Her father’s death made a lasting impact on Romanova. She blamed herself for having had the stupid idea to get a car and for letting her father learn to drive. It was in her nature to be accountable and to always accept responsibility for the part she played in things.
In 1989 Romanova was a young professional with a son from a short-lived student marriage. Her career developed fast; she worked as a financier at the Ministry of Trade and tried her hand at economic journalism, but she didn’t know what to do next with her life.
Romanova was very sociable and made many friends at the ministry. One of them, a young lawyer, approached her with a surprising idea. He had just been offered a great job in New York. He was not married, and in 1989 that meant he was not allowed to work abroad. He offered Romanova a deal: marry him and move to New York, with no obligations. Romanova said yes. She still blamed herself for what had happened to her father. She decided to start from scratch.
In New York, a small apartment on the ground floor of a three-story building on Lexington Avenue was awaiting her. She did not even have to pay for it—her husband, who immediately left her on arrival, as they had agreed, took care of it—but she still had to make a living. She went to Brighton Beach and landed a job in a Russian-emigrant nightclub. Her job was to entertain guests before the star singer appeared on the stage. Her gypsy songs turned out to be very useful. But after more than a year of singing and waiting tables, Romanova felt she was going nowhere.
In August 1991 she learned there had been a KGB-orchestrated coup d’état in Moscow. She felt she had to get home, to be there at this uncertain time in the life of her country, so she boarded the next plane she could.
In Moscow, Romanova soon joined the liberal newspaper Segodnya as chief economic observer. That kicked off her media career and, in a few years, landed her a job as a TV anchor. In the mid-2000s, it made her famous although still not financially secure. Alexei Kozlov was a man who would stand by her side. And for Kozlov, Romanova was a prestigious prize—one he had grabbed right from the TV screens of millions of Russians.
The wedding guests were from two different worlds. Kozlov was personable, serious, and very rich. His friends were rich too. Their wristwatches cost more than a month’s salary for the journalists invited by Romanova. Under Putin, journalists had gradually been losing their social standing and were paid less and less.
Two older men circulating among the guests didn’t belong to either group. They were bossy and frequently stood to offer loud toasts to the newlyweds. Kozlov had invited them because they had been crucial to his business career. Both were from the murky world of the secret services, but so had been his beloved grandmother Zoya Zarubina. In fact, Zoya Zarubina—daughter of Soviet spy Vasily Zarubin, stepdaughter of the brutally efficient operative Nahum Eitingon—had introduced Kozlov to the two bossy men in the first place.
Zarubina had taken care of Alexei since his childhood. His parents had separated when he was small, and he had struggled in relationships with both of them. His grandmother had stepped in gladly to fill their shoes, and she invited the boy to move into her spacious flat on Arbat in the center of Moscow. There he started meeting people like US ambassador Matlock and his wife, Rebecca, who were frequent visitors. When he would go out to buy bread in a shop around the corner, he often met members of Gorbachev’s inner circle. Alexei grew up as a true golden boy who learned from childhood that he belonged to the elite, thanks to his grandmother’s connections.4
He kept his room in his grandmother’s apartment until he got married. It was an apartment with a distinguished history—Trotsky’s assassin Ramon Mercader was a family friend and had dropped by regularly when Eitingon was alive.
While the Soviet regime was falling apart, Zoya encouraged Kozlov to go to university rather than join the KGB. Always ambitious, Zoya was determined to help her beloved Alexei establish a career. In the 1990s, all ambitions in the city were centered on money and the West. Zoya got Alexei a part-time job as an interpreter with one of the first American banking delegations to come to Moscow. He became interested in banking, and she helped him go to the United States to study. She located a suitable USAID (US Agency for International Development) program, and off he went, to George Washington University, to study finance.
In 1996, Alexei returned. He wanted to have a career in banking in Russia, and now he had a specific dream: he wanted to make $1 billion by his fortieth birthday. He knew he had an advantage. The presence of KGB foreign intelligence officers was palpable in the Russian banking business.5 And his grandmother happened to know just the right people.
Zoya introduced Alexei to a former KGB general who in 1991 had helped KGB chairman Kryuchkov draft his plans for the doomed coup d’état. In the 1990s, the general had a top-ranking position in a big Russian bank. Zarubina thought he could help with advice and cover her grandson’s back. In Putin’s Russia, it seemed, Soviet-era KGB family connections were just as relevant as they had been in Zarubin’s time.
The general, son of a prominent Soviet spy himself, had admired Vasily Zarubin and was happy to help his family. The retired general-turned-banker became Kozlov’s godfather in business and got Kozlov his first job at the bank. The unusually tall general proposed most of the toasts at Kozlov and Romanova’s wedding.
The second guest, also an acquaintance of Kozlov’s grandmother, was head of the SVR Foreign Intelligence training academy. For seven years, Alexei paid a stipend named after Zarubin to the most accomplished student at the Russian spy school. It was a smart investment. The head of the academy put Kozlov in touch with big shots in the economic department of the SVR. Kozlov speculated on Russia’s foreign debts from time to time, and this game was always under the close watch of the SVR.
At age thirty-one, Kozlov already possessed a brilliant résumé: he had experience as a deputy CEO of a large Russian company and as the vice president of a well-known bank. He also had the backing of former and active generals in Russian foreign intelligence. What could possibly go wrong for a guy like Kozlov in Putin’s Russia?
After the wedding, the couple set off for Kozlov’s country house in Rublyovka. It was a big, brand-new, three-story mansion. Its garage was packed with an Audi A8, a Mercedes sports convertible, and a Lexus. It also had a swimming pool on the second floor, next to the hosts’ bedroom, just as Kozlov had insisted. In the billiards room, Kozlov had two portraits on the wall. They were of his two great-grandfathers—Vasily Zarubin and Nahum Eitingon. The one of Eitingon irritated Romanova from the start. Her family, peasants in the Tambov region, had unhappy experiences with the Bolshevik repressions.6
But the portrait didn’t darken Romanova and Kozlov’s relationship. In a way, theirs was a perfect match: a famous and smart TV news anchor who happened to be on a first-name basis with plenty of Russian oligarchs and government officials and an ambitious young financier with the right connections to foreign intelligence. It seemed like a win-win combination for the kind of economic system Putin was building.
Romanova and Kozlov spent three years in the mansion at Rublyovka. Then things started falling apart. Kozlov was eyeing his dream of $1 billion, but he was getting reckless. Romanova suspected that he took a lover on the side.7 He also fell out with his godfather, a retired KGB general.
By then, Kozlov worked at a large investment group run by a well-connected tycoon, a job his godfather-general had helped him land. The tycoon had just gotten himself a senate seat and left Kozlov to run his business.
The senator was twenty years older, much richer, and much more influential than Kozlov. A conflict broke out about a tannery in Moscow. The factory was not an issue, but the huge piece of land it occupied was worth tens of millions of dollars. The senator decided that Kozlov had tried to help his competitors take over the factory, and he had police investigating the case. Kozlov hadn’t expected such a development.
On a sunny summer day in 2008, his career as a successful financier ended. The police came to the corporation’s
office. They arrested Kozlov and took away his phone. He kept a second burner phone, and in a crowded elevator, he found a way to make a brief call to Romanova. Kozlov was incarcerated in Butyrka, an old, dirty, crowded redbrick prison in the center of Moscow.
At that point, Romanova and Kozlov were on their way to divorce, but she still lived in Rublyovka. It was the mansion where she got Alexei’s call. She went into the billiards room, looked at the portrait of Eitingon, and tore it off the wall.
Next she went to Butyrka to see Kozlov. He seemed to have lost weight, although only days had passed since his arrest. She made up her mind: She was his wife. She didn’t want to fail another man in her life. As she had done many times before, she took responsibility.
It was a new, tough job for Romanova—coming to prison to see Kozlov. The prison authorities were reluctant to let her in, and she tried many pretexts. She soon found the most effective was to come disguised as a member of a Butyrka church choir. Kozlov declared his deep religious feelings that required him to make frequent visits to the prison’s church.
She paid money for a better cell for Kozlov, for normal food for him, for a hot shower. She paid the expensive lawyers. But months passed, and nothing worked out. Kozlov stayed in prison.
Every time Romanova went to Butyrka, she met a long line of women—wives and girlfriends of inmates. One day she invited some women to her apartment to talk and to think about what could be done to help their men. They decided to fight for the rights of the imprisoned and formed a group. Romanova dubbed it Russia Behind Bars.8
She started with a small action. She taught women terrified and humiliated by the Russian prison system to put on a bright red dress when they went to court. The stunt worked in two ways: women lost their fear, and judges (usually women) began paying attention to the wives of prisoners.
She also convinced Kozlov to start writing a blog—named after Butyrka—detailing the harsh conditions of everyday life in Russian prisons. She asked her friends in the media to publicize it, and the blog soon became so popular that the prison’s administration took notice.
Russian society took notice too. Romanova and Kozlov had successfully removed the stigma from public debate about prisons. All of a sudden it became clear that not only criminal outcasts but regular people fell victim to a prison system that was very little reformed since the days of Stalin’s gulag. For Romanova and Kozlov, that was the first step.
By the end of the 2000s, the businessmen and the middle class—the very people who had prospered under Putin—started to emerge from a dangerous delusion and realized that just knowing and playing by the rules guaranteed nothing. Their jobs, their houses, even their freedom could be taken away swiftly. Their fate depended not on them, as Zaslavskiy put it at Echo Moskvy, but rather was at the mercy of the new, repressive regime.
In 2010 Ilya Zaslavskiy and his brother left Russia for the United States for good.
But he couldn’t forget what happened to him. He had some plans forming in his mind. He was thinking about what could be done from abroad.
Meanwhile, some prominent opposition politicians were also thinking hard along the same lines.
CHAPTER 28
“WE NEED SOME TARGETED HITS”
By September 2011, Boris Nemtsov, Yeltsin’s first deputy prime minister, was clashing openly with Putin. He published several reports, like “Putin: 10 Years” and “Putin: Corruption,” that exposed Putin’s corruption, and he went to anti-Putin protest rallies. If he had once been protected in any way by his status as a former high-ranking official, that was no longer the case. Earlier that year, he had spent fifteen days in jail for taking part in a rally against restrictions on public protests.
Nemtsov, a big, tall, powerfully built man, was always cheerful, with a ready joke and laugh. But he had come to think not much could be done about Putin’s regime from inside. After the troubled 1990s, the more time that went by, the more the Russian people seemed to hate liberals. The Kremlin blamed them for all kinds of troubles the country had gone through after the collapse of the Soviet Union—from the upsurge of violent crime to economic downturns—and ordinary Russians seemed to accept that narrative.
The Kremlin also made sure that all attempts to launch a popular liberal political party or form any kind of liberal coalition failed. Nemtsov’s party had lost its presence in the Russian parliament back in 2003, and the Kremlin was determined to further marginalize the opposition.
But the country was not isolated like the Soviet Union had been. Its borders were porous and Russia was globalized, as was the Russian elite—the oligarchs but also the highly placed officials, who had kids in British public schools, nice mansions abroad, and foreign bank accounts. Presumably they would not like to lose all that. And in theory, that made Putin’s system vulnerable.
By 2011, Nemtsov had been working to prove this theory for four years.
His efforts began in December 2007 in a nineteenth-floor office in east Moscow. The occupant, former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, had also fallen out with Putin and was trying to find his place in opposition politics. In the room with Nemtsov and Kasyanov were Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet dissident and one-time head of the 1980s anticommunist organization Resistance International, and Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr., who had come from Washington for the meeting. They had been talking for hours about opposition strategy for the upcoming election when Nemtsov suddenly had an idea. “We should work on getting sanctions on the personal visas of important figures in Putin’s political regime,” he exclaimed. “These guys are in charge of repressions and falsifying elections, yet they want to enjoy Western ways, keeping their money in Western banks and their kids in Western schools.” He paused, then quietly added, “We need some targeted hits.”
The group thought about who might be targeted first in such an effort. Nemtsov suggested starting with Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s gray cardinal. Surkov was the deputy head of Putin’s administration in charge of dealing with political opposition. Surkov was believed to be behind most of the attempts to transform Russia into what he called a “sovereign democracy,” a term coined by Surkov, meaning that democracy in Russia should have different rules from that of the world outside. These projects included creating pro-Kremlin youth organizations who could take to the streets to counter popular demonstrations. Some pro-Kremlin youth movements were devoted to activities like public burnings of books by liberal writers and displayed portraits of prominent human rights activists and opposition politicians defaced with swastikas in their summer training camps. One of those portraits was of Nemtsov.1
The idea was approved. It was the right moment to start in on Surkov. His pro-Kremlin activists were even now harassing the British ambassador for attending an opposition conference. Everywhere the ambassador went, he was met with posters of his face with the inscription “loser” drawn on his forehead and with screams and shouting.
British officials were receptive when Nemtsov and Kara-Murza Jr. approached them asking whether they should be letting Surkov come and go to London as he pleased to quietly enjoy his time there. As a result, Surkov was summoned to the British embassy in Moscow and told, very politely, to stop harassing the ambassador. Diplomatic staff hinted that if he persisted, he would not be allowed back into his beloved London. Surprisingly, despite Surkov’s usual “don’t give a damn” attitude, the tactic worked.2
The next year, Nemtsov’s idea of visa sanctions got a surprising backer: American investor Bill Browder, a grandson of the one-time US Communist Party leader Earl Browder, who had been an agent of the Soviets and a comrade of Jacob Golos in the 1930s and 1940s. Bill Browder had been making good money in Russia since the 1990s as the head of an investment fund, but in 2005 he and the Kremlin had had a falling out. As a result, the Russian authorities started prosecuting his businesses. One of his employees, lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, was jailed and tortured to death in Butyrka prison. Browder had drafted and started to lobby the US Congress for passage of legislation to pun
ish the Russian officials involved in Magnitsky’s prosecution by banning them from traveling to or having assets in the United States.
At the end of 2010, Nemtsov went to Washington to talk to US senator John McCain. He brought Kara-Murza Jr. along with him to the meeting in the W Hotel, near the White House. Nemtsov had known McCain for years and trusted him as a fierce and determined critic of Putin.
Nemtsov and Kara-Murza explained to the senator that they wanted to expand Browder’s legislative initiative to make it open. This meant including an option to add to the list of sanctioned people not only those who had played a role specifically in Magnitsky’s tragedy but also any officials who violated the rights of Russian citizens. McCain was sympathetic, and Nemtsov returned to Moscow, leaving Kara-Murza Jr.—then head of the RTVI bureau in Washington—to continue lobbying in DC.
Kara-Murza sensed that getting involved in political lobbying could be perceived as undermining his journalistic integrity, but he believed that he was still ethically aboveboard. He didn’t cover Russian politics as a journalist and reported only US news.
Kara-Murza got down to business in early 2011, at the start of the new congressional session. “From January to May, I went to the Congress almost every day. For four months I met people, explained why it was important,” Kara-Murza told us. The Obama White House was not very supportive. The State Department didn’t feel the need for special sanctions. It argued that the US government had already put a dozen Russian officials on the visa-ban list for human rights violations in the wake of Magnitsky’s death, without having to enact new legislation.3 But the names of these officials were not made public, and their assets were not frozen.
Another issue was sensitive when it came to formal legislation. Bill Browder, although he had renounced his American citizenship to obtain a British passport some time ago, had been born in the United States. But Nemtsov and Kara-Murza Jr. were Russian citizens, and now they were lobbying in the US Congress to change American policy toward Russia. They were not, as had been the case during the Cold War, Russian émigrés carefully selected by some George Kennan initiative. They were activists and politicians from the country itself. For the very first time in history, the Russians had come to Washington, DC, to lobby for legislation that would, as Putin’s officials made crystal clear in their conversations with their American counterparts, inevitably harm the US relationship with the Russian government. It made several US officials uncomfortable. Nevertheless, in May 2011, the new, expanded draft was introduced to Congress.
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