Death of a Dissident (30 page)

Sasha now had all the time in the world for rumination, but Marina did not have much opportunity to adjust to the shock. She learned about the arrest from Ponkin and the rest of his crew, who came to her workplace in the evening and tried to comfort her. Suddenly she had to take care of a thousand things. In the morning, Boris’s office called. Berezovsky is abroad, they said, but we found a lawyer for you. An investigator from the prosecutor’s office wanted to see her. Arrangements had to be made for Tolik to stay with his grandparents for a few days.

She went to see the lawyer. He was a veteran of military justice, who said from the outset that he had no experience in political cases.

“But the politics of it will probably not be decided in the courtroom. What I can do is everything that is necessary on the merits of the case, as if it was nonpolitical.”

Boris had also arranged for Marina to have a monthly stipend of $1,000, roughly equal to what Sasha had been making.

“Don’t worry, we will get him out,” he said on the phone from Paris. What else could he say? she wondered.

Then she went to Lefortovo.

“When can I see him?” was her first question to the investigator, Sergei Barsukov.

Barsukov was aloof and formal. He explained the rules: Sasha was entitled to two visits a month, at the investigator’s discretion. March was almost over, so she could expect to see him twice in April, unless there was a reason to refuse her visits. But first Barsukov wanted to conduct a search of her home. He presented a warrant.

Why search, she wondered, in view of the charges against Sasha? They were simply on a fishing expedition. They turned her home upside down but did not find anything of interest. Of course, Sasha did have secret files, but he was hiding them elsewhere.

As for the charges, Marina found them laughable. Eighteen months earlier, during the detention of a criminal group, Sasha
allegedly beat up a certain Vladimir Kharchenko, the suspect’s driver. The bodily harm was in the form of a bruise “the size of a 5 kopeck coin.” The lawyer said not to worry; politics aside, on its merits the case would not stand up in court.

In early April she got her first visit. She woke up at 6 to get in line to register by 8. As she listened to the conversation of other women in the line, a fear engulfed her: What if somehow she had exceeded the limit of gifts allowed in the prisoner’s package, the allowance for grams of soap and packs of tea, for example, and the whole thing were rejected?

After registering, Marina had to wait for another three hours before she was led into the visitors’ room, to a small booth where Sasha sat behind thick glass. They spoke over the telephone while a stone-faced guard listened. The case could not be discussed, nor could anything that might seem like a coded message. They could talk about family, the weather, health, and all the other things important only to them. During the seven months he spent in Lefortovo, she had sixteen visits like that.

Lefortovo is a special prison. It is well funded, clean, efficiently run—and extremely depressing. The worst thing about it, according to Sasha, was the silence. Such devastating stillness he had never heard in his life.

“Lefortovo crushes you spiritually,” he later wrote in
The Gang from Lubyanka
. “There is some negative energy coming from those walls. They say that birds avoid flying over it. Perhaps it’s the legacy of the old days when Lefortovo was a place of mass executions and torture.”

As an FSB prison, Lefortovo was reserved for serious clientele: spies, mob bosses, large-scale economic offenders. Sasha had the distinction of being there for a petty offense: beating someone up. Nonetheless, he was accorded the treatment of a serious customer. They used the full gamut of psychological techniques on him.

From the outset, his investigator let him feel that the outcome of his case was not an issue. There was no point in even talking about it, he said. Just wait for the trial, and you will be sent away, to somewhere
in the Urals. There, you will be knocked off. No one will notice or care or have sympathy for you. You are a traitor, and you know how traitors are dealt with.

What Sergei Barsukov really tried to convey to him was that everything could still be reversed. He was the one who had brought it upon himself—and for what? He must admit that siding with Boris was a mistake. If he only faced the truth and admitted that Boris was not worth sacrificing his own life, then they could start thinking together about how to help Sasha out of his predicament.

After thirty-six days of solitary confinement interrupted by such sermons, Sasha was on the verge of going insane. Suddenly he was given a cellmate. He knew it was a plant, but he was still happy to talk to a human being, even though the conversation was surely recorded.

In his seven months in Lefortovo, Sasha changed cellmates five or six times. He saw through them all. Each had been sentenced to a long term and instead of rotting in one of the truly hellish places of the gulag, earned his stay in Lefortovo by reporting on fellow inmates. The method was more or less the same: establishing trust by talking about family and common interests, sharing life stories, and then, gradually, infusing into the “object” the mood of hopelessness, the futility of resisting the system. Or, depending on the need, making the object talk about specific things that the investigator wanted to hear. Sasha knew the routine well enough; “In-Cell Development” had been one of his favorite subjects in counterintelligence school.

He amused himself by playing games with the invisible oper who was running his cellmates. On one occasion he cracked his interlocutor by telling him bluntly that he knew that he was an informer. Once Sasha got out, he threatened, he would check the man’s FSB file; there was someone in the Agency who would let him have a peek for a few hundred bucks.

The next day, the Lefortovo oper called him in: “Why are you doing this? Why are you bullshitting my agent?”

“I don’t like the man,” said Sasha. “He snores. Send me somebody else.”

Sasha was perplexed by the direction of the questioning by his
investigators and his spy-cellmates: they were all interested in “the Kremlin family”: Yumashev, Voloshin, Tatyana, Roma, and Pavel Borodin, the Kremlin’s property manager. What were their habits, their relationships with each other, their third-party contacts, spending routines? It was clear that the investigators totally misunderstood Sasha’s standing in Boris’s circle. Of course he had met all these people, except Borodin, but he was not nearly close enough to provide any answers of that sort, even if he wanted to.

At the time Sasha did not know the politics behind it; he had never heard of “the family” before. But later on, in London, we analyzed his prison experiences. Was he Skuratov’s prisoner after all? Or Putin’s?

We argued about that for hours. Neither theory made any sense.

Putin would not need to poke into things like the Tatyana-Yumashev relationship; he knew it first-hand. He could not be after Borodin’s secrets; he had worked for him for two years. And yet, Sasha was sitting in Putin’s prison, under the charge trumped up by Putin’s Internal Affairs. So why was he questioned in an essentially anti-Putin investigation?

And then we realized that perhaps both theories were true. Putin, who wanted to see him in jail for his own reasons, was doing it with Skuratov’s hands; he knew that Sasha could not tell much of substance, so he threw him to Skuratov like a bone. The prosecutor was after him because he was Boris’s friend; Putin, because he was Kontora’s traitor.

While Boris and Putin were talking in the elevator anteroom at Lubyanka, the president in the Kremlin was tormented by the same problem: Who should inherit his throne? As he wrote in
Midnight Diaries
, by the end of April, Primakov’s fate was sealed. He “regretted it deeply,” but Evgeny Maksimovich used “too much of the color red” in his political palette.

Although he did not discuss it with anyone, not even with the man himself, by then Yeltsin had already chosen his crown prince. It was Putin, dependable and uncorrupted. The problem was, it was too early to announce him. He did not want “the society to get used to
Putin during the lazy months of the summer. The mystery, the surprise part must not be wasted. It would be so important in the elections.”

But Primakov had to go now, so Yeltsin needed an interim replacement. He chose Stepashin, the softie, who had the best chance of approval by the Duma. The Communists would love to have him in their sights as the opponent to beat in the election. This was Yeltsin’s strategy: he would install Stepashin for just a few months and then bring in Putin when the time was ripe. It would throw his opponents off-balance.

On May 12, Primakov was sacked. Sergei Stepashin sailed smoothly through Duma confirmation as the new Russian prime minister. Boris’s friend Vladimir Rushailo took over the Interior Ministry. Primus departed for a well-deserved vacation, carrying with him the informal title of the most popular politician in Russia. His approval rating was at 60 percent, compared to Yeltsin’s 2.

For the summer months, Russia’s political metabolism shifts to the green belt of dachas surrounding the capital. On one steamy night in early June, Igor Malashenko, the president of NTV, greeted a pair of guests at his dacha: the Tanya-Valya team. They came with a mission: to sound out Malashenko regarding Putin. Would NTV support him should he become the heir apparent?

“I was horrified,” recalled Malashenko years later. “He was KGB. How can one even think of picking a KGB man? That’s a criminal organization.”

“But you have not even met him,” Tanya-Valya protested. “He is different. He is truly liberal. And loyal. He did not betray Sobchak, and he would not betray us. Papa likes him a lot.”

Igor agreed to meet Putin before coming to a final judgment. On Sunday, June 6, a dinner was arranged at the dacha of Peter Aven, one of the original Davos Pact oligarchs, the founder of Alfa Bank. Putin came with his two daughters.

Aven’s house, with its over-the-top opulence, must have been a shocker for the teenage daughters of an uncorrupted civil servant.

The dinner was dull. The conversation listlessly eddied around the
topic of water shortages in downtown Moscow. Putin kept his silence, acting “like a hero captured by the enemy.” Finally Malashenko’s wife arrived and livened up the night. She came straight from the airport, seeing their daughter off to her boarding school in England.

That gave them a new subject to discuss: private schools in the United Kingdom. Putin still kept silent, as did his daughters.

A while later, Malashenko’s daughter called from Heathrow: nobody was there to meet her. Could Mama contact the school, please? Children were not allowed to travel by themselves.

“Come on, it’s Sunday evening, there’s no one at school,” said Malashenko’s wife. “You’re a big girl: get a cab, give the address to the driver, and he will take you there.”

She hung up. Suddenly Putin spoke for the first time.

“It’s a mistake what you just did, you know. You can never tell who could be out there, posing as a cab driver.”

Igor’s jaw dropped. Was he joking?

But Putin was deadly serious. Igor was an important opinion-maker in Russia, a target for Western intelligence services, he explained. For a man like him it is advisable to be more cautious about the security of his family.