Once Upon a Time in Russia

by Ben Mezrich

  As long as the money kept pouring in—as long as the deliveries of suitcases, carryalls, and envelopes full of American dollars kept arriving at the Logovaz Club to prop up ORT—and Berezovsky’s increasingly lavish lifestyle—he was content. So far, Abramovich had made good on every request Berezovsky had made; a million here, five million there. Berezovsky wasn’t certain how much the man had already sent him, but it had to be well over thirty million dollars. And there would be much, much more to come. Berezovsky didn’t care what his official association with Sibneft might be—as long as the money kept flowing.

  Abramovich was efficient and reliable. More than that, Berezovsky had grown to truly like the young man on a social level. They had vacationed together, dined together, celebrated each other’s birthdays all over the world. The young man was ambitious, as Berezovsky had first perceived, but shy in public, choosing to eschew the limelight and keep himself out of the press at all costs. In fact, the public had begun to refer to him as the secret Oligarch—a man whose picture had never been taken, an invisible, rising star. Abramovich didn’t care what the public thought; he simply wanted to grow his business, his empire.

  In a few more days, Berezovsky was confident that the election would give Abramovich all the protection he needed to continue moving forward. Yeltsin was going to win, and the payoff for the men who supported him would be unprecedented.

  Berezovsky was about to reach for another poster from his propaganda department to titillate Badri—when he was suddenly interrupted by a frantic commotion coming from the other end of the floor. He looked up in time to see his young, annoying assistant, Ivan, rushing toward him, holding a cordless phone. The bodyguards around Ivan looked terrified—obviously something important was happening. Berezovsky’s first fear was that Yeltsin had suffered another heart attack; the old man had already endured four that Berezovsky knew of. Hell, it was hard enough battling Communists, but even Berezovsky was going to have difficulty coming up with a scheme to battle against the failure of Yeltsin’s own heart. But as Ivan reached him and began to speak, Berezovsky realized the problem wasn’t with Yeltsin’s heart at all—but with his right hand.

  “They’ve been arrested,” Ivan sputtered, as he skidded to a stop in front of his boss. “Chubais’s men, they were coming out of the White House with a cardboard box. The security agents are reporting that the box had more than half a million dollars inside. Cash, no receipts, no papers.”

  “Security agents? Whose security agents?”

  Ivan finally calmed down enough to clearly explain the situation. It appeared that Korzhakov had made his move. His private security forces had arrested two of Chubais’s campaign assistants, carrying a box of cash on their way out of the Russian White House.

  A bold and terrifying move. Even, possibly, the precursor to a coup. Korzhakov had to know that Chubais wouldn’t stand for his men being arrested, no matter what the charge. And to do such a thing in public, in the middle of the election?

  “Arkady Yevstafyev and Sergei Lisovsky,” Ivan continued. “They’re being held at gunpoint right this minute. But they still seem to have their cell phones, and they’ve spoken to Chubais. General Lebed is already on his way to get them released.”

  Berezovsky shook his head. He looked at Badri, but his friend’s face was unreadable behind his cigar. Korzhakov was obviously growing desperate. A month earlier, he’d been all talk, even though he had raised many hackles when he had made a statement implying that he thought the election would lead to a civil war—and that it should be canceled. Now it seemed as though he was attempting to start that civil war himself.

  The charges themselves didn’t matter. Hell, with the amount of money Berezovksy and the Oligarchs were pouring into the campaign, you could throw a rock at any man walking out of the White House and knock over a box filled with cash. Korzhakov was attempting to escalate the battle for Yeltsin’s favor—and this time, Berezovsky believed, the man had gone too far.

  Berezovsky grabbed the phone from Ivan’s hand. It was time to circle the wagons. He intended to call everyone he could; Chubais, he was informed, was already on his way over. They would gather at the Logovaz and wait out the night; it was as safe a place as they could find. But Berezovsky knew that in this moment, the most important member of their group wouldn’t be an Oligarch or a campaign manager.

  Money and ideology were powerful cards—but a president’s daughter trumped everything.

  The minute Berezovsky heard Tatiana’s voice on the other end of the line, he knew that one way or another, the Korzhakov situation would soon be resolved.

  • • •

  By 3:30 in the morning, the air in the club still rang with the voices of some of the most powerful and wealthy men in Russia—but the edge of fear that had gripped Berezovsky earlier had begun to recede. Tatiana had already visited and left. Badri was still sitting beneath the television, watching the screen even more intently. General Lebed, on Chubais’s behalf, had made a number of appearances over the airwaves already—speaking directly to the cameras: “It appears that somebody is trying to disrupt the elections. Any attempt at mutiny will be put down mercilessly.”

  Intense words. Berezovsky’s cheeks had heated up as he had watched the general speak, and he had been able to see from Badri’s expression that the situation was reaching an end.

  Berezovsky had only heard one side of the phone calls between Tatiana and her father, but he was certain that, as of tomorrow morning, Korzhakov would be finished. More than that, he believed that Yeltsin was going to fire three of his previously most powerful confidants: Korzhakov, with whom he had shared vodka, climbed onto tanks, and run a country; Mikhail Barsukov, current head of the FSB, who had presumably allowed these arrests to happen and was a big supporter of Korzhakov’s; and Oleg Soskovets, the deputy prime minister, a former Red Director from the steel industry, as right-wing as they came.

  It would be enormously painful for the president, but it would send a clear pro-democracy message. Yeltsin wasn’t going to take the election by force; he was going to take it by vote. The loss of Korzhakov would hurt Yeltsin deeply, but it might very well ensure his victory.

  With Korzhakov gone, Berezovsky and his Oligarchs would find themselves in an even stronger position. Berezovksy’s role in the Family would become more integral, and he would be closer to Yeltsin than ever. He might even be involved in the search for someone to fill the vacuum at the head of the FSB. Yeltsin would be looking for someone exceedingly loyal, a true yes-man, a cog who knew when to turn, when to stay still.

  But that was something for tomorrow, and the days after that. For the moment, Berezovsky could clear his mind of such things, and allow himself to relax. Badri lit another cigar.

  The Georgian was right.

  It was time to celebrate.

  PART TWO

  Two bears can’t live in one cave.

  —OLD RUSSIAN PROVERB

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  * * *

  December 1997,

  FSB Headquarters, Lubyanka Square

  IN RETROSPECT, ALEXANDER LITVINENKO realized, he should have known that something out of the ordinary was about to happen the minute he entered the stark, cement-walled office on the third floor of the mammoth building. Nine fifteen a.m., and the briefing was already in full swing. Three other agents were gathered in the room, two of them seated on institutional-style metal folding chairs, a third leaning against the far wall next to a heavy wooden bookshelf, overflowing with legal texts, police procedure manuals, and unmarked suspect files. At the front of the room, seated at the heavy wooden desk by the only window, in unusually good humor—his departmental superior. The man was laughing heartily, at the tail end of a joke that Litvinenko had no intention of asking him to repeat.

  After the fact, Litvinenko might have guessed that his normally finely tuned awareness of the world around him had been dulled by a surprisingly long period of normality—if such a word could ever have been appropriate in th
e life of a secret service agent. Yet, in the eighteen months since the election that had secured his patron Berezovsky’s position for the foreseeable future, Litvinenko’s world had slid into a pleasant rhythm; days spent working for the FSB on numerous investigations involving the gangsters who continued to battle it out on the streets of Moscow, and early evenings often spent meeting with Berezovsky at the Logovaz Club to discuss matters that made Litvinenko feel he was a part of an elite world of wealth and power.

  Certainly, Berezovsky’s stock was riding high. Berezovsky had been appointed the deputy secretary of national security, perhaps as a reward for the election that he had massaged toward victory, and he had suddenly found himself involved in the conflict between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Chechnya, which was almost universally opposed by the Russian public. But that conflict seemed to be heading toward some sort of resolution.

  Of course, Litvinenko knew better than anyone that Berezovsky was his own best propagandist. The stories he told in their evening sessions grew more extravagant the more the vodka flowed—or the more ears were turned in the Oligarch’s direction. These stories ranged from the merely humorous to the fabulously extreme—from tales of Berezovsky single-handedly saving Yeltsin, democracy, and capitalism, to stories about his rapidly growing portfolio of businesses—Sibneft, ORT, and now Aeroflot, the national airline—to narratives that seemed so insane it was impossible to know if they could be true—such as the story of Berezovsky rescuing, again single-handedly, a group of hostages held by Chechen rebels by showing up in person on his private jet, and trading the poor civilians’ safety for a hundred-thousand-dollar Patek Philippe watch.

  It was certain that Berezovsky did have relations with the Chechens; but Litvinenko suspected that most of the conversations with the terrorists had involved Badri, the Georgian, who had the proper “demeanor” for dealing with the type of men who wore Kalashnikov rifles to business meetings. Whatever the case, Berezovsky was riding high—and that meant Litvinenko was also living well. Berezovsky had never been richer; his wealth had been estimated to be close to three billion dollars, though nobody knew for certain. Directly after the elections, Abramovich’s oil company had sprung up in value by, some said, more than a factor of twenty. Berezovsky, in turn, was receiving payments on an almost weekly basis. It seemed that all he needed to do was pick up the phone and dial, and a suitcase would arrive filled with US dollars. For his part, Litvinenko understood that sort of business relationship; after all, Berezovsky could pick up the phone and dial him, too, and Litvinenko would hurry straight to his office—his FSB badge in one hand, his automatic in the other.

  But ever since Vlad Listyev’s murder, so long ago, Litvinenko hadn’t needed to draw his weapon even once at Berezovsky’s behest. Now that Korzhakov was gone and Tatiana Yeltsin seemed squarely in Berezovsky’s camp, Berezovsky himself had the most powerful krysha of all. In fact, he had solidified his position with the Family even further by hiring Yeltsin’s son-in-law to run Aeroflot. Litvinenko had begun to believe that the only thing bigger than Boris Berezovsky’s delusions of grandeur was Boris Berezovsky’s actual life.

  Litvinenko’s life might not have been quite as grand—but it was certainly happy. He and his ballroom dancer were well provided for, and he saw most of what he did for the FSB in basically noble terms. The world around them was still gripped by chaos, but he was essentially a beat cop, and his job was to try to clean up as much of the mess as he could.

  Sometimes, of course, that meant the application of violent methods; Litvinenko had recently been promoted into a group of officers tasked with dealing with organized crime in a particularly intense way, which meant that, whenever he read about a graphic and spectacular murder that had taken place in the streets of Moscow—a bomb going off in a café or a businessman found hanging from a bridge without his hands and feet—Litvinenko and his colleagues might need to “get a little rough” in the quest to solve the crime. But he still believed that, each night, he came home with clean hands.

  As he slid into the third-floor office, and took the one empty chair, just a few feet from the edge of his superior’s vast desk—he suddenly wondered if that was about to change.

  When his superior stopped laughing, he seemed to focus directly on Litvinenko. The man was still smiling, but his words had lost any tinge of humor.

  “So your friend has been coming up in conversation.”

  The other agents shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. The lead officer continued—but didn’t get to a name until a few sentences into his monologue.

  “I’m right, aren’t I? Boris Berezovsky is your friend, correct?”

  Litvinenko did not meet the man’s eyes, instead glancing toward the nearest cement wall. He felt an inadvertent shiver, looking at the smooth, hard material. He knew well the history of this building. The precisely rectangular, many-storied, fortified structure rose up above the northeastern corner of Lubyanka Square like some sort of unholy behemoth—and for most Russians, the sight of even the building’s shadow sent daggers up the spine. In Stalin’s era, this was an address you didn’t want to hear mention of, let alone approach. The first floor contained one of the most feared prisons in Russia, Lubyanka, where many of the nation’s worst enemies and most famous revolutionaries had been held, tortured, and sometimes killed. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Stalin’s nemeses had ended up there—just two floors below where Litvinenko was now sitting. There was an old joke that he had often heard—that this had once been the tallest building in Russia, because you could see Siberia from its basement.

  Litvinenko had no doubt that these walls could tell stories that would terrify even the most hardened FSB agent. But his superior, at the moment, was still all smiles—even as he spoke words, as Litvinenko would later remember them, that sent the young agent into a sudden and severe state of shock.

  “Boris Berezovsky, you know, the Jew.” And then the man stood and placed his hands flat against his desk. “You should kill him.”

  Litvinenko looked at his colleagues in their metal chairs, but they would not meet his eyes. He was certain they had all heard it—but the words seemed so strange, impossible, said so conversationally, as if they were just another normal bit of dialogue. But in his mind, there could be no doubt of their meaning: Litvinenko was being given an order. It was not the first order he had been given by this man that he had seen as wrong. He had been asked to take part in rough interrogations, in a handful of beatings, that sort of thing—but this was insane and extreme.

  “Mr. Berezovsky is my associate,” he began trying to put into words some sort of response that would get him out of the situation, “I’ve known him for some time—”

  “Yes,” the man interrupted. “He is your friend, your employer. And he is causing problems for many people, and has been a problem for this country for a long time, and he should be dealt with.”

  Litvinenko knew that Berezovsky had made many enemies over the past few years, both in business and in politics. But this conversation, these orders—as Litvinenko saw them—why were they coming now? And why to him?

  He had never thought of his superior as an overly complicated thinker. Perhaps he had chosen to involve Litvinenko because he thought the young agent’s association with the Oligarch would make the job easy. And since Litvinenko was considered a loyal FSB agent, his superior probably did not think he would choose a businessman, with no FSB ties, over an order. But such a murder? An assassination like this—it was exactly the sort of thing he was supposed to be fighting against. He did not consider himself some sort of hero, but he drew lines, he had always drawn lines. And Berezovsky was his friend, his patron, his supporter. His krysha.

  Litvinenko sat in silence, trying to figure out what he should say. He could tell the other agents were struggling not to watch him, but they were waiting to hear how he would respond. He thought again about that prison on the first floor of the building—and the days of the past when men who said the wrong
thing to a superior might very well have ended up standing in front of cement walls just like those that surrounded him.

  For the moment, he decided to say nothing, to give no response at all. But inside, he was already coming to a conclusion. A rift was opening, a chasm so deep he couldn’t see the bottom, and he felt like he was in danger of falling right in. He knew, once again, he needed to make a decision that would affect the rest of his life.

  A decision that might very well land him at the bottom of that chasm, for good.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  * * *

  March 1998,

  Alexandrovka Dacha, Podolsk District

  FOR A BRIEF MOMENT, Litvinenko felt himself shrink against the cream-colored couch, vanishing into the cushions as he stared at the dead, glossy, pitch-black eye of the video camera, because in his mind, he wasn’t looking into the lens of a video recording device, which was standing on a metallic tripod in a corner of the living room of Boris Berezovsky’s state-financed country estate outside Moscow—instead he was looking right into the barrel of a gun, pointed directly between his eyes.

  Marina was just a few feet away, nervously watching him, waiting for him to speak; he knew she supported what he was doing, even though it terrified her. She supported him because she believed in him, and the way he thought, and the decisions he had made. And next to her, Berezovsky himself, moving back and forth on the balls of his feet, real anger in his face. Berezovsky supported Litvinenko, as well, but for many different reasons. Fury, revenge, strategy—these were the things that moved behind the businessman’s pinpoint eyes. Litvinenko cared little for any of these emotions; this was not a strategy any more than suicide might be—and yet he felt it was the only thing he could do, the only choice he had.