The Compatriots

by Andrei Soldatov

  Meanwhile, the organizer of the original congress, Mikhail Tolstoy, had married a participant of that first congress—a descendant of the first wave of emigration whose family had made its way from Russia to China and then to the United States. Now Tolstoy left Russia, as had many Tolstoys before him. He moved to the United States, settled in Menlo Park, California, and thus became a compatriot.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE SIEGE

  In Russia, the dawn of the twenty-first century brought with it a new idea: the rules, it was clear, should be tightened. The country had barely survived a devastating economic crisis that was preceded by a government default on debt that had knocked out the middle class. Yeltsin had let the country run dangerously wild—that was the opinion shared by both elites and angry businessmen. Russians wanted more order.

  To sort out the mess, they talked about the need to bring in some sort of Pinochet, the infamous Chilean dictator. But Russia was not Latin or South America. Historically, order in Russia originated not in the military but in state security. In 2000, Russia got the order it had been missing in the 1990s in the form of a new president. Tough and energetic, Vladimir Putin also happened to be a former officer of the KGB.

  The job of state security is to police society. One of the first steps is the establishment of government control of the media—and Putin embarked on that task immediately.

  During the previous decade, Russian Americans had helped open the door to Western financial markets. In the new circumstances of the early 2000s, some found new roles to play. One of that special group was Boris Jordan, the energetic thirty-five-year-old investment banker.

  Boris started with television.

  The TV channel NTV had drawn the ire of the new Russian president when the channel began to report critically on the Second Chechen War. Putin perceived the critique as a conspiracy to undermine his war effort and his prestige. Therefore, the channel needed to be crushed—and, gradually, so did the media empire of which NTV was the flagship.

  NTV had been built by Russian tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky. A bespectacled, corpulent man with a defiant smile, a stage director by training, Gusinsky made his fortune in the 1990s by building up his bank empire, as had many other oligarchs of the first generation. But then he made a dramatic turn: he aspired to become a media magnate. In just five years, he built his media empire—a newspaper and a magazine, radio and television—and he built it from scratch, unlike other tycoons who had gotten slices of national property from the government at bargain prices. Emotional and highly ambitious, Gusinsky thought of himself as the Russian Ted Turner; he even sent his best journalists to CNN for training. He was also a political player, and he had supported Putin’s competitors—the side that lost—in their bid for the Kremlin.

  Now the Kremlin was landing punch after punch. Special forces in balaclavas raided Gusinsky’s offices, and Gusinsky himself was jailed in an effort to make him sell the channel. The attacks finally forced him out of the country, and the Kremlin placed NTV in the hands of the state-owned corporation Gazprom.1

  But the NTV journalists, led by the channel’s CEO and chief editor, Evgeny Kiselev, refused to accept the change. They kept working, and they kept speaking up on air despite and against the Kremlin’s pressure.

  They effectively turned the most popular NTV talk shows into permanent protest rallies, inviting political opposition leaders, human rights activists, experts, and journalists to talk about the channel’s precarious situation. The highest-ranking official to accept the invitation was probably Boris Nemtsov, a tall man with curly hair and a ready smile, who was leader of the liberal caucus in the Russian parliament and a former deputy prime minister. His position was to try to find a compromise between NTV journalists and Gazprom.

  But the stalemate continued, for days and then weeks.

  One day, Evgeny Kiselev got a call from Nemtsov: “Evgeny, I have great news for you! They want Boris Jordan to be the new CEO of NTV. He is a Russian American, so he would not choke your journalists.”2 Kiselev responded, quietly, that he knew who Jordan was but didn’t share Nemtsov’s enthusiasm about his appointment.

  Boris Jordan was not a government official or a TV professional but a financier. Cherubic, blue-eyed, and just thirty-five years old, Jordan had already earned a prominent place in recent Russian history.

  Every door opens on both sides, and the door between the Russian and American financial markets was no exception. Vladimir Galitzine and Natasha Gurfinkel at the Bank of New York had flung it wide open on the American side, letting the Russian dollars stream into the United States. But there were also American dollars eager to come to Russia, particularly when the privatization of large chunks of Soviet state property began. Someone had to open the door on the Russian side, and another pair of Russian émigrés with American passports—one of them Boris Jordan—was more than happy to oblige.

  The path of this second émigré pair mirrored that of Galitzine and Gurfinkel in many ways.

  Boris Jordan, a New Yorker, was a descendant of the first wave of White Russian emigration, an aristocrat connected to the best prerevolution Russian families and a devoted member of the Orthodox Church.

  In 1992, he went to Moscow along with his best buddy, who had been born to a Jewish family in Leningrad and moved to the States when he was a teenager.3 The two were twenty-six years old, and they were in Russia seeking opportunities to make a quick buck. In three years the pair launched the Renaissance Capital investment bank. Within a few years it was the largest bank attracting Western money into Russia. Jordan even briefly contemplated getting Russian citizenship but abandoned the idea—the American passport was still much more convenient.4

  Boris Jordan was crafty and ambitious. He had succeeded financially in the 1990s, when everything in Russia was about money. Now he wanted to keep on succeeding.

  Among other things, this meant finding a way to cooperate with people from the security services. They came back to prominence after Yeltsin consecutively appointed three prime ministers whose main qualifications seemed to be that they had been tied to the security and intelligence services. Finally, Yeltsin made his bet on the KGB man Putin.

  Jordan’s Renaissance Capital brought two Foreign Intelligence generals on board. The first was Yuri Kobaladze, the very same SVR spokesman who had so disastrously invited Vassiliev to join the SVR’s active measures book project. The other, Yuri Sagaidak, was a colleague of Kobaladze’s who was known mostly for having been expelled from London, where he had served in the guise of a journalist, in the late 1980s after he had tried unsuccessfully to recruit a British member of Parliament.5 When Kiselev got the call from Nemtsov, he remembered that, together, these two generals had already tried to organize a back channel of communication with the besieged NTV station in very traditional secret-service style.

  Even before Nemtsov’s call, Kiselev had gotten a call from Kobaladze inviting him to the Renaissance Capital office to talk. Kiselev understood that Kobaladze wanted to talk about NTV, so he agreed to come. At that meeting, Kobaladze and his colleague had a message to deliver. The message, it turned out, was from the counterintelligence agency now known as FSB. “Some big shots at the FSB want to talk to you about NTV,” Kiselev was told. Kiselev refused to come to Lubyanka—he feared the FSB could record him entering their offices and then use the video to try to compromise him. After all, Lubyanka was the same building that had once housed Stalin’s secret police, and the new Russian president had arisen from that building to rule the Kremlin. Hearing that Kiselev didn’t want to meet inside Lubyanka, the FSB canceled its invitation.6 That first attempt by the Russian secret services to impact the fate of NTV, using the traditional KGB tool kit and the Renaissance Capital connections, had failed. The second attempt failed when Kiselev was not swayed by Nemtsov to step down as CEO and accept Jordan.

  On April 3, 2001, Gazprom convened a meeting of the channel’s board. At that meeting, the board elected a new chief executive—Boris Jordan—along w
ith a new editor in chief. Most of the channel’s journalists rejected the new leadership, and the stalemate continued.

  It was a classic seize-and-capture operation, the kind typically practiced by Russian special forces. The thirteen-story rectangular Ostankino TV center in northeast Moscow was the nerve center of Russian television, housing nearly all of the country’s TV channels. But in the early hours of April 14, 2001, it was very quiet—after all, it was Holy Saturday, the day after Good Friday. The building was barely lit when a group of heavily built, short-haired men in dark suits made their way beneath the entrance’s concrete canopy and in through the glass doors.

  One of the men spoke briefly with a sleepy policeman, who promptly let the men into the large lobby. There they divided into two groups: the first went to the elevators, and the second took the stairs. They met on the eighth floor, which was marked NTV in huge green letters. This floor had its own security guarding the NTV channel. One of the men in dark suits produced a letter signed by the channel’s new CEO, Boris Jordan. According to the letter, from this moment on, these men were in charge. They burst into a long corridor, and the man heading the group quickly directed a dark suit to stand at every door. He placed two people by the door of Evgeny Kiselev’s office, just in case.

  The news team’s night shift was taken completely by surprise. The men in dark suits told them, very politely, that they could either comply with the new bosses or vacate the premises. Most decided to comply, but one journalist made an outside call. In a few minutes, Moscow’s largest radio station, Echo Moskvy, broke the news: NTV had been seized. It was just before 5:00 a.m.

  One NTV news program editor was home but not asleep—her new baby was very active. She was a news junkie and kept her radio on and tuned to Echo Moskvy at all times. When she heard of the takeover, she immediately picked up the phone and called her boss, Vladimir Kara-Murza. He was at home too; it was the only day of the week when he had no program to run.

  Kara-Murza, then forty-two years old, was an anchorman on NTV’s nightly news program, easily recognizable thanks to his trademark black turtleneck, gray jacket, and ducktail beard. His unmistakable intonation and intelligence made him one of the most respected voices in Russian television. When he heard what had happened, Kara-Murza immediately got dressed. He threw on his gray-and-black outfit and went out into the street.

  A descendant of a distinguished Moscow family, whose scions—among them, historians, scholars, and lawyers—had long belonged to the intelligentsia, Kara-Murza had a soft voice and good manners. But he was also a man of action outraged at pressure from the Kremlin—an attitude naturally inherited from his father, a journalist who had spent several years in Stalin’s labor camps.

  When Kara-Murza had studied at Moscow University in the late 1970s—the fourth generation of his family to study there—he had almost been thrown out. A group of students in the dormitory had had a party during which they accidentally set fire to the political notices board on the wall. Unfortunately, when the board went up in flames, so did the photo of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev that was on it. One of the students, most likely Kara-Murza, threw the burning stand out of a seventeenth-floor window. Of course, the heretics burning the Soviet leader’s portrait were denounced at once. All of them faced expulsion from the university. Luckily, the decision fell to a Komsomol leader, a grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister, who had been a friend of Kara-Murza’s family. He downplayed the case, and Kara-Murza graduated with distinction. Nevertheless, he determined never to work a single day at a Soviet institution. Instead, he made his living by tutoring, and at night he worked in a boiler room.

  When the Soviet Union collapsed, a former classmate, Oleg Dobrodeev, was a heavyweight working in television. He invited Kara-Murza to come work with him in the burgeoning Russian TV scene. By April 2001, Kara-Murza had spent almost a decade at NTV. His career on television made sense to him as part of the Kara-Murza family mission; it was the kind of role Moscow liberal intelligentsia should play in Russian society. He was proud that his nineteen-year-old son already shared his sense of public mission. Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr. was already a part-time journalist and was helping Boris Nemtsov at the parliament.

  The news of the takeover shook Kara-Murza to his core. It was about a fifteen-minute drive to the Ostankino TV center from his apartment. He took a cab and tried to collect his thoughts.

  What was happening inside Ostankino looked like the final stage of a government-sanctioned hostile takeover, something NTV journalists had been dreading for almost a year.

  Kara-Murza believed that with Boris Jordan as CEO, the new leadership could have already blacklisted the dissenting journalists. If Kara-Murza was on such a list, they would not let him up to the eighth floor. He needed to think fast. He asked his cab driver if he could buy the driver’s sunglasses and then asked to be dropped off at the Ostankino back entrance. Using his still-valid ID, he took an elevator to the eleventh floor, walked along a maze of corridors to the other end of the building, and descended to the eighth floor and NTV’s offices.7

  There he bumped into a cameraman named Zhenya. He and Zhenya had worked together in many hotspots, including Chechnya. Taking his sunglasses off, Kara-Murza spoke in a commanding tone. He ordered Zhenya to turn on his Betacam camera. He then approached a new security guard at the entrance to the floor and said in a loud, firm voice, “I’m Vladimir Kara-Murza, NTV TV company. Who are you? Your name and surname!” Faced with a TV celebrity who was instantly recognizable in his black turtleneck and gray jacket, the astonished guard let him in.8

  Taking the cameraman with him, Kara-Murza slid into the corridor of the hijacked station. Almost immediately he saw two people approaching. One was the new chief editor, a man appointed with the full approval of the Kremlin. That was anticipated. But the second was truly a surprise: Oleg Dobrodeev, a bulky, solid man in old-fashioned glasses, had been CEO of NTV just a year earlier. When NTV started scrapping with Putin, Dobrodeev deserted the battle. Rather than incur Putin’s displeasure, he moved to head up the state-owned media mammoth known as Russian state television. Ever since, he had been busy buying up journalists leaving the beleaguered NTV. When Dobrodeev saw Kara-Murza, he turned away, but Kara-Murza blocked him with his hand.

  “Turn on your camera, Zhenya! A question for our viewers. Why has the chairman of the state-owned TV corporation, at”—Kara-Murza looked at his wristwatch—“5:30 in the morning on a Saturday, found himself on the premises of the TV channel NTV?”9

  “Because I’m no longer a representative of Russian state television,” Dobrodeev said and turned away. He was pretending to have resigned from state television to fool people into thinking that he had come to NTV as a friend.

  Kara-Murza wasn’t buying it. He followed Dobrodeev.

  “OK, so why didn’t we see you here yesterday or a year ago?” he asked.

  “Well, we all needed to think about what’s going on. And you too,” Dobrodeev replied.

  “To think about what?” Kara-Murza exclaimed. “Zhenya, keep rolling!… Please confirm that the program scheduled for tonight, the one about a takeover of NTV, will be aired as planned. The program that also looks at Beria and Yagoda.” Kara-Murza was referring to Stalin’s chiefs of state security, directly implying that the takeover of NTV amounted to government repression. He continued to address Dobrodeev, not the new editor in chief. His gut feeling was correct: he didn’t know then that Dobrodeev had been driven to Ostankino after his meeting with Putin in the Kremlin.10

  Dobrodeev kept walking away. Then he suddenly stopped and turned to Kara-Murza. He started in a surprisingly thin voice: “You want to talk about freedom of speech? Freedom of speech, Volodya [diminutive for Vladimir], is not only you, alas. And you understand this perfectly.” He hinted that Kara-Murza, too, was not completely free in his actions. For months, state propaganda had been attacking NTV journalists. In these attacks, they claimed that NTV journalists were extremely well paid by Gusinsky, implying that th
e journalists had traded their integrity for big salaries and low-interest loans on apartments. But if Dobrodeev was accusing him of having sold out to the oligarch, Kara-Murza wanted him to say it explicitly, on camera.

  “Please, look into my pockets!” Kara-Murza exclaimed. Offended, he opened his jacket wide. He asked where the evidence was of his being paid. “I do not understand your hint… I do not understand your hint,” he repeated, slowly enunciating each word.

  But Dobrodeev kept walking away.

  It was the end of NTV as its Russian audience knew it. Most of the station’s prominent journalists left in protest of its hostile takeover.

  It was also the end of a twenty-five-year friendship. Oleg Dobrodeev had been Kara-Murza’s friend since the days they were both studying history at Moscow University. Their families were friendly, too. Kara-Murza was godfather to Dobrodeev’s son. It was Dobrodeev who had invited the unemployed Kara-Murza to work in television in the first place, at the channel Dobrodeev himself had founded. He had also kept giving Kara-Murza wristwatches, which Kara-Murza kept losing. One day Dobrodeev took off the wristwatch he was wearing, which had been specially made for NTV’s top executives. It was an expensive, classic-looking piece engraved with “NTV Channel,” but he gave it to his friend. That had been just seven years ago.

  That precious gift Kara-Murza never lost. It was this wristwatch, in fact, that he consulted when he asked Dobrodeev what he was doing on the premises of the occupied NTV at such an early hour.

  Always a professional, Kara-Murza made several copies of the recording of his walk-in and encounter with Dobrodeev and sent the tapes to his Russian and foreign colleagues. The tape aired the same day. But that, of course, didn’t have any effect on the fate of NTV.