Authors: Brian Haig
But somewhere on this flight, they were almost certain, lurked a bodyguard. Possibly two, but no more than two: of this they
were nearly certain. Alex Konevitch’s life was in perpetual danger in Moscow, where it was open season on bankers, entrepreneurs,
and rich businessmen. Nearly seven hundred had been whacked, bombed, or kidnapped that year alone, and there were still four
months to go.
But the Wild East was behind him now; or so he believed. He would relax his precautions, as he always did when he left Mother
Russia in the dust. And besides, Alex Konevitch, they had been confidently informed by their employer, regarded large bodyguard
detachments as distasteful, ostentatious, and worse—bad for business. A large flock of elephant-necked thugs tended to upset
the Western investors and corporate types he dealt with.
But somewhere on this flight, they were quite sure, a bodyguard or bodyguards were seated, like them, calm and unobtrusive,
waiting and watching. They held out little hope of detecting them, at least during the flight; these boys came from a well-heeled
foreign private outfit with a first-class reputation, mostly former intelligence and police types who got paid big bucks not
to make stupid mistakes. But the dismal odds aside, they were ordered to give it their best shot anyway; maybe they’d catch
a lucky break. They agreed beforehand to look for anybody staring a little too possessively at Alex and his pretty little
Mrs.
So the couple traded turns making idle passes through the cabin, trolling back and forth, mostly to the toilets. There were
a few young men with tough faces and thick, muscular builds, but that seemed abnormally conspicuous for an elite security
firm that loudly advertised its discreetness and invisibility.
At least the bodyguards wouldn’t be armed; they were sure of this. Smuggling a weapon through a Russian airport was absurdly
difficult. And detection would cause a public mess, the last thing a prestigious, supposedly ethical firm needed or wanted.
No, they wouldn’t be that stupid.
Besides, why risk getting caught when a better alternative was available?
Far easier to have somebody meet them in Budapest and discreetly hand over the heavy artillery.
On August 19, 1991, the old boys had their last desperate fling at preserving an empire hanging by its fingernails. Gorby,
who had wrought so much damage with his flailing attempts at reform, was vacationing at his Black Sea resort when a clutch
of rough-looking KGB officers stormed the building and took him hostage. In Moscow, a cabal including his chief of staff,
vice president, prime minister, minister of defense, and KGB chairman promptly seized the organs of government.
A few thousand troops were rushed to the capital, the state television stations were seized, and water reservoirs secured;
heavily armed guards were posted in front of food distribution centers to ensure a stranglehold on the city population. Tanks
were littered at strategic intersections around the government section of the city—the usual signs of a beerhall putsch in
progress.
Next, the cabal convened a hasty televised press conference to introduce themselves as the saviors of communism and the union.
It was a disaster. They were wrinkled, sclerotic old men, unpleasant, nasty, and afraid. And it showed. Their hands trembled,
their voices quivered and shook, no facial expression registered above a fierce scowl.
Never before had they smiled at their people: why start now?
Worst of all, they appeared disorganized, feeble, nervous, and ancient—as impressions go, at that precarious, decisive moment,
the wrong one to convey to a fractious, anxious nation.
To say it was a glorious gift to Boris Yeltsin, a born opportunist and addicted rabble-rouser, would be an understatement.
He rallied a band of fellow flamethrowers and issued a call for all Russians to join together and battle for their freedom.
A large, unruly mob flocked to the Russian Congress building, heckling and chanting and daring the men who led the coup to
do something about them. The cabal had been supremely confident their good citizens would respond in the best Soviet tradition—like
scared, obedient sheep. The combative show of opposition caught the old boys totally by surprise.
Half argued strenuously to slaughter the whole bunch and hang their bodies from lampposts. A fine example, a paternal warning
and long overdue, too. That wet noodle Gorby had been a sorry mollycoddler. The nation had grown soft and spoiled, they insisted;
a good massacre was exactly the paternal medicine needed to whip it back in shape. The more dead wimps the better.
The other half wondered if a bloody spectacle might incite a larger rebellion. They weren’t morally opposed by any means.
In Lenin’s hallowed words, as one of them kept repeating, as if anybody needed to hear it, omelets required broken eggs. But
the nation had grown a little moody toward tyrants, they cautioned. The wrong move at this brittle time and they, too, might
end up swinging on lampposts. Ignore the mob, they argued; in a day or two, at the outside, the crowd would grow bored and
hungry and melt into the night.
Agreement proved impossible. Kill them or ignore them? Stomp them like rodents or wait them out? The old men were cleanly
divided in their opinions, so they sat and squabbled in their gilded Kremlin offices, brawling and cursing one another, drinking
heavily, collectively overwhelmed by the power they had stolen.
For two sleepless days the world held its breath and watched. Boris’s protestors turned rowdier and more daring by the hour.
They constructed signs. They howled protest chants and hurled nasty taunts at the security guards sent to control them. They
erected camps, stockpiled food, heckled and sang, and prepared to stay for the duration; the coup leaders argued more tumultuously
and drank more heavily.
Despite serious attempts to scare away the press, a small pesky army of reporters had infiltrated the mob and was broadcasting
the whole infuriating standoff via satellite, smuggling out photographs and earning Pulitzers by the carton. The whole mess
was on display, in living color for the entire globe to see.
Yeltsin adored the spotlight, and was almost giddy at having all the world as his stage. Televisions were kept on in the Kremlin
offices 24/7. The old boys were forced to sit and watch as Boris—miraculously sober for once—pranced repeatedly in front of
the cameras, calling them all has-beens and wannabe tyrants, threatening to run them out of town. That clown was thumbing
his nose and shooting the bird at them.
For an empire in which terror was oxygen, it was humiliating; worse, it was dangerous.
On the third day the old men had had enough. They ordered the tanks to move, scatter the rabble, and crush ol’ Boris. But
after three hapless protestors were mowed down, the army lost its stomach. As miscalculations go, it was a horrible one. Should’ve
sent in the ruffians from the KGB, they realized, a little sad, a little late. Need a few bones snapped, a little blood spilled,
the boys from the Lubyanka were only too happy to oblige. Soldiers, on the other hand, had no appetite for flattening their
own defenseless citizens. A handful of disgusted generals threw their support behind Yeltsin. A full stampede ensued.
The coup leaders were marched off in handcuffs, tired, defeated, disgruntled old men who had bungled their last chance. And
Yeltsin, caught in the flush of victory, sprinted to the cameras and declared a ban on the Communist Party: a bold gesture,
the last rite for a rotten old system that had run its course. The crowd roared its approval. It was also insane, and shortly
thereafter was followed by an equally shortsighted act: the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union.
With a few swipes of ink the immense empire fractured into more than a dozen different nations.
For seventy years, communism had been the ingrained order—the legal system, the governing system, the economic apparatus of
the world’s largest nation. Lazy, wonderfully corrupt, and spitefully inefficient as they were, its millions of servants and
functionaries were the veins and arteries that braided the country together. They kept it functioning. They doled out the
food and miserly paychecks, assigned housing, mismanaged the factories and farms, maintained public order, distributed goods
and services, kept the trains running. A terrible, horribly flawed system, for sure. Nonetheless, it was, at least, a system.
Yeltsin had given little serious thought to what would replace it, or them. A few vague notions about democracy and a thriving
free market rattled around his brain, nothing more. Apparently he assumed they would sprout helter-skelter from the fertile
vacuum he created.
Worse, it quickly became apparent that Yeltsin, so brilliant at blasting the system to pieces, was clueless about gluing the
wreckage back together. He was a revolutionary, a radical, a demolitionist extraordinaire. Like most of the breed, he had
no talent for what came after the big bang.
But Alex Konevitch definitely did. By this point, Alex already had built a massive construction business, a sprawling network
of brokerage houses to administer an arbitrage business that began with construction materials and swelled to the whole range
of national commodities, and a Russian exchange bank to manage the exploding finances of his hungry businesses. Amazingly,
every bit of it was accomplished under the repressive nose of the communist apparatus. Dodging the KGB and working in the
shadows, somehow he had self-mastered the alchemy of finance and banking, of international business.
The nation was not at all prepared for its overnight lunge into capitalism. But Alex was not only ready he was hungry.
With killer instinct, he rushed in and applied for a license to exchange foreign currency. The existing licenses had been
granted by the government of the Soviet Union; whatever permissions or licenses had been endowed by that bad memory were insolvent,
not worth spit. Anyway, the spirit of the day was to privatize everything, to disassemble the suffocating state bureaucracy,
to mimic the West.
After a swift investigation, it turned out Alex’s banks were the only functioning institutions with adequate experience and
trained executives, and with ample security to safeguard what promised to be billions in transactions. Not only was the license
granted, Alex ended up with a monopoly—every dollar, every yen, every franc that came or left Russia moved through his exchange
bank. Cash flooded through his vaults. Trainloads from every direction, from Western companies scrambling to set up businesses
in the newly capitalist country, and from wealthy Russians pushing cash out, trying to dodge the tax collector and hide their
illicit fortunes overseas.
Millions of fearful Russians lined up at the doors to park their savings in Alex’s bank, which happily exchanged their shrinking
rubles for stable dollars or yen or deutsche marks, whatever currency their heart desired, and let them ride out the storm.
Overnight, Alex and his senior executives were setting the national exchange rates for all foreign currencies. Heady power
for a young man, not yet twenty-five years old. Also, quite happily, a gold mine.
Alex took a slice of every ruble shuttled one way or the other, only two percent, but as the mountain of cash approached billions,
he scraped off millions. Then tens of millions.
He saw another rich possibility and promised twenty percent interest to any Russian willing to park their savings at his bank
for one year. Reams of advertisements flooded every TV station in Russia. A striking female model was used for certain pitches.
She wiggled her pliant shoulders and gyrated her sinewy hips, and in a seductive whisper purred that her boyfriend was a sexy
genius: his money was earning interest. Who knew it only took a little interest to get laid? To appeal to a different segment,
a handsomely aged couple stood against the backdrop of a decrepit wooden cottage and in tearful voices thanked Alex’s bank
for ensuring their retirement funds were not only safe but actually growing by the day. Then, flash a year forward in time,
and the same old couple were shown climbing sprightly into their gleaming Mercedes sedan parked in front of a charming seaside
dacha.
It was unheard of. No Soviet bank ever advertised. None offered interest, not a single kopeck. Wasn’t it enough that they
protected their customers’ money? Why should any bank dish out the bucks for its own generosity?
The commercials were vulgar and the promise of interest bordered on criminal negligence, the Soviet-era bankers growled among
themselves and to whatever reporter would listen to their gripes. But twenty percent? Okay, one or two percent, maybe; but
twenty? Konevitch would pay dearly for his bluster—he’d be bankrupt before a month was out.
Millions more investors lined up at the door. Billions more rubles flooded in. Alex took the deluge and hedged and bet it
all against the unstable ruble, then watched as inflation soared above a thousand percent. At the end of a year, the investors
took their twenty percent cut and considered themselves lucky indeed; at least their life savings hadn’t melted into half
a kopeck as happened to millions of miserable others. The remainder of the spread went to Alex. Nearly ninety percent of every
ruble in his savings bank was his to keep. He cleaned up.
And as the economy limped from one catastrophe to another, as the disasters piled up, Boris reached out desperately for help.
At the president’s insistence, a telephonic hotline was installed between Boris and his trusted whiz kid, who seemed to have
this whole capitalism thing figured out. Late-night calls became routine. A single push of the red button and the president
would rail about this problem or that, long, whiny diatribes fueled by staggering amounts of liquor. Alex was a cool, sober
listener; also a quick study with a mathematician’s lust for numbers.
Yeltsin had little background and even less appetite for financial matters; all the economic prattle bored him to tears. Alex
would talk him through the latest disaster—boil it all down to simple language—propose a reasonable solution, and Boris would
pounce on his cabinet the next morning, issue a few brusque instructions, and a total meltdown would be avoided, or at least
postponed for another day.