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From Russia with Blood
What the public didn’t know was that the prime minister’s night at the opera with Russia’s future president had been carefully orchestrated by the two countries’ spy agencies. The arrangement had arisen when a senior FSB officer approached the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, in London and asked him to help arrange a high-profile meeting between Blair and Putin to burnish the latter’s presidential credentials ahead of the election. After protracted discussions back at the River House, the spy chief had decided this was an “unusual and unique opening” for the UK and urged Downing Street to accept the invitation. Thus Britain had its hand in smoothing Putin’s ascent.
Blair wasn’t the only world leader who was starry-eyed about Russia’s putative president. Bill Clinton had phoned the British prime minister months before polling day to express his own excitement.
“Putin has enormous potential, I think,” the US president opined.* “I think he’s very smart and thoughtful. I think we can do a lot of good with him.” There was a faint note of caution—“He could get squishy on democracy”—but overall, Clinton was hopeful that Putin would come to the table with the right coaxing. “His intentions are generally honorable and straightforward,” the US president said. “He just hasn’t made up his mind yet.”
On the contrary, Putin’s mind was very much made up.
Seven days after his official inauguration, in May of 2000, Russia’s new president enacted a raft of new laws all aimed at what he euphemistically called “strengthening vertical power.” He replaced elected members of the upper house of parliament with Kremlin appointees, sent presidential envoys to supervise the running of Russia’s semiautonomous regions, and granted his administration the power to remove local governors on the mere suspicion of wrongdoing. With the regions thus under tighter control, Putin clamped down on other competing power sources. Next in line was the free media.
Putin’s media minister Mikhail Lesin, the adman who had helped secure his victory, led an assault on the independent TV stations, newspapers, and magazines that had proliferated since the fall of the USSR, using all the levers of state power to pressure their owners into ceding control to the Kremlin. Journalists and proprietors were arrested; advertisers were leaned on; offices were raided; trumped-up charges were brought. Lesin, who would go on to found the sprawling international propaganda network Russia Today (RT), so relentlessly rammed independent media outlets back under Kremlin control that he earned himself the nickname the Bulldozer.
And with the media purge well under way, Putin turned his attention to the oligarchs. Berezovsky and his fellow tycoons were summoned to the Kremlin and told that their special privileges were being revoked. While Putin would stop short of reviewing the rigged privatizations, they would no longer enjoy special access to power. In short: they would be allowed to keep their loot, as long as they kept out of politics.
Berezovsky was agog. He had rubbed shoulders purringly at Putin’s inaugural ball, delighting in telling everyone how he had plucked Russia’s new ruler from obscurity. So confident was he in his status as Kremlin chess master that he had gone to the new president soon after to propose an audacious deal. Putin would rule Russia, while Berezovsky would nominally head up the opposition party, thus carving up power between them, shoring up the position of the oligarchs, and making sure the presidency remained effectively unopposed. But Putin had declined that offer with icy disdain, and that was when Berezovsky first began to realize his mistake.
Putin’s creeping authoritarianism had in fact been well in evidence long before his inauguration for anyone with eyes to see it. As the Chechen war raged on, he had used his three months as acting president to reverse some of the more pacific reforms of the post-Soviet era: signing a decree allowing for the use of nuclear weapons in response to major foreign aggression and ramping up spending on the armed forces. And then there were the warning signs that those who knew too much might have exactly that much to fear.
Anatoly Sobchak had returned from his exile in Paris to become a vocal if chaotic supporter of Putin’s election campaign. The old mayor had struggled to stay on message: he appeared to have forgotten his liberal credentials when he hailed Putin as “the new Stalin,” and he was all too fond of reminiscing about episodes from the old days in St. Petersburg that the presidential contender would rather forget. On February 17, 2000, Putin asked Sobchak to travel to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, between Poland and Lithuania, for a campaign pit stop. Three days later, the old man was found dead in his hotel room. The official postmortem declared that he had died of a massive heart attack—but that didn’t explain why his two bodyguards had to be treated for mild symptoms of poisoning. The investigative journalist Arkady Vaksberg later published an account suggesting that Sobchak had been eliminated by a toxin smeared on a lightbulb in his hotel room—a classic KGB technique. Soon after, the journalist’s car was blown up in his Moscow garage. He happened not to be inside—but the message had been sent.
As Putin lurched toward autocracy, Berezovsky decided to show his protégé who was boss, using the pages of Kommersant to publish a searing critique of the president’s plans to centralize power. “In a democratic society, laws exist to protect individual freedom,” he lectured in one of his open letters. When Putin ignored that moral lesson and continued his crackdown, Berezovsky’s aides and advisers counseled the furious oligarch to let matters lie.
“You have to think, Boris! Slow down, calm down, think,” one adviser beseeched him over wine and cigars in the Logovaz Club lounge against the tinkling backdrop of the grand piano. “You have access! Work with the guy. You’re very persuasive, you’re cleverer than he is, you put him in that position in the first place—so work with him.” Badri Patarkatsishvili agreed. Why couldn’t Boris just keep his head down for a moment and let things settle? After all, hadn’t Putin said he’d leave the looted assets untouched as long as the oligarchs toed the line? But Berezovsky had developed a thirst for power that overwhelmed even his love of money, and he was incapable of conciliation.
“You son of a bitch,” he would mutter when Putin’s name arose. “I’m going to fight you.”
For his part, the old Logovaz director Yuli Dubov was left scratching his head about that first encounter with Putin over the lunch that never was in St. Petersburg. In retrospect, he came to believe that the appearance of monkish probity had just been Putin’s way of setting himself apart from the crowd.
“He was playing the long game,” Dubov mused. “It was too early for him to begin to enrich himself, so he waited for his moment.” Berezovsky’s fatal flaw, in Dubov’s mind, was an inflated sense of his own importance. He had believed Putin would be incapable of ruling without him, but it turned out that the new president no longer needed him—and neither did anyone else very much. Suddenly Berezovsky found himself quite friendless in Moscow’s corridors of power. But undeterred, he went on the attack again.
In August of 2000, the new president found himself in the throes of his first public scandal after his botched handling of a nuclear submarine disaster left 118 naval officers to sink to their deaths unaided in the bitter waters of the Arctic Ocean. Berezovsky seized the moment, using Channel One to eviscerate Putin for his role in the tragedy.
Berezovsky was sunning himself at his gleaming white villa overlooking the sapphire waters of the Côte d’Azur when a copy of Le Figaro landed on his doorstep carrying a message direct from the Kremlin. Putin had given an interview to the French newspaper declaring that oligarchs who stepped out of line in the new Russia would receive “a crushing blow on the head.” That warning was rapidly followed by a summons for Berezovsky to appear in Moscow for interrogation by the new prosecutor general, who had reopened the Aeroflot embezzlement case that Putin had helped squash two years before. The godfather of the oligarchs was now a wanted man and an enemy of the Kremlin.
One thing was immediately clear to him: while Putin was in power, he could never return to Russia.
*A transcript of this phone call was released by the Clinton Presidential Library in 2016.
iv
Wentworth Estate, Surrey, England, 2001
Scot Young was easing his Porsche up the gravel drive of his magnificent new mansion in Surrey on a breezy summer evening when Michelle came running through the topiary.
“There’s a strange man inside, and I can’t get him out!” she said. “Shall we call the police?”
Young marched through the grand columned entrance to find a small black-eyed man settled comfortably in an armchair.
“Welcome to my home!” the intruder boomed in a thick Russian accent, throwing his arms wide. “How much do you want for it?”
Later, Young liked to tell his friends that this was the first time he had ever laid eyes on Boris Berezovsky. The story appealed to him both because he was a great raconteur who loved to spin a good yarn and because it happened to be more convenient than the truth. Its punch line was that he hadn’t known the man was one of Russia’s richest tycoons, so he told Berezovsky to “fuck off.” But of course Young knew exactly who Berezovsky was.
Years later, private detectives hired to delve into Young’s association with the oligarch would uncover evidence that he had actually met Berezovsky’s people a few years earlier on a trip to Moscow and had been secretly operating as his point man in the UK ever since, helping him stash the money he was siphoning out of Russia in spectacular British properties and investments. Since Berezovsky fled, the previous year, Young had also been visiting Moscow regularly on his behalf, handing out a business card billing himself as a consultant to Channel One. It didn’t take long for the FSB to develop what the spooks called a “long-term interest” in the British businessman. The FSB surveillance team built up a picture of Young as a high-class fixer providing highly confidential assistance to the oligarch and being pampered in return. He had drunk and dined lavishly on Berezovsky’s ticket at Moscow’s exclusive Café Pushkin, Vogue Café, and Vanille—and he liked to end the night at Private Club Bordo, a brothel frequented by the city’s political and business elite.
The Youngs had sold Woodperry House for £13.5 million earlier that year—more than double what Young had paid for it—and in turn had bought the main manor house on the celebrity-studded Wentworth Estate, in Surrey. After many months luxuriating in his vast Italianate villa on Cap d’Antibes, Berezovsky had tired of soaking up the sun and moved to England to start building his new life in earnest. The oligarch was putting down roots as he settled into a long exile—and he had set his heart on his fixer’s home.
Berezovsky produced a case of exquisite red wine from behind the armchair and pulled out a dusty bottle. The two men spent a raucous night demolishing the offering as the Russian regaled Young with rip-roaring tales of the Wild East, and before long Berezovsky’s offer of £20.5 million had been accepted. Young would always tell friends the true price was £50 million, the lion’s share of which had been hidden offshore, but whatever the cost, Berezovsky had made Wentworth Estate his home.
The godfather moved into his new mansion with his wife and young children, displacing the Youngs to another spectacular property across the estate, and with that a new enclave was established. This lush corner of Surrey, with its follies, lakes, and roaming deer, was to become the seat of some of Russia’s richest men as they waged a long-distance war on the Kremlin.
Part Two
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