The Compatriots

by Andrei Soldatov

  Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr., as he preferred to be called, to distinguish himself from his famous father, was twenty-one years old. He looked a lot like his father, but he was OK with that; he was eager to take up the mantle of his family’s mission. He was understandably anxious. This was his first political campaign.8

  He had spent the entire day in a suit because he thought he looked too young and talked too fast, and he wanted to come across as serious. He briefly reminded himself that he was not entirely green when it came to politics. After all, he worked not just for some ordinary member of parliament but for Boris Nemtsov, a former vice prime minister and protégé of Yeltsin. Plus he had spent years in journalism—he had been writing since he was sixteen years old. On the downside—there was always a downside—he had lived abroad for the past seven years; he’d been taken to London by his mother. Now he had a British passport along with the Russian one—not a good thing in the eyes of the Russian authorities, but the lawyers who the party had consulted said it was fine, at least for now. Vladimir had always wanted to make a political career at home in Russia.

  It had been a long, tiring day, and his mind was still racing. He reminded himself that he was graduating from Cambridge in three days, and he needed to make it back to the United Kingdom on time. He needed and deserved some rest. To unwind, he turned on the hotel’s TV set and switched to the channel TVS, his father’s channel, a years-long habit.

  He watched until midnight, and then the broadcasting suddenly stopped. An enlarged white TVS logo appeared and above it the line, “Farewell! We were disconnected from the broadcast.” Soon after, the sign was replaced with the logo of a sports channel. Later on, the Press Ministry would say the channel had been terminated “in the interest of viewers.”

  Kara-Murza Jr. was shocked, but at least now he knew one thing for certain. In three days, when the time would come to get his Cambridge diploma (a “double first”) and to kneel at the throne in the Senate Hall in a hood of black-corded silk lined with white silk, both of his parents would be there. His father, who was always busy with the three shows he hosted on TVS and had been reluctant to promise he could attend the ceremony, now could definitely come to Cambridge.

  On that lovely, sunny day in dreamy medieval Cambridge, the Kara-Murzas, senior and junior, both knew that the time had come to face some cold facts. Kara-Murza Sr. would never work in Russian mainstream media again. That period of Russian history—and of his life—was over.

  When Boris Jordan had first taken command of NTV, he had canceled the station’s top satirical show, which featured kukly (puppets), one of which was a caricature of Putin. The last program TVS aired before being shut down was another show focused on political satire and hosted by Vladimir Kara-Murza Sr. It marked the very last time the Russians would see political satire on their TV screens. Such programming was clearly not acceptable anymore.

  A short time later, Gusinsky offered Kara-Murza Sr. a job at the Moscow bureau of his RTVI channel. Kara-Murza understood that he would no longer be reaching a Russian audience, but he took it. And in December, Kara-Murza Jr. lost his election, and his party didn’t make it into the parliament. Apparently there was no room left in the country for either his ambitions or for his father’s.

  In February 2004, Kara-Murza Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps and joined RTVI. On his first day on the job, a bomb exploded at the front door of the apartment occupied by well-known Russian journalist Elena Tregubova. She had just published a revelatory book about the Kremlin. Among many juicy stories was one about her rendezvous with Putin in a Japanese restaurant that seemed more like a date than a meeting. The book immediately became a bestseller. It also angered Putin. An interview with Tregubova recorded on NTV was taken off the air. And now her apartment had been bombed.

  The police cordoned off the building and effectively locked Tregubova inside it. An RTVI editor told Kara-Murza Jr. it was his story to cover. He was given a TV crew and sent to Tregubova’s. He found her home phone number and called her. He called many times, each time speaking in his fast, exaggeratedly polite manner. Finally, he talked her into slipping behind the policemen’s backs to come out to the street and give him an interview. She did, and he got his story.

  A few days later, Kara-Murza Jr. got a call from Gusinsky’s top lieutenant. He was offered a new job: launch and then head a new RTVI bureau in Washington, DC. Kara-Murza Jr. readily accepted. In two months he moved to a country he had never lived in before.

  Gusinsky’s RTVI became the most popular television broadcasting network for the Russian audience abroad—much more popular than the radio stations the US government had launched at George Kennan’s instigation—and it emerged at the very moment when the number of Russian-speaking people outside Russia dramatically increased. People kept leaving Russia, but they also were now leaving the former Soviet republics, including the Baltics, where everybody still spoke and understood Russian. There was also a substantial audience of Russian speakers in Eastern Europe and the huge community in Israel.

  But Gusinsky’s channel lacked funding to become truly international television. It was, essentially, a startup funded mostly from Gusinsky’s pockets. And despite Gusinsky’s energy and determination, it could not survive long with that level of funding. The big opportunity to create a major media outlet for the Russian emigrants (and, with the advent of internet, for the audience inside the country, too) was missed.

  Boris Jordan had played a disruptive role for Russian television. The NTV takeover operation had so split the community of journalists that when Putin turned on Jordan, nobody came to his or the channel’s defense. Jordan fell victim to the game in which he had been an eager player, but there were other, much more important victims as well.

  Boris Jordan lost the game on one of his chessboards; Vladimir Putin, personally, had turned the board upside down. The Russian president’s intense suspicion, instilled in him during his career as a KGB officer, that an uncontrolled media undermined his authority was simply too strong to beat. As a good investor, Jordan knew the rules: one needs to be on good terms with Putin to stay successful in Russia. Jordan needed to repair their relationship and quickly.

  Jordan had another game going. It was a big game and a tricky one; although riskier than NTV, it could help him win back Putin’s trust. That game included exploiting his connections in the United States, in the Russian émigré circles where his family was widely respected. If he were successful, he would deliver a precious gift to the Russian leader, something no one in the Kremlin had even dreamed of being able to attain.

  CHAPTER 24

  COURTING THE WHITE CHURCH

  Before the revolution, the church in Russia had always been closely connected to the Russian state. Its borders matched the borders of the Russian empire, and the Russian tsar was the head of the Orthodox Church. The revolution changed this relationship dramatically. Two churches emerged—one in Moscow, under control of the Communists, known as the Red Church, and one launched in Europe and then in the United States, called the White Church. The latter was officially known as the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and became the church of the Russian emigration. The White Church was the first truly globalized Russian institution with parishes extending from France, Germany, and England to the United States. The White Church also embodied the idea of the “other Russia,” that of the intellectuals, artists, industrialists, writers, and officers; of an elite uncompromised by cooperation with the Communists. The other Russia was an imaginary, inchoate, ultimately unrealizable vision of the country but a very appealing idea, even for many who lived in the realm of the Red Church.

  Putin wanted one united Russia. He didn’t like alternative versions.

  When Putin had visited the United States in November 2001, things had started out swimmingly. He had met with Bush at the White House, been welcomed warmly by the US Congress, and anticipated enjoying himself at the Bushes’ Texas ranch. But before he left Washington for Texas, something occurred
that he found profoundly frustrating—something the Kremlin had not foreseen.

  On November 14, the Russian embassy had thrown a large reception, inviting more than 250 people, to honor the new Russian president. The crème de la crème of American business came to the white-marble Russian embassy to hear Putin, along with prominent Russian émigrés—including artists, writers, and athletes. In the marble and glass Golden Hall of the embassy, framed by gold curtains and two walls of dreadful panels—one set depicted the capitals of fifteen Soviet republics and the second fifteen Russian cities, all on gold backgrounds and all drawn in the primitive, overoptimistic style common to children and Soviet official art of the 1970s—a long line formed to talk to Putin. The first to reach him were the leaders of the Jewish community.

  They seemed to like Putin a lot. “The eyes of the American Jewish leaders have opened. They shine! They did not believe that in Russia now there is such a man—Vladimir Putin,” exclaimed chief Russian rabbi Berel Lazar, who was ordained at the Central Lubavitch Yeshiva in New York and who had lived in Moscow since 1990.1 Indeed, Rabbi Lazar was so excited that he promised to lobby for the cancellation of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. That piece of legislation sanctioned the countries that did not allow the free emigration of Jews and was still law, although not in use anymore. Russia had been determined to be in full compliance with Jackson-Vanik every year since 1994.2

  “I liked him,” said Ernst Neizvestny, a sculptor who had left the Soviet Union in 1976 and lived in New York.

  “What a speech! How many thoughts! Especially that part that everyone should unite,” added Slava Fetisov, a former legendary defenseman of Soviet ice hockey. His brave and public fight for the right to emigrate to play for the National Hockey League in the United States made world headlines in the late 1980s. He succeeded and won the Stanley Cup playing for the Detroit Red Wings and was now an assistant coach with the New Jersey Devils.

  Putin enjoyed this gathering much more than he had the World Congress of Compatriots, held just a month earlier in Moscow’s Hall of Columns. The people who came to greet him now, at the Golden Hall of the Russian embassy, really mattered.

  But Putin had expected another important guest to come. The Kremlin had asked the Russian embassy to pass on an invitation to His Eminence the Most Reverend Metropolitan Laurus, the head of the White Church. Putin wanted to meet Laurus to invite him to come visit Russia.

  Whereas the first Russian president, Yeltsin, hadn’t known much about the religion, Putin made it known from the beginning that he was deeply religious. He also didn’t hesitate to use his religion as a tool to win the trust of world leaders. At his very first meeting with Bush in June 2001, Putin told the American president a story about how he’d saved the Orthodox cross his mother gave him from a fire in his dacha. The story so resonated with Bush that he famously told the press after that meeting, referring to Putin, “I was able to get a sense of his soul, a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”3

  Still, this was a personal matter for Putin. Officially, the church in Russia has been separated from the state since the Bolshevik Revolution, and the collapse of the Soviet Union hadn’t changed things. Strictly speaking, it was not Putin’s call to invite a church leader to the country.

  The Orthodox Church in Moscow was very sensitive about visits to Russia by the heads of other churches. The Russian Orthodox Church treats Russia as its territory—70 to 80 percent of Russians profess to be Orthodox—and jealously guards it from competitors.4 Pope John Paul II spent years trying to get invited to Russia but failed. The relationship between the Orthodox Church in Russia and the White Church was even more strained. The two churches were like close relatives who not only did not trust one another but who each suspected the other of downright treachery.

  There was a lot of bad blood between the two churches. The White Church was founded in May 1919 by a motley group of hierarchs of the Orthodox Church who, horrified by the Bolsheviks’ advance, had fled Moscow for territory controlled by the White army. When the Bolsheviks’ Red army besieged and stormed Crimea, the last holdouts of the White army evacuated the priests along with the troops to Constantinople. The last commander in chief of the White army, baron Pyotr Wrangel, decided not to disband the troops but rather to maintain the army in exile. The priests made a similar decision. They formed the Russian Church Abroad, the White Church, to serve the army in exile. As it happened, the officer corps, which still had a strong aristocratic element, would always have a decisive say in the church’s affairs.

  In 1921, the White Church established its headquarters in Serbia along with many of the Russian émigrés. When World War II broke out, those Russians stayed in Serbia under German occupation. Toward the end of the war, in the face of approaching Soviet troops, the church heads, along with masses of émigrés, fled to Germany and reached the American occupation zone. In 1951, the church leaders moved to the United States. They put down roots in New York and stayed there.

  The descendants of the first wave of emigration and the White Church stayed close. That proved true for many prominent families, including Boris Jordan’s.

  The Jordans, a Russian aristocratic family, went through a lot after the revolution. Just like the church’s leadership, they settled in Serbia. While Boris Jordan’s grandfather became a leader of a local Russian community there, his position was a mere shadow of the status he’d enjoyed in Russia, where his wife had served as a maid of honor under the empress and could go every day to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

  Sticking to traditions, Boris’s father, Alexei, went to the Whites’ Cadet Corps. He joined the Russian Protection Corps, a Wehrmacht unit, when the Germans invaded Serbia. By the end of the war, the Jordans fled to Germany and eventually moved to the United States. There, Alexei went to banking. He remained close to the church; for decades, he had helped the White Church handle its finances.

  When Boris, Alexei’s son, went away in the early 1990s to make big money in the new capitalist Russia, he remained close to his father, and his affiliation with the White Church remained important to him.

  The White Church, although never very large or wealthy, could always count on the support of the Russian aristocracy in exile, including the Galitzines and the Jordans. Many Russian émigrés shared mistrust and contempt for the Red Church.

  After the revolution, the atheist Communists had attacked the priests who had remained and destroyed most of the churches in the country. Humiliated and devastated, the church was forced to recognize and adapt to Soviet rule. Later on, the Kremlin eased the repression but still kept the church under firm control. For seven decades, the White Church considered the church in Moscow to have been largely corrupted by its cooperation with the Soviet authorities. It believed, rightly, that the KGB had penetrated the Moscow organization at every level.

  The Orthodox priests in Moscow, in turn, looked at the White Church with a mix of suspicion and envy. After all, the White Church was the single ideological institution that united the millions of Russians living abroad, from Australia to Canada to the United States to Europe. And it was completely out of reach of the priests in Moscow.

  It didn’t help that the two churches were very close to one another spiritually and, at times, geographically. In New York, the Red Church was (and is) headquartered in St. Nicholas Cathedral, a Russian-style church with seven domes above a dark redbrick facade trimmed with limestone, squeezed between two four-story apartment buildings on East Ninety-Seventh Street. The White Church’s headquarters were (and are) located a mere seven-minute walk away, at the corner of Park Avenue and East Ninety-Third Street, in a redbrick and limestone mansion.

  Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB officer visiting Washington, took an unprecedented step: he invited the head of the White Church to the Russian embassy—his territory. It was not just a polite gesture. Putin wanted to meet Laurus to bring him over to his side. More than that, he wanted to take over the “other Russia.”
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  Laurus chose not to come to Putin’s reception in Washington, nor did he accept Putin’s invitation to visit Russia.5 It became clear to Putin that he needed a subtler approach to this sensitive matter. Perhaps a gentle push by someone inside to urge the church to come to terms with Moscow. But who was in position to act as go-between and push the church?

  He found this person in Boris Jordan. Jordan had proved himself useful with the NTV just half a year earlier—even if things hadn’t gone so well in the end—and he wanted to stick around. The president met with him at a one-on-one meeting in Moscow. They had a long conversation about many topics—Putin was very interested in Jordan’s family story.6 Then the topic of reunification was raised.7

  “I understand that you’re involved with the church, that you’re a religious person,” the president—a former officer of the Soviet secret police—said to the Russian American financier, a descendant of an officer of the White army who had fled with his family from the Soviet secret police. Putin continued: “I believe that the reunion of the churches is a very, very important thing. One of the most important things you can do, much more important than anything you’re doing in television or business, is to help in the reunification of the churches.”8

  Jordan was excited. Personally, he didn’t have any problem with Putin’s origins in the Soviet secret police. “He was a chekist, yes, but that doesn’t mean he is bad. He is a religious person, close to the church. I support him because I saw what happened while he has been president—he got more people out of poverty than any Russian leader before him. And look, these days, you can see the icons in the offices of the heads of secret services,” he told us.

  Jordan was ready to invest his personal prestige in the reunification of the churches.

  Now he needed a proper battle plan.