Once Upon a Time in Russia

by Ben Mezrich

  Manufacturing line to consumer, an incredible journey of miles and minutes: these had been the perfect ingredients for an epic level of arbitrage. In the free-fall economy of Russia’s teenage capitalism, time was usually considered an enemy to money. Double- and triple-digit inflation had turned every ruble into a rapidly leaking balloon, shrinking by the second. But Berezovsky had been able to turn this enemy to his advantage. He had come up with a scheme to take a large number of cars on consignment, paying the Red Directors only a nominal down payment, which, for the most part, they had happily pocketed. Then Berezovsky sold the cars through his various dealerships. After that, he’d wait months—or even years—to make good on the balance of what he owed AvtoVAZ, letting inflation do its work. By the time he’d paid off his debt, he was putting down kopecks on the ruble. In short order, Logovaz was earning more than six hundred percent profit on every car it sold.

  And that had only been the beginning. Berezovsky had built on his reputation as the premier Lada dealer to open a banking fund to pre-order even more cars. He’d raised almost sixty million dollars toward that end—money he was in no rush to turn over to AvtoVAZ, or anyone else.

  Perhaps the most incredible thing about his venture was that none of what he was doing was technically illegal. It was simply arbitrage, a mathematical and ambitious mind taking advantage of an inefficiency in an existing market. Of course, the fact that Berezovsky hadn’t broken any explicit laws didn’t mean he hadn’t ruffled any feathers. The car business, like every other business in modern Russia, existed in a chaotic vacuum many people liked to call the Wild East. Where there was money to be made, there were often men with guns involved. Almost daily, the Russian newspapers had reported stories of businessmen murdered because of deals gone bad.

  To Berezovsky, the dangerous elements on the fringes of the business world were simply an unfortunate cost of this new, free market. Successful corporations adapted, dedicating resources to defend themselves against what they called “wet work,” perhaps an overly graphic term for the assassination trade, borrowed from the world of organized crime. Rumor was, Logovaz had outsourced its wet work to a team of “specialists”—a murky association about which Berezovsky wanted to know as little as possible. Even so, his dealerships had not been immune to the violence. A few of his showrooms had even been shot up over the past few weeks, though nobody had been killed. Even more frightening, a known member of a powerful Russian gangland outfit had recently approached Berezovsky himself, demanding the resolution of some unimportant difference of opinion. Berezovsky had essentially waved the man away—and, a few days later, there had been a pitched gun battle outside one of his regional Lada showrooms. A half dozen unclaimed Chechen and Russian bodies were carted off by the local police.

  Bulletproof limousines, high-priced bodyguards, paid mercenaries: business as usual under perestroika. Unpleasant but necessary, and the furthest thing from Berezovsky’s thoughts as he watched the parked cars flashing by. His mind shifted ahead to the dinner he was about to attend; more deals to be made, more rubles to be mined out of minutes. After dinner, he would take the short ride back to his club—and maybe arrange a visit to the upstairs apartment. As his Mercedes moved alongside the dust-covered Opel, he was imagining the smell of perfume, curves shifting beneath sheets. And then, entirely by accident, Berezovsky noticed something odd out of the corner of his vision. It might have been nothing at all—maybe a trick of light against the bulletproof window to his left, or even a shadow from the high fruit stand that rose up behind the parked car. But he thought he saw a wisp of dark smoke coming out of the Opel’s trunk.

  He opened his mouth to say something to his driver—but before the words could come out, there was a sudden flash of light.

  And then the shock wave hit.

  The Mercedes was lifted three feet off the ground, tilting sickeningly in the air. The window to Berezovsky’s left exploded inward, jagged shards of bulletproof glass pelting his face, neck, and shoulder. He felt a brief moment of weightlessness—and then the limo crashed back to the ground, both axles snapping from the force. The sound came next, a howling roar loud enough to pop both his eardrums, hitting him like a fist against his skull, slamming him back against the warping leather seat.

  And then the heat. His eyes went wide as a ball of searing flame engulfed his entire world, bright orange licks of fire clawing at the exposed skin of his face, neck, and hands. He screamed, slapping at the pain, then found himself rolling forward, almost by instinct. The next thing he knew, his knees and hands hit pavement, and he was crawling through broken glass. A strange scent, acrid and sweet at the same time, filled his nostrils; he realized it was the scent of his own skin burning. He screamed again, lurching forward on the glass-covered road, away from the heat. Finally, he was able to lift himself to his feet.

  He turned back toward his car—and stared at the burning, mangled mess of metal. It took him a full minute to understand what he was seeing; much of the chassis was melted right into the pavement, the windows were all blown out, the outer fuselage warped beyond recognition. He shifted his attention to the front seat. His bodyguard wasn’t visible, but he could see his driver, still sitting behind what was left of the steering wheel. The man looked strange, hunched forward at an odd angle, smoke rising from his jacket. Berezovsky was about to call out to him—when he came to a sudden realization.

  The man no longer had a head.

  Berezovsky collapsed to his knees, as sirens sang in the distance.

  CHAPTER THREE

  * * *

  June 8, 1994, 2:00 a.m.,

  Logovaz Club

  “WELL, THIS IS NEW.”

  Alexander Litvinenko ran his fingers through his hair, as he watched Igor Davny, a junior agent under his command, trying to pry what appeared to be a piece of a leather seat cushion from the base of a partially melted, steel trash can. The leather had fused to the steel, making the task nearly impossible, but Davny wasn’t going to give up so easily. The young man cursed as his gloved hands slipped off the material, then he bent at the waist for another go.

  “Now they’re blowing each other up,” Davny continued, with a grunt of effort, as he worked on the leather. “Less efficient than a bullet, but I guess it makes a statement.”

  Litvinenko grimaced, refusing to see the humor in the situation. It was the middle of the night, and he had much better things to do than pick through a still-smoldering crime scene. As a newly promoted officer on the central staff of the FSB, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, specializing in counterterrorism and organized crime, he had thought he was beyond this sort of menial task. When he had gotten the emergency call, he had just crawled into bed with his new girlfriend—Marina, a ballroom dancer, twice as beautiful as he deserved—after a long dinner at a friend’s house.

  He took great care as he stepped over a piece of wood from the nearby destroyed fruit stand. They were still a good ten yards from the center of the blast radius, but even here, the air was thick with the scent of ash, burning pavement, and melted rubber.

  He shifted his gaze toward the spot next to the mangled Mercedes limousine at the direct center of the crime scene, where the most senior investigators were crawling through a pile of rubble and shrapnel—the remains of the parked Opel, or ground zero, as the inevitable report would declare. Litvinenko was already certain what the investigators would find; he’d surveyed the blast area when he’d first arrived on the scene. A fairly sophisticated explosive device, hidden in a parked car. The bomb had been detonated by remote, and despite what the younger agent might have thought, this wasn’t a unique crime scene at all. Litvinenko was well aware, from his latest officer’s briefing, that over the past few days, there had been at least two other bombings in Moscow—one of them right in front of the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. Both had been “business related”—and considering the most likely target of this evening’s attack, this incident was of a similar nature.

  If anything,
this explosion was the mildest of the three. There had been surprisingly few casualties, considering the size of the bomb, and the brazen location and timing of the detonation—the middle of the afternoon, just a few doors down from the Logovaz Club.

  “He’s one lucky bastard,” Davny said, finally giving up on the strip of leather. The young agent moved next to Litvinenko, likewise scanning the crime scene in front of them. “Burns to his hands and face, some shrapnel wounds, but other than that, nothing serious.”

  “His driver wasn’t quite as lucky,” Litvinenko noted.

  The man’s head had been sheared right off by a chunk of the Opel’s trunk. The force of the explosion had been severe; aside from the mangled Mercedes, at least five other cars had been utterly destroyed, along with the fruit stand and eight stories of windows of an office building across the street. Amazingly, only six pedestrians had been injured, and only the decapitated driver had left the scene in a body bag.

  Well, two body bags.

  Davny was right, Berezovsky had been damn lucky. The burns would heal, the shrapnel would be removed. According to Litvinenko’s higher-ups, the auto mogul was planning on heading to a sanitarium in Switzerland to recoup and recover. LogoVAZ had already released a statement to the press about the attack, which Litvinenko had read on the ride over to the crime scene:

  “There are simply very powerful forces in this society which seek to hinder the creation of civilized business and the revival of the economy. And they will use barbarian, criminal methods to get what they want. It is hard to fight.”

  Succinct, accurate—and more than a little hypocritical. Civilized business. Three years of FSB work investigating organized crime, three years before that working under the Third Chief Directorate of the KGB, the main security service of the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991: Litvinenko had become an expert on the way business was usually conducted in his home country, and civilized was about the last word he would have chosen to describe what he’d seen. Then again, the security services—not to mention the military bureaucracy, and, hell, the entire goddamn government—weren’t exactly bastions of virtue, and never had been. The KGB, the pre-Gorbachev Soviet machinery—at least back then, you knew what to expect. You kept your head down, did what you were supposed to do, and usually you came out okay. Now? Often, Litvinenko felt as lost as the youngest of his underlings.

  In his opinion, the FSB was a shadow of its precursor. Certainly, if his dwindling paycheck was any indication, the “revival of the economy” was going a lot better for the “civilized businessmen” blowing each other up in Mercedes limousines than for the men charged with keeping tabs on the mayhem.

  Litvinenko knew that many of his colleagues had been taking things into their own hands—moonlighting for companies and wealthy businessmen, heading up security organizations, using their specific skills to take part in the new economy. Technically, it was illegal, and an agent could get fired—or even arrested—for taking part in after-hours corporate work. But usually, the higher-ups looked the other way. For the most part, turning a blind eye to indiscretions had become a way of life for the bureaucrats who were, themselves, trying to navigate through a world that now seemed constantly in flux. It was only under very special circumstances that the people in power focused their attention on any one individual or incident. Usually, that sort of focus could only mean trouble—for everyone involved.

  Litvinenko concentrated on the scene in front of him, shifting his gaze outward from the center—the mangled limousine, hunched forward like a dying jungle beast on two broken axles, surrounded by a lake of broken glass and melted asphalt—to the outer rings of the shock wave, nearly twenty yards in every direction. Across the scene, he counted at least a dozen investigators, working their way through the rubble with plastic evidence bags and shiny forceps.

  Davny waved a gloved hand.

  “All this because someone tried to murder a car salesman.”

  This time, Litvinenko laughed. He didn’t know if his young charge was serious or not, but Boris Berezovsky was obviously much more than a car salesman. The very fact that Litvinenko had been dragged out here in the middle of the night to personally take part in the investigation was evidence of that. Although Litvinenko was hazy on the details, he had heard that the request for special attention had come all the way from the top. Apparently, this Berezovsky had some sort of connection to Yeltsin himself. Litvinenko hadn’t asked any questions when the assignment had come down, and he certainly wouldn’t have gotten any answers from his direct superiors at the FSB.

  “It isn’t murder when you blow up an entire street to try to kill one man.”

  “So that’s what happened here?” Davny asked. “An assassination attempt?”

  Litvinenko gently kicked with his leather boot at a piece of singed wood from the destroyed fruit stand.

  “What happened here, comrade, is Mr. Berezovsky’s roof fell in.”

  Davny looked at him, then finally nodded, because he understood. Litvinenko wasn’t talking about the fruit stand.

  Krysha—literally, roof—was a uniquely Russian concept. Originally, the term had its roots in the world of organized crime; gangsters were only as powerful as their “roof”—the person or organization that protected them in case things went awry. The form of protection a “roof” might offer could be physical, economic, political, or even personal; although the concept was often loaded with the threat of real violence, the most effective forms of krysha never had to resort to guns and bombs. An implication of threat was often far more chilling than when pressure was applied.

  In the realm of business, the concept of krysha—a protective roof—was no different. The Red Directors who had at first inherited the newly privatized companies of the ex-Soviet regime had, some might argue, the ultimate roof—a government that would protect them as long as they stayed in favor. Private businessmen—men like Berezovsky—needed a different sort of roof to protect them as they chased their ambitions. Increasingly, these businessmen were turning to the very organizations that had coined the term, with varying results.

  “Chechens?” Davny asked. “Russians? Georgians?”

  Litvinenko shrugged. Of course, it could have been either. All three territories had extensive networks of organized crime. All of them had a reputation for being particularly vicious and violent; but for the right price, there were plenty of gangs willing to take up the cause of “civilized business.”

  Lately there had been a rash of business-related incidents: numerous gun battles in city streets, shootouts in restaurants and office buildings. Even a case of chemical poisoning, involving the toxic heavy metal cadmium, placed on the rim of a banker’s coffee cup. And now, apparently, car bombs.

  Litvinenko had no idea who Boris Berezovsky had pissed off to get himself on someone’s shit list, but he was certain that the crime scene in front of them was the result of a business disagreement. Someone was testing the strength of Berezovsky’s roof. From the files Litvinenko’s superiors had given him on the way over to the site, he knew that Berezovsky had an associate, a partner in his LogoVAZ corporation, a Georgian strongman named Badri Patarkatsishvili, who, if not connected to the types of people who could provide a roof for a growing business, could talk the sort of language such people would understand. But it was obvious that Berezovsky and his Georgian strongman didn’t have access to the kind of roof that kept you safe forever.

  “Whoever it was, I think they got their point across.”

  Litvinenko kicked at the heat-darkened pavement beneath his boots. He wasn’t concerned with keeping the crime scene pristine; he knew full well that he wasn’t going to find any answers picking through the smoldering dirt. Besides, he wasn’t entirely certain he wanted answers, no matter how connected this Berezovsky might be. Look too hard, he thought to himself, and you ran the risk of finding something.

  In the world he was living in now, wasn’t it better to simply turn a blind eye?

  He exhaled,
thinking about his beautiful ballroom dancer. Then his gaze shifted back to the mangled Mercedes limousine.

  What sort of life could a man like him make for himself in this new Russia?

  What sort of roof did he have?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  November 1994,

  42 Kosygin Street,

  Vorobyovy Gory (Sparrow Hills), Moscow

  THE BIG MAN IN the towel was moving fast, steam coming off his thick, bare shoulders in violent plumes as his pawlike feet left wet prints on the hardwood floor. He was surprisingly agile for a man his size. Two steps behind him, Berezovsky was breathing hard trying to keep up. It wasn’t until the gargantuan finally slowed in front of a bank of lockers in a quiet corner of the dressing room, that Berezovsky could be certain that the man was even listening to him.

  Berezovsky had been engaged in a one-sided conversation with the man’s back for most of the morning, traveling through half the Presidential Club along the way—from the tennis courts to the steam room, past the movie theater and the dining room, even through the showers. Well aware of the absurd spectacle they cut on their journey through the club, and not merely because of the difference in their sizes, Berezovsky could hear the whispers of the politicians and dignitaries they had passed along the way; the bandages on his arms and head were hard to ignore, and he knew that the boldest of the club’s members had even begun referring to him as Smoky. But to Berezovsky, it wasn’t an insult; he wore his burns as a badge.