Death of a Dissident (6 page)

They were married in October 1994 at a registrar’s office, when their son Tolik was already four months old. They had not wanted to make a big deal about it; after all, it was a second marriage for both. Besides, they thought, marriages are made in heaven and certainly not in gloomy bureaucratic settings. But when they went inside wearing their usual blue jeans, the registrar said, “You have a son, and when he grows up he’ll want to see a photograph of your wedding. Think about how you want to look in it.”

“Sasha had only one suit—light-colored. He went home to get it and he gave me some money to buy a dress, but of course I couldn’t find a thing for that money. So even in our wedding we traded roles: the groom wore white and the bride was in black, the only formal suit I had.”

Shortly afterward she met his colleagues. At first they seemed like nice guys, but she noticed that Sasha stood out somehow.

“It was three things. First, he didn’t drink, while they couldn’t relax any other way. Second, it was money. Sasha did not know how to handle money. I mean, we always had enough, but we did not live luxuriously. We finally did buy an apartment, but it was small, just a one-bedroom. Our car was an ordinary Zhiguli. When his friends began driving foreign cars and buying fancy apartments, it became obvious that Sasha did not know how to do what they were doing: make money.”

Sasha explained to her that the money came from taking outside jobs, “selling enforcement services on the market,” as he called it. At the time, the police and the FSB were permitted to take outside “consulting” contracts to compensate for the government’s inability to pay decent salaries. “I’m no good at that,” he explained.

Third, he was hesitant to use the power that came with the FSB badge. That little red card could open any door, in stores, at the theater, wherever, because people were still terrified of the KGB. But except for her driving test, he never used it. His pals mocked him. Yet “he didn’t disapprove of them, at least not then. They were a good band. He was a team player.”

At least, at first.

To hear him tell it, Sasha was a team player who didn’t always pass the ball. He began to wonder about some of his teammates within the first years of his new life with Marina. And he met the man who would eventually win his loyalty away from his team and his entire agency.

“When I first met Berezovsky, our service was no longer the KGB but not yet called the FSB. It was the FSK, the Federal Counterintelligence Service. This was the most decent period in our history: the repressions were over and corruption was only beginning. I was a major in the service, assigned to our antiterrorism and organized crime division. On that day there was an assassination attempt on Boris. He was already a big shot. The director sent a memo to all divisions:
anyone with any information should investigate. I decided to talk to Boris, since I had some thoughts on who could have done it.”

I remembered the attack on Berezovsky very well; it was the first time I had heard his name. A photo of a bombed car had appeared on the front page of
The New York Times
.

A remote-controlled bomb placed in a parked blue Opel exploded at 5:20 p.m. on June 7, 1994, as Berezovsky’s gray Mercedes pulled out of the gates of The Club, his company’s reception house in downtown Moscow. His driver was killed instantly, but somehow, miraculously, Berezovsky and his bodyguard suffered only minor burns. The blast blew out windows in an eight-story house across the street and wounded six pedestrians. It was one of the first big contract hits in the era of privatization. In those days commercial disputes and business conflicts were usually settled with the help of gangsters rather than in the courts. Law enforcement, like the other branches of government, stood helpless, shell-shocked by Russia’s economic reforms.

“We never found out who was behind that attack,” Sasha said, “but it definitely had to do with the auto business, since Boris wasn’t doing much else in 1994—he sold Zhiguli and Mercedes automobiles.” Boris was running the country’s first capitalist car dealership, LogoVAZ (a name derived from
logic
in honor of his former life as a mathematician and the acronym VAZ for the Volga Automobile Factory). He founded LogoVAZ in 1989 and had not yet begun to branch out into the media, airlines, and oil industries. Sasha’s original theory was that the hit was related to a turf war; at the time, LogoVAZ was buying up showrooms all over the city, which had been controlled by racketeers from a gang known as Solntsevo. But Sasha later came to believe that it was someone from VAZ, the producers of Zhigulis, one of the colossal state enterprises under the Soviets that produced about half of all cars driven in Russia. It was terribly bloated and inefficient, and Boris was trying to take that company private.

“He had a financial person, Nikolai Glushkov, who was doing due diligence on VAZ,” Sasha explained. “Glushkov was poking
into the management’s ties with intermediary firms. So someone at VAZ put out a contract on Boris.”

Sasha described the classic conflict of Russian privatization. Investors would invariably discover that profits were skimmed by third-party sales companies and that the core enterprise had been running at a loss, kept afloat by government subsidies. As a rule, the sales companies were owned by the enterprise director or his family or friends, usually all Soviet holdovers. In effect, they were bilking the state they represented. Privatization meant the end of this shell game, and their prosperity, as it broke up the sales structures.

“The VAZ contract on Boris was to be carried out by the Kurgans, not the Solntsevo guys,” Sasha explained. These were two of the most famous organized crime groups in those days. “The Kurgans did not have their own business and specialized in contract killings. They’d knock off anyone. They had their own people in the Moscow police and even in the Agency.”

When Sasha went to see Boris to talk through all this, they exchanged telephone numbers and agreed to stay in touch. In the ensuing months, they saw each other a few times, but the investigation did not go far: the Chechen War began in December, and it became a priority for the FSB. Ordinary crimes, including mob hits, took a backseat.

December 10, 1994: Three Russian divisions invade Chechnya, a mountainous, predominantly Muslim province in southern Russia. Grozny, the Chechen capital, is surrounded. Separatist president Dzhokhar Dudayev’s regime is under siege. The Russian divisions are met with massive resistance and suffer severe losses—nearly two thousand dead—during a botched attempt to take Grozny on New Year’s Eve
.

By late 1994, Boris Berezovsky all but abandoned his automobile business—which did extremely well without his attention—and
turned to a new endeavor, the mass media, which was intimately tied to the precarious world of Russian electoral politics.

Russia’s market reforms were in their third year. Coming to power in 1991 when he engineered the dissolution of the USSR, Boris Yeltsin undertook reforms harshly and decisively: he did away with state price controls, dropped customs barriers, and embarked on a crash privatization program. In four years of “shock therapy” his chief adviser, Anatoly Chubais, the thirty-eight-year-old boy wonder of Russian economics, did the impossible: he auctioned off and privatized tens of thousands of enterprises, moved more than half the workforce into the private sector, and somehow kept the economy from sliding into uncontrolled inflation.

Yet these successes cost ordinary Russians dearly. The lack of purchasing power in the impoverished population and the reduction of state subsidies brought entire branches of the economy to a halt, primarily in the military-industrial complex and also among producers of consumer goods, who could not stand the competition from Western manufacturers who were flooding the country with everything that ordinary Russians had lacked, and craved, for so long. Western clothing, cars, and electronics were in great demand by anyone who could afford them.

Unfortunately, fewer and fewer had the money to buy them. Millions fell below the poverty line. Civil servants—teachers, doctors, officials, police—were not paid for months at a time. Taxes were not collected, since the tax service was still being created (there had been no taxes in the Soviet system). The intelligentsia in the universities and science labs lost faith in democracy. Crime rose. The army grumbled. Capitalism and the market lost their appeal. More and more Russians thought nostalgically about the good old days of the USSR.

On the other hand, freedom flourished. After seventy years of Communist dictatorship, journalists could write what they wanted, there were no more political prisoners, anyone could get a passport to travel abroad, voters could pick among a dozen political parties, and eighty-six regions and ethnic republics of the Russian Federation gained self-rule and could go about their business without interference from the Kremlin.

Yeltsin’s main dilemma throughout his entire administration was just how far he was willing to violate democracy in order to save it. In fall 1993, the Supreme Soviet—the parliament, which was still full of ex-Soviet apparatchiks—had blocked his reforms and called on federal regions to rebel. Yeltsin disbanded the legislature and sent tanks to smoke out the deputies who barricaded themselves inside; 140 died in the melee. It was a tough choice, but the alternative had seemed worse: total economic collapse and political implosion.

The Communists did not quit. As Yeltsin’s presidential term continued, he was opposed once again by a newly elected hostile parliament, the Duma, where the tone was set by Communists as well as the neo-fascist party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who openly advocated an authoritarian model of government. There was every reason to expect the coming presidential election to be a catastrophe: Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist candidate, was polling in the 30 percent range as Yeltsin’s numbers plunged into single digits by the onset of the Chechen War.

Berezovsky had gained entrée into the Kremlin inner circle just a few months previously. He was forty-six years old. The journalist Valentin Yumashev, who had ghost-written the president’s memoirs and subsequently married Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, introduced Berezovsky to two of Yeltsin’s entourage: his chief of staff, Viktor Ilyushin, a liberal, and Gen. Alexander Korzhakov, the chief of Kremlin security, called the Federal Service of Okhrana (FSO), the agency that supplied bodyguards to federal bureaucrats. Korzhakov’s power, however, reached far beyond security; he was the de facto representative of all the secret services and the intelligence community in the Kremlin.

The pressing concern among all of Yeltsin’s people was the presidential election in 1996. With every passing week Yeltsin’s chances of winning a second term seemed worse.

After reviewing the situation, Boris Berezovsky came up with a fresh idea: use the senescent Soviet television—Channel One, broadcasting to 200 million people across ten time zones—to work for Yeltsin’s reelection campaign. Thus was born ORT; the initials in Russian stand for Russian Public Television, a.k.a. Berezovsky’s channel.

Before Boris, Channel One used to be Ostankino TV, a mosaic of studios and programs that the Duma Communists were trying to get their hands on, insisting that state TV should be subordinate to the legislative branch. At the time, the only private—and the best managed—network in the country was NTV, owned by Vladimir Gusinsky, which held roughly 15 percent of market share. But it was clear that whoever controlled Channel One would have access to the majority of Russia’s viewers. Berezovsky convinced Ilyushin and Korzhakov that he was the man who could control the airwaves for the benefit of the reforms and the president.