The Compatriots

by Andrei Soldatov

  CHAPTER 25

  REUNION

  The small resort town of Sea Cliff, twenty-five miles east of Manhattan on the North Shore of Long Island, became home to many White Russian emigrants, including the Jordans. The first Russian families arrived in the 1930s, and the community of Russians continued to grow steadily. The Russians built several tiny churches topped with onion domes where their children learned the language and religion on Fridays and Saturdays, and Russian was often spoken on the streets. In the 1970s, when Boris Jordan grew up, there were still people alive in Sea Cliff who remembered how they had been thrown out of their homes by Bolsheviks.1

  Now Boris Jordan needed to convince his neighbors, who had never forgotten where they came from, that they could pray alongside the Russian president from the KGB.

  Jordan obviously needed some help.

  In the 1990s, while Boris was busy making his fortune in Russia, his father had traveled across the United States giving lectures about Russian army traditions before the revolution. That was why Alexei Jordan had been invited to Putin’s World Congress of Compatriots. He thoroughly enjoyed the attention of the Russian military. All of a sudden, his family had once again become important in the motherland.

  When Boris Jordan set off to promote the idea of the union of the churches, his father, although seriously ill by then, stepped in to help. In August 2002 he wrote a letter to Laurus asking him to consider the union with Moscow. Half an hour after he had finished the letter, he died.

  Alexei Jordan’s letter had no immediate effect. So Boris Jordan flew to New York, visited Metropolitan Laurus in his monastery, and during a long conversation tried to convince him to meet both Moscow’s Patriarch Alexy II and Putin.2

  But months passed, and the progress was slow.

  What was needed was someone from the White Church who was ready to push from inside. As it happened, there was such a person in Laurus’s entourage—one Peter Holodny, a priest and treasurer of the White Church.

  Everybody in the Russian community knew that Holodny was pro-reunification. In fact, his grandfather, a prominent priest, had been expelled from the White Church for cultivating a close personal friendship with Moscow’s patriarch and, in the 1990s, moved to Russia, where he died. Holodny chose the career of financier, working in the late 1980s and early 1990s at JP Morgan, First Boston, and Lehman Brothers. In 1993 he was picked by the White Church to be treasurer for his financial talents. Quite conveniently, he was also ordained as a priest.

  Like Boris Jordan, Holodny had spent years in Russia and was privy to the Russian financial world. And since 2000, he had combined his priesthood with work for the Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, who, as it happened, was also on friendly terms with Boris Jordan. Here was a new opportunity for achieving Putin’s goal.

  In September 2003 Putin returned to New York. This time his goal was not to win George W. Bush’s trust but to advocate for Russian companies by discussing the American president’s most controversial project: the war in Iraq.

  Putin stayed at the Waldorf Astoria, where he played world leader, meeting five heads of foreign governments in a row.3 He also delivered a speech at the UN General Assembly. That didn’t go very well—no journalists other than the Russians brought from Moscow came to listen to him.4

  Putin also tried once again to arrange a meeting with Metropolitan Laurus. Once again, Laurus was invited to talk on Putin’s territory—at the Russian consulate in midtown Manhattan. This time, Laurus did meet the Russian leader.

  Laurus walked into the consulate accompanied by five priests. One of them, the youngest, dressed in bright blue among the rest in black, was thirty-nine-year-old Peter Holodny, treasurer of the White Church and Laurus’s chief negotiator.5 The priests were ushered into a large hall trimmed with white and gold panels, lit by massive chandeliers. A grand piano was in the corner, and next to it, an oval table was set for a meal so as to make the meeting look less formal.

  Holodny had been entrusted with carrying a gift to the Russian president—a massive icon of the last Russian empress Alexandra, killed by chekists. If the gift was intended to send a message to Putin, Putin knew how the game was played. “I want to assure all of you that this godless regime is no longer there,” he said at the meeting, although after he returned to Moscow, he ordered the erection of a monument to Yuri Andropov, the longest-serving chairman of the KGB and a celebrated chekist.6 “You are sitting with a president who is himself a believer,” Putin pressed.7 The priests listened intently.

  The meeting lasted more than three and a half hours and ended on a high note: Laurus accepted Putin’s invitation to come to Russia. Laurus also made it clear that he was ready to talk to the Red Church. The ground was prepared.

  Now it was time for the two churches to talk business. In two months, five priests—including four who had attended the meeting with Putin in New York, Holodny among them—flew to Moscow. On arrival, they were brought to Sretensky Monastery, in the Lubyanka District, a stone’s throw from the KGB headquarters. They were greeted by Tikhon Shevkunov, Putin’s designated negotiator, known for his anti-Western views.

  Shevkunov’s standing within the Red Church was officially modest; he had nothing to do with the department of the church that handled diplomacy. But he happened to be the abbot of the monastery—a church and collection of chaotically spread three-story buildings behind a low wall—strategically located in the corner of Bolshaya Lubyanka Street and Rozhdestvensky Boulevard.

  In the mid-1990s, many FSB officers became religious, and they ended up going to Shevkunov’s monastery. They were met by a young, easygoing, well-versed priest who talked about religion using modern language—Shevkunov was a screenwriter by training. Soon Shevkunov was on friendly terms with many generals, including Putin, whom he had known since 1996.

  The relationship between the church and the security services improved dramatically in the early 2000s and proved mutually beneficial.8 Just the year before, the FSB had expelled five prominent Catholic priests from Russia, helping the Orthodox Church to protect its territory against what it saw as Catholic expansion.

  Shevkunov showed the five priests from New York around the monastery. He walked them to the monastery’s church, where the liturgy included a prayer for the health of the heads of the two churches. Finally, he invited the visitors to breakfast at his office in the abbot’s modest building.9

  The five priests brought with them a list of talking points addressing property issues, the legal status of the White Church, and personnel policy—for example, who would get positions in strategically located parishes and who would have a say in these appointments. It was a long and successful conversation. Later there would be a meeting with the Moscow patriarch, followed by a series of meetings with church hierarchs. But in that spacious room on the second floor of the abbot’s mansion, its windows overlooking the quiet Moscow courtyard, the six priests in black came to terms regarding how best to lead the two Russian Orthodox churches to reunification.

  The next item on Putin’s agenda was to get Metropolitan Laurus to come to Russia. In spring 2004, accompanied by Peter Holodny, Laurus made the first official trip. He was given a reception fit for a head of state. The visit was reported by the biggest Russian state media. Putin received him, along with Moscow’s patriarch, in his residence at Novo-Ogarevo. All went well—and then something completely unexpected happened.

  On July 9, Evgeny Kiselev was sitting with his friends at a restaurant in the Barvikha Luxury Village, a luxury brands shopping mall in Rublyovka, known as Russia’s Beverly Hills, when Boris Jordan rushed to his table. It was their second encounter after Jordan’s security guards had thrown Kiselev’s team out of their NTV offices. The first time they’d run into one another after the ouster, the ever-jovial Jordan had pretended they were good friends. Now he was uncharacteristically serious. “Evgeny!” Jordan exclaimed. “Paul Klebnikov has been killed. Do you know who killed him?”10

  Paul Klebnikov, an Americ
an journalist and a founding editor of Forbes Russia, had been gunned down on the street when he left the Forbes offices in the east of Moscow. Like Jordan, Klebnikov had been born into an aristocratic Russian family in the United States, and the two men, who were roughly the same age, had known each other for twenty years.

  It was a high-profile assassination. Klebnikov was a well-known and widely respected investigative journalist both in the United States and in Russia, where he had spent years investigating and exposing criminal connections of Russian oligarchs.

  Although Putin had downplayed the assassinations of Russian journalists more than once, he didn’t downplay this one. He made a point of personally condemning the crime.11

  Jordan was in deep shock. “We all felt, including Paul, that they’re no longer hiring assassins in Russia, they’re hiring lawyers to settle their disputes,” he said to the Washington Post. “The fact is, that doesn’t seem to be the case.”12

  The Klebnikovs had been very religious, and a question arose about where to have a memorial service for Paul. The Klebnikovs were parishioners of the White Church in New York, but they had also occasionally gone to St. Nicholas Cathedral, the seat of the Red Church, on East Ninety-Seventh Street. They were on friendly terms with all main drivers of the reunification from both churches. Everything about Paul’s death suddenly became political and high profile.

  Tikhon Shevkunov, always energetic and a quick thinker, wasted no time. First, he brought Klebnikov’s body to his monastery and organized an overnight vigil for him. Second, he arranged a memorial service for him at the Christ the Savior Cathedral.13 The Soviet authorities had destroyed the original cathedral, built to celebrate the Russian military victory over Napoleon, and put a huge swimming pool in its place. In the 1990s, Christ the Savior was built anew to signify that Russia was reclaiming its religious identity. The resurrected cathedral started to play the same spiritually symbolic role for the Red Church that St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome did for Catholics.

  Klebnikov’s coffin was put on display in the grand hall of Christ the Savior. Tikhon Shevkunov held the service, with Holodny in attendance. Then Klebnikov’s body was transferred to New York, and a second memorial service was held at St. Nicholas Cathedral—that is, in the Red Church.14 It was a very powerful message for the Russian émigré community in the United States.

  At this point, the reunification project still lacked the White Church congregation’s official approval. For that, the Kremlin and the White Church had to wait for two more years.

  In May 2006, the White Church gathered for conference in San Francisco.15 Boris Jordan personally helped fund the conference and was given a chance to speak. He urged the conference to approve the reunification. “It was my personal thing. I was personally interested in making it happen,” he told us. After four days of debate, the conference voted for reunification.

  On May 17, 2007, the two churches signed the accord, known as an Act of Canonical Communion, in an elaborate ceremony at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow—where Shevkunov held a service for Klebnikov three years earlier. Jordan was present at the ceremony.

  Prominent figures of the Russian first wave of emigration, including Vladimir Galitzine, the retired vice president of the Bank of New York and now leader in Russian American aristocratic circles, voiced approval of this news. They had similarly voiced approval two years before, when the remains of a renowned commander in chief of the White army and of Ivan Ilyin, a chief philosopher of the White movement, were transferred to Moscow.16 This operation was also funded by Boris Jordan.17

  The entire reunification project, from beginning to end, took Putin six years. During this same period, Putin was also busy crushing his opposition inside Russia, attacking media freedom, and promoting former and current KGB members to important positions—effectively making them the new nobility of the country.18

  The Russian president’s successful absorption of the White Church essentially nullified the “other Russia.”

  Why was this move of Putin’s so readily accepted by the descendants of the first wave of the émigré community? We have asked ourselves this question dozens of times. They should have detested his KGB past and been suspicious of his use of Soviet symbols—a practice that included the reintroduction of Stalin’s hymn, with the words just slightly changed.

  The only theory we have come up with is that the descendants of the White Russian émigrés shared something with Putin. In the course of his career, the Russian president repeatedly demonstrated his excellent tactical skills—in particular, his understanding of what made particular Western politicians tick—but strategically, he lived in the nineteenth century. The bon mot coined by Tsar Alexander III in the late nineteenth century, that “Russia has just two allies, the armed forces and the navy,” resonated deeply with Putin. (Indeed, Putin was present at the 2017 opening ceremony of a monument to this tsar in Crimea that had these very words inscribed on it.19)

  The descendants of the first wave of Russian emigration remained, institutionally and personally, stuck in the memories of the glorious imperial past. They were naturally given to this nineteenth-century thinking. And seven years after the Act of Canonical Communion, Putin’s imperial message after his annexation of Crimea would be enthusiastically received by many Russians abroad.

  This commonality provided a deep emotional bond—one that Putin exploited to the full.

  In November 2018 in an Italian restaurant on Bolshaya Ordynka, in the historical center of Moscow, priest and financier Peter Holodny was sipping his tea. He was a tall, thin man with a bony face and gray hair cut short, wearing a white shirt under a dark sweater. He made it crystal clear: he didn’t want to talk for the book we were writing. He brought his grown son with him to the meeting, probably as a witness.

  “Forgive me for not being as naive as I used to be. You have an ambiguous reputation, and you have powerful enemies,” he said. He was referring to the FSB, the Russian security service. “Now you want to write about the reunion. I’m telling you—there was no money, no one bribed anyone, there was no coercion.”

  Nobody had asked him about money or coercion.

  Then Holodny started talking about Putin. “Vladimir Vladimirovich, with him there is so much freedom for a Russian man, more than ever before!”

  He became emotional and waved his hands. As he did, one could see his cufflinks—they were in the colors of the Russian flag. Twenty minutes passed. It was clear that the meeting was over, then all of a sudden Holodny asked, “So, what do you think about the Skripal case?” He was referring to the poisoning earlier that year of a Russian former spy living in England.

  It was clear that the story of a Russian poisoned in the West worried him greatly.

  PART IV

  MEANS OF OUTREACH

  CHAPTER 26

  POLITICAL EMIGRATION: RESTART

  The 1990s were the first decade in Russian history in which there was no political emigration.

  The long tradition of Russian political exiles being forced to live out the remainder of their lives in the West was broken for the first time in 1991, when Mikhail Tolstoy forced the KGB to let émigrés who had been thrown out of the Soviet Union return to Russia. With that, Russian political emigration of the Soviet era effectively ended. In Yeltsin’s Russia, people might leave the country because of the problems with the Kremlin, but they always returned. Yeltsin didn’t banish his enemies from the country.

  Putin, however, did.

  In May 1999 Yeltsin’s chief of staff summoned media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky to the Russian White House on Krasnopresnenskaya Embankment for a little talk. The Kremlin official explained clearly that Yeltsin wanted a safe, predictable presidential election come March 2000. Gusinsky’s freewheeling NTV could jeopardize that. The Kremlin wanted Gusinsky to leave the country and to stay out of Russia for roughly ten months. The government would compensate him for his trouble. “We can help you with all your debt problems,” Gusinsky was told. Then th
e official added, “We are even prepared to give you 100 million US dollars if you will just leave the country until the presidential election.”1

  In May 1999 Yeltsin was still the president—the game was not over. So Gusinsky refused.

  Things stayed as they were. The Kremlin team prepared the country for the forthcoming election, and Gusinsky’s media companies continued to operate as they had been doing, independently from the Kremlin.

  That summer Yeltsin named the new Russian prime minister: Vladimir Putin, promoted as a Russian strongman dealing with separatists and terrorists. Meanwhile, NTV remained to provide critical coverage of the hottest political topic of the day—the Russian war effort in Chechnya.

  Putin won the presidential elections in March 2000 and took the oath of office on May 7. Two months later, in the course of the Kremlin’s NTV takeover, Gusinsky was imprisoned and “encouraged” to sell his media assets in return for his freedom. After three days in jail, Gusinsky was released and allowed to leave the country. He fled to London and exile.

  The period of absence of political emigrants proved to be a very short one in Russian history. It lasted nine years, just a split second by historical standards. Now it was over.

  Vladimir Putin had been running the country for less than a year when two more prominent people fled to the West. Former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, a blond, fit man in his late thirties with strangely light eyes bearing no expression, flew to London with his wife and a son, in fear for his life. He was soon joined in London by the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky.

  Berezovsky, a middle-aged, round-shouldered man with receding hair and lively brown eyes, was a powerful oligarch and a familiar face to everybody in Russia. He was on the front pages of the newspapers, on the covers of magazines, and on TV screens. Berezovsky might meet with top Kremlin officials on Monday, warlords in rebellious Chechnya on Tuesday, and finish his week at a party with fellow oligarchs, and all of it would be covered by media.