dead end.⁵⁷ Two days later, he announced that a fund-raising drive he initiated had collected over a million dollars to aid families of the deceased Kursk sailors; he added that he would set up a commission to investigate the causes of the disaster.⁵⁸

Putin did not travel to Severomorsk, headquarters of Russia’s Northern Fleet, to meet with the families of the Kursk victims until August 22, a full ten days after the tragedy occurred. According to a transcript of the closed meeting, published later by Kommersant, it did not go well.⁵⁹ Putin, faced with tears and angry shouts, tried to explain why he had not come earlier: “I asked the military if there was anything I could do to help, and they firmly said no!” When Putin promised compensation for the families, one woman wailed: “We are experiencing such grief. People are already sobbing … We don’t need money. We need them alive. Children had fathers; wives had husbands. They believed that the state would save them.” Putin responded by blaming others for the disaster. He claimed that the economic turmoil caused by his predecessors’ policies had deprived the military of the funds necessary to maintain rescue equipment, and that the media had lied about the disaster in order to discredit the government. The minute foreign help was offered to the Kursk, Putin said falsely, it was accepted, “and that means, the television lied, lied, lied.”

The next day, Putin appeared on state television and acknowledged responsibility for the tragedy. But he also vented his anger at those who “take advantage of this calamity in an unscrupulous way.” In a clear reference to Berezovsky, Putin said that some of those helping the sailors’ families, even collecting a million dollars, have for a long time contributed to the decline of the military and the government. “It would be better if they sold their villas on the Mediterranean coast of France and Spain,” Putin added. “Then they would have to explain why all this property is registered in fake names and legal firms. We would ask them where they got the money.”⁶⁰

In the end, Putin did not suffer a great loss of public confidence because of his handling of the Kursk tragedy. Although his approval ratings dropped from 73 to 65 percent in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, they soon bounced back.⁶¹ But Putin was thin-skinned, and this was the first crisis he had faced, so he experienced the media attacks personally and focused his revenge on Berezovsky. On August 27, Putin summoned Berezovsky’s business partner Badri Patarkatsishvili to his office and asked him what kind of “strange game” Berezovsky was playing. He told Patarkatsishvili, who thought he might be arrested on the spot, that he wanted him and Berezovsky to “clear out” of ORT and suggested that Patarkatsishvili meet with his minister of the press, Mikhail Lesin, who had negotiated the Gusinsky buyout, to discuss the sale of their ORT shares.⁶²

Feeling the pressure, Berezovsky reverted to a previous tactic—an open letter to Putin, which appeared in Kommersant on September 5. Berezovsky wrote that he rejected the Kremlin’s demand that he transfer to the state his holdings (49 percent of the shares) in ORT television: “If I agree to the ultimatum, television information will cease to exist in Russia and will be replaced by television propaganda, controlled by your advisors.” Noting that the president was unhappy with ORT’s coverage of the Kursk submarine disaster, Berezovsky alleged that the Kremlin was resorting to threats and blackmail to wrest control over ORT from him, offering him a choice between relinquishing his shares or following Gusinsky to jail. But, he said, “you know me quite well and therefore should not be surprised to learn that I will not submit to your ultimatums.” Instead, Berezovsky wrote, he was transferring his ORT shares to a group of prominent journalists and intellectuals.⁶³

Desperation

Had Berezovsky quietly sold his ORT shares to the government and ceased speaking out in the media about Putin’s failings, he might possibly have made a tenuous peace with the Russian president and remained in Russia. But he seemed to hope that by publicizing his dispute with the Kremlin and demonstrating the danger for democracy posed by a Kremlin takeover of ORT, pressure might be brought to bear on Putin. An article in Kommersant on September 5 suggested this. Pointing out that Putin was heading to the United Nations summit in New York, the author noted that he might face questions about press freedom from other world leaders: “For the West, Berezovsky is a much more odious figure than Gusinsky. But if there really is not a single nonstate Russian TV channel left in Russia, the Western establishment is likely to temporarily forget about its antipathy toward the oligarch and agree conditionally to consider him another victim of the Putin regime’s struggle with independent media.”⁶⁴

In fact, Putin was questioned about Berezovsky during a dinner with the media, hosted by Tom Brokaw, on September 8, 2000. Asked why his government would harass Berezovsky, given that the oligarch had helped in the selection of Putin as Boris Yeltsin’s successor, Putin responded angrily: “Did he really? He wanted you to believe that” and did not answer the question.⁶⁵ In a one-on-one with Larry King, Putin said that freedom of the press in Russia was not under threat and that the real issue with Gusinsky and Berezovsky was simply that they had incurred debts. He also told King that he always wore the Orthodox cross his mother had given him, which was almost lost in a fire at his dacha.⁶⁶

Andrei Piontkovsky later scoffed at the story of the cross, which Russians had already heard countless times in different versions and was intended to show Western audiences that Putin had a human side. “The interview with Larry King helps shed light on why Western leaders are so taken with Putin,” Piontkovsky noted. “The export-model Putin is vastly different from the version for domestic consumption. When abroad, Putin doesn’t threaten to wipe anyone out in the outhouse, and he doesn’t go into self-revealing hysterics, shouting ‘Television is lying! Television is lying! Television is lying!’ The export Putin doesn’t use [a crude expression] when talking with women. This kind of behavior is only acceptable at home, with his own lackeys. Especially as the lackeys love it.”⁶⁷

If Berezovsky was counting on support from the Russian public as a victim of Putin, it was wishful thinking. Albats probably reflected the views of most well-informed Russians when she commented harshly in The Moscow Times on Berezovsky’s most recent letter to Putin.⁶⁸ The only rationale behind Berezovsky’s public and private adventures, she wrote, “has been self-enrichment at the expense of subverting all the noble desires that he presumably is fighting for now.” He himself created the situation he was now in, with little to offer in bargaining with the Kremlin: “Once again, Berezovsky has proved that he is good at short-term tactics, but no good at strategic thinking.” Lilia Shevtsova later observed: “Though the most restive tycoon said all the right things about the threat to democracy, no one in Russia thought he was sincere. Everyone remembered his role in the evolution of the Yeltsin regime and assumed he was only trying to save himself and his empire now.”⁶⁹

Some independent journalists accepted Berezovsky’s offer to become trustees of his shares in ORT, despite his reputation of being more a manipulator of the media than a defender.⁷⁰ But Berezovsky lamented in a presentation at the International Press Center in Washington, DC, on September 20 that “it is easier for me to speak in the West than at home because the Americans understand me much better.” Russians, he said, have a slave mentality. He went on to say that his political opposition to Putin was not meant to topple him from power but to offer the Russian leader alternative strategies.⁷¹ Back in Moscow in mid-October, Berezovsky raised his pitch, warning that “the whole might of the state machinery is being used to prevent the formation of an opposition.”⁷²

On October 17, Berezovsky was grilled for two hours by Russian prosecutors on the Aeroflot case and afterward announced that “the whole case is pure politics, first by Primakov and now by Vladimir Putin.”⁷³ The next day he was locked out of his lavish state dacha in Aleksandrovka, which he had rented for his family since 1994. As if Berezovsky needed any further reminder of the Russian president’s wrath, Putin gave an interview to Le Figaro on October 26 in which he responded to a question about Berezovsky by suggesting that the oligarch was trying “to scare the political leadership” with blackmail. Putin then made a pointed warning: “We wield a big stick, called ‘palitsa’ in Russian, which can clinch an argument with one fell swoop. We have not used it yet, we are simply holding it in our hands, and that has had some resonance already. But if we are provoked, we will have to use it.”⁷⁴

By this time, Berezovsky had headed to his French villa, where he soon received an order from Russian prosecutors to appear for questioning in Moscow on November 15, 2000. According to a deputy prosecutor, Berezovsky could expect “very serious charges of embezzlement” involving the $700 million of Aeroflot funds that had gone through the bank accounts of Forus and Andava. Nikolai Glushkov, Berezovsky’s business partner and onetime deputy director of Aeroflot, had also been summoned, but his appearance had been postponed because he was in the hospital.⁷⁵

Alex Goldfarb arrived at Cap d’Antibes on November 12, 2000, to discuss a planned Berezovsky foundation for political opposition to Putin. He was surprised the next day when Berezovsky announced that he would be flying to Moscow to answer the Russian prosecutor’s summons. Goldfarb literally pulled Berezovsky out of his car as he was about to leave for the Nice airport, saying: “Boris, are you insane? Didn’t they tell you that they would put you in jail if you did not give up ORT? Why are you going there?” Goldfarb got Elena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov’s window, on the phone to talk with Berezovsky. With Bonner’s help, Goldfarb and Berezovsky’s wife, Elena, managed to dissuade the oligarch from returning to Russia.⁷⁶

Instead, a depressed Berezovsky wrote a long statement for the Russian press, published on November 15, in which he said that he would not return to Moscow for questioning by prosecutors. He had been compelled to choose, Berezovsky wrote, “between becoming a political prisoner or a political emigrant.” He went on to say that “as a candidate for Russia’s presidency, Putin had seen nothing wrong with using the profits of Swiss firms cooperating with Aeroflot for purposes of financing the Unity bloc or his own presidential campaign.” Yet now, Berezovsky added, Putin was using the Aeroflot case against him because ORT had told the truth about the Kursk tragedy. He ended the letter by predicting that, if Putin continued to use the security services to stifle freedom, “his regime will hardly last until the end of the first constitutional term.”⁷⁷

Consigned like Trotsky to permanent exile, Berezovsky would become more extreme in pursuing a vendetta against Putin in the following years. But what he said in this letter, openly accusing Putin of corruption, helped to seal his fate. Berezovsky’s predictions of the demise of Putin’s regime, which would open the way for his own triumphant return to Russia, would prove to be a fantasy—like wishing on a star.