A mathematician by training, Berezovsky was a born go-between. He made his first fortune in the early 1990s by becoming a middleman between the Soviet-era automobile manufacturing giant Avtovaz, organized crime that controlled the car dealer networks, and ordinary Russians trying to buy a car. He achieved political prominence when he placed himself as a middleman between the Russian oligarchs and Yeltsin. But he learned well that to be an effective go-between, there need to be two groups with two well-defined positions to navigate in between.
The Kremlin was such a group, but the oligarchs were not. Each rich and powerful man in the “new Russia” had different interests, priorities, and ambitions. So Berezovsky put a lot of effort into shaping the oligarchs into a unified group with a shared political agenda. He turned his club/office—a fancy one-story late nineteenth-century mansion in the historical center of Moscow on Novokuznetskaya Street—into a meeting place where Russia’s wealthiest people could discuss issues and forge consensus positions that Berezovsky could later represent to the Kremlin. To make the oligarchs look more cohesive to the public, he told the Financial Times in 1996 that a group of seven people made most of the decisions in Russia. He provided the list of names of the people who would become known as the Big Seven Bankers,2 claiming that together they controlled more than 50 percent of the Russian economy.
In the late 1990s, he readily stepped in as a middleman in disputes between many parties, including the Kremlin and the Chechen separatists (Yeltsin made him deputy head of the Russian Security Council for that). When the time came to secure a transfer of power from Yeltsin to Putin, Berezovsky tirelessly toured the country to help Yeltsin’s entourage obtain support from regional elites and oligarchs. As a result, many, including Berezovsky himself, believed that it was he who had given Putin his victory.
But soon after the election, Putin broke up with the oligarch. He didn’t want to be dependent or perceived as dependent on anyone, especially on such an energetic and media-friendly character as Berezovsky.
Berezovsky was forced to leave Russia and chose London as his permanent address, joining Gusinsky and Litvinenko in the first post-Soviet wave of emigration. This wave would be joined by various other oligarchs who fell out with Putin and their clientele. But Berezovsky, still a very wealthy man in his early fifties, was not ready to go into a comfortable retirement.
A go-between by nature, he believed that he could play another game with the Kremlin. In London, he had no well-defined group with a shared agenda on whose behalf he could talk to the Kremlin, but this kind of obstacle never stopped Berezovsky. He immediately set off to create a group that would represent and define the political opposition to Putin abroad. Just as he had done in 1990s Moscow, he turned his office in a redbrick four-story mansion on Down Street, adjoining Piccadilly, into a meeting place for everybody who fell out of favor with Russia’s president. He joined forces with Gusinsky in funding the TV channel RTVI aimed at the Russian-speaking audience abroad. He launched several news websites and published op-eds and stories critical of the Kremlin. By naming his own publication Kolokol, he consciously invoked the memory of Alexander Herzen, the most prominent Russian liberal in exile in the second part of the nineteenth century, and the censorship-free Russian periodical Kolokol (The Bell) that Herzen published in London.3
The Kremlin’s propaganda quickly made Berezovsky an archenemy of Putin. Berezovsky was accused of plotting horrendous terrorist attacks in cooperation with the CIA and al-Qaeda and of committing high-profile murders, including the murder of journalist Paul Klebnikov. Documentaries were made and books published describing his crimes.
Apparently, this was not quite enough.
In December 2004, the blockbuster movie Lichnyy Nomer (meaning “dog tag” in Russian but titled Countdown in its English-language release) hit Russian cinemas. The movie provided a fictionalized account of two actual terrorist attacks: the 1999 Moscow apartment building bombings and the 2002 Dubrovka Theater siege. The portrayal of the events themselves was left largely unaltered except that the theater was replaced with a circus. But in the movie, an oligarch living in exile in the West is shown to have been colluding with the terrorists on a hostage-taking plan targeting the circus. The depiction of the treacherous oligarch bears a striking resemblance to Berezovsky.
Despite its $7 million budget, the movie was not a commercial project; it was an active measure by the Russian security services. The film was shot with the security services’ support, and a deputy director of the FSB advised the film crew.4 The main producer and author of the script was Yuri Sagaidak, a former KGB agent, journalist, and colleague of General Kobaladze, who headed the infamous SVR book project. Sagaidak was also the second man in Kobaladze’s conversation with Evgeny Kiselev trying to lure him to Lubyanka during the hostile takeover of the NTV. The Kremlin, apparently, had a pretty short bench for sensitive operations. The film was a relative success and aired scores of times on Russian TV.
It was not Berezovsky but rather his friend Litvinenko who was hated the most at FSB headquarters in Lubyanka.
Litvinenko had made his mark serving in the Russian secret services’ most corrupt department, which was in charge of taking down organized crime. The department often used brutal methods but was also tasked to interfere if the mafia attacked wealthy businessmen. That was how Litvinenko met Berezovsky. In the mid-1990s, before Putin’s ascension, Litvinenko openly switched allegiance from his masters in the FSB to Berezovsky—a very unorthodox thing to do. Litvinenko became Berezovsky’s best foot soldier in the FSB, with wide connections within the secret services. He also became the first Russian whistleblower from the post-Soviet secret services.
When Berezovsky got into trouble with the FSB, Litvinenko helped organize an incendiary press conference. At this press conference, he and several colleagues announced that FSB leadership had ordered them kill Berezovsky. The director of the FSB lost his job and was replaced by Vladimir Putin, who didn’t like this kind of political game. Litvinenko was thrown into jail. Released at the end of 1999, he fled to the UK a few months later.
In London, Litvinenko remained close to his patron. His affection for Berezovsky was genuine. The former operative had humble family origins in a far-away region in the North Caucasus, had spent his life first in the barracks and then in Moscow dealing with gangsters, and had done time in the hotspots. He told us in London that the oligarch had opened his eyes to a new world of breaking the established rules. “He told me, there is always a line. To become truly free, you need to cross it; you need to step over the line.”5
We met Litvinenko in 2003 on a rainy evening at Piccadilly Circus. When we arrived, Litvinenko was waiting for us at the corner in an oversized blue jacket, a dark shirt, and black slacks. He didn’t have an umbrella, and it didn’t bother him. “I’m a warrior. I can sleep on bare ground!” he exclaimed.
Although three years had passed since Litvinenko’s escape from Russia and resettlement in London, he was still struggling to learn English and adjust to British ways. Berezovsky had continued helping Litvinenko financially, but the former FSB officer was trying to establish his own way of making a living by helping recent Russian émigrés get their money out of Russia. (Much later it was made public that he was also helping the British and Spanish secret services fight Russian organized crime.) He also kept publicly exposing the FSB, providing verifiable details and real names.
At the time, Berezovsky was seeking a flag, a theme to organize people around, to build up the Russian exile community. The apartment bombings in September 1999 in Moscow, which killed more than three hundred people and terrified the country, provided one. It was true that after the bombings, many Russians became more supportive of the Russian war effort in Chechnya, and it was Vladimir Putin who promised to find and kill terrorists. After the bombings Putin’s popularity skyrocketed. But many others felt that the apartment bombings had not been properly investigated and suspected that they were, in fact, the work of the Russian secret
services.6 To Berezovsky, it was a story of Putin securing the presidency via a mass killing of fellow citizens, pure and simple.
In his office on Down Street, he welcomed anybody who could offer any information about the tragedy.
Berezovsky had a special assignment for Litvinenko. The former FSB officer had coauthored a book with a historian, a Soviet emigrant in the United States who worked for Berezovsky. The book, called Blowing Up Russia,7 elaborated on the assertion that the apartment bombings had been organized by the FSB to propel Putin to power.
On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko was poisoned at the bar of the Millennium Hotel in central London. He died a few weeks later. The British determined that Litvinenko was poisoned with highly radioactive polonium-210 that had been put in his teapot by two Russian agents, one of them a former KGB officer, under the orders of the Kremlin. The assassination was straight out of the early days of the Soviet Union when the operatives of Stalin’s secret service had fled to the West, published revelatory books, and ended up hunted down and killed by Stalin’s agents.8 It was textbook Nahum Eitingon.
Another presidential election came and went, and Putin stayed in power. Another election would be held in 2008. In April 2007, a now desperate Berezovsky announced his big plan to the Guardian: “There is no chance of regime change through democratic elections. If one part of the political elite disagrees with another part of the political elite—that is the only way in Russia to change the regime. I try to move that.”9 He added, “There are also practical steps which I am taking now, and mostly they are financial.”
The FSB took him seriously. Lubyanka charged Berezovsky with conspiring to seize power and opened a large-scale criminal investigation. The secret service also harassed Luke Harding, a Moscow correspondent for the Guardian whose name was one of the three in the byline of Berezovsky’s interview.10
Berezovsky had spent millions by then plotting in London, but it was Litvinenko who made the biggest impact on public opinion in Russia and the West. The English-language edition of his book was published posthumously that same month by Encounter Books, a politically conservative American publisher based in New York. Though criticized as a conspiracy theory, Litvinenko’s allegations became part of the widely accepted narrative of Putin’s rise to power. His poisoning and death gave his story in Blowing Up Russia all the more traction. Emigrant books worked once again.
Berezovsky’s call for regime change had no impact on Russian society. The number of people unhappy with Putin’s policies remained relatively small throughout most of the 2000s. In fact, they were being marginalized as an emerging middle class grew more and more comfortable under Putin. That middle class, and Russian businessmen, thought they understood the game—until Putin changed it.
CHAPTER 27
ILLUSIONS CRUSHED
Why did so many smart, Westernized, financially successful people feel so comfortable under Vladimir Putin in the first decade of the twenty-first century? The KGB had a horrifying reputation, and Putin never condemned the organization that defined him. On attaining the presidency, he immediately moved to suppress the media freedoms Russians had come to savor under Yeltsin. He put KGB people into top positions in government, and soon a number of businessmen started to be sent to jail.
And yet, many people remained supportive of his policies. They continued to like him. Why? That question tortured many Russian liberals in the 2000s.
The popular radio station Echo Moskvy, essentially a talk-radio outlet, had been a haven for liberals since the early 1990s. But over the next decade, Echo’s hosts and their guests felt increasingly isolated from the rest of the country. Every year Putin tightened his grip on the political system, but few in the country seemed to care. The middle class in big cities enjoyed ever-growing prosperity secured by high oil prices. The economy was booming. Comfortable compounds popped up in suburbs, while new shops featuring trendy clothes opened in Moscow every month. Echo’s editorial office was on the fourteenth floor of a high-rise with old elevators and Soviet-era wood-paneled walls, but below the Novy Arbat Highway was filled with brand-new cars. A mile to the west, a bunch of skyscrapers were rising in Moscow City, a new international business center for the Russian capital. Journalists felt they were losing touch with their audience.
To bridge the gap, Echo created an ongoing show called One Family in the Times of Vladimir Putin. The concept was to invite an ordinary family on air to talk about everyday life to try to understand what made them tick under Putin. In May 2007, the featured guests on the show were Ilya Zaslavskiy, a twenty-eight-year-old manager of the oil company TNK-BP—a highly profitable joint Russian-British venture—and his girlfriend, Veronika.
Soft-spoken, smiling Ilya was very sure of himself. Oxford-educated, he also held an American passport. His family was Jewish and had moved to the States in 2000, first to Connecticut, then to New York. Just a few years later, Ilya and his older brother Alexander returned to Russia when they saw opportunities to make money opening in Moscow. The best options, they thought, were in the area of gas and oil, so the brothers went into that business. Now Ilya enjoyed a good position at TNK-BP; he cleared the equivalent of more than $7,000 a month after taxes and rented a spacious apartment on Mayakovskaya, in the heart of Moscow. He had spent $12,000 producing an independent movie—about an oil trader—and was thinking of a career in the film business. Indeed, Ilya sounded like a poster child for Putin’s economic boom.
A program host asked Zaslavskiy what he thought about the past seven years under Putin.
“Honestly, it’s basically nonsense, the idea that your well-being depends on Putin or Yeltsin,” said Zaslavskiy. He added, cheerfully, “Your well-being depends, if you don’t live in an authoritarian country, more on you than on Putin.”1 He seemed to be under the impression that he was not living in an authoritarian country.
Less than a year later, in March 2008, Ilya Zaslavskiy was in his second-floor office in the posh brand-new TNK-BP building on Arbat when he got a call from his father. “Your brother has been arrested!” his father told him. “You need to get home now and deal with your computers and flash drives, just in case.”
Ilya rushed out. But when he reached the street, three plainclothes operatives snatched him and threw him into a car—a Russian Lada with tinted windows.2 They brought him to Lefortovo prison. They forgot to search him and failed to take his phone away, so he made a brief call to his father and warned him that he, too, was detained. Zaslavskiy was then brought to the small room on the second floor of Lefortovo where he was interrogated by an FSB officer. After hours of interrogation, he was taken to his apartment to see it thoroughly searched by FSB operatives.
He had learned that he and his brother were to be charged with industrial espionage.3 Allegedly, they had tried to access some confidential information about a Russian state-controlled gas company, but Ilya already knew the case against them was just a pretext. The brothers Zaslavskiy found themselves at the center of a monumental battle over control of the highly profitable Russian-British joint venture, with the Russian secret service helping the Russian side by applying additional pressure on the British to squeeze them out. (This goal was ultimately achieved.)
The Zaslavskiys were just two small fish living in still, warm waters in a corporate aquarium. Then the moment came when the aquarium was smashed to pieces. Nobody cared about the brothers—the FSB didn’t even bother to throw them in jail. It just used them as an excuse to raid the BP offices and harass top managers. After a while, Ilya and his brother were sentenced to one year of probation.
Ilya suddenly understood that his career and reputation had been destroyed by powerful forces—just like that—and his personal tragedy went completely unnoticed. Ilya’s corporate bosses didn’t stand by him.
It was time for him to say goodbye to illusions. But he didn’t accept that he had been treated as a small fish by both the Russian state and the Russian oligarchs. He was not that kind of person.
Moscow 2005
. The warm August day was perfect for a wedding. A bride in a beautiful white gown was standing by her tall groom, who looked solid and wealthy in a dark blue suit. They were a power couple—famous TV anchor Olga Romanova, thirty-nine years old, had a son and a daughter from a previous marriage, and financier Alexei Kozlov, age thirty-one, had a son—and they knew very well what they wanted from their marriage.
Olga, an attractive, sharp-tongued blonde, had grown up in a family of doctors in a working-class Moscow suburb. Her parents had sent her to a music school, obligatory at that time for girls from a good family, where she made headway playing piano. She also loved singing but not the classical music repertoire. Rather, she loved singing “gypsy” (Roma) folk songs she had learned from her neighbors in a nearby Roma district. Her parents did not encourage her friendship with the Roma, but they couldn’t stop Romanova from having relationships with whoever she wanted.
In the early 1980s, she enrolled at the prestigious Financial University. Each day she traveled to Moscow by commuter train to attend classes. Often she rode home on the last train of the day, which was usually deserted, inviting trouble with hooligans wandering the cars. Romanova was not afraid of them. Many of her classmates had joined criminal gangs, and when a suspicious person approached her, she called out the names and nicknames of the most dangerous, implying she knew them. It usually worked well.
But she really wanted to have a car. Finally, her parents gave her one—a Soviet-made blue Lada sedan, which was quite a luxury gift for a girl in the Soviet Union. Her father, who didn’t own a car or drive himself, started taking driving lessons along with her. He wanted to be able to lend her a hand with driving when she needed it. One day he was driving with an instructor and the car crashed, killing them both.
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