Once Upon a Time in Russia

by Ben Mezrich

  “Thugs and gangsters,” the man was saying, at the tail end of a monologue that had begun so long ago, Berezovsky had already finished two glasses of vodka in the interim, “and there is no place for either of them at ORT anymore.”

  Berezovsky nodded, as a waiter refilled his tumbler for the third time. The man sitting across from him—Vlad Listyev, easily the most popular television anchor in Russia—seemed to be struggling to contain his emotions, as his voice rose above the din of the moderately crowded drawing room. Berezovsky supposed his guest’s animated demeanor was better than the stiff and awkward silence that had enveloped the man when he had first arrived at the Logovaz Club. Maybe it was the opulent setting that had initially caused his unease, or perhaps the newness of his own situation—he was, after all, a stranger to this world of business deals and handshake lunches. Or perhaps it was Berezovsky’s Georgian business partner, seated not ten feet away on an antique daybed, pretending to read a newspaper. Badri Patarkatsishvili tended to have that effect on people. Even those who were blissfully unaware of his reputation.

  Berezovsky had offered to move the meeting to his office on the top floor of the club, but thankfully, his guest had declined. The partially curtained alcove in the drawing room was private enough, and besides, what was the point of having such a famous face on his team if he was going to hide it behind an office door? You didn’t hang a Picasso in the medicine cabinet, you stuck it right on the living room wall.

  And what a famous face it was. Alive and glowing behind that bushy brown mustache, those square-framed glasses, that impressive, glossy hair. A face made for television, or more accurately, made by television.

  Thirty-nine years old, in his trademark suspenders—supposedly modeled on the American television star Larry King—Listyev was perhaps the most famous man in the entire country. First as the host of his own talk show, which had a regular audience of over a hundred million people, and then as the beloved star of Russia’s most popular game show, Vlad was a near daily presence in every Russian household. The hush that had moved through the Logovaz Club when Berezovsky had led him into the parlor had been palpable; even Badri had flushed behind his newspaper.

  Choosing Vlad Listyev to run the newly privatized ORT had been an act of pure genius. Korzhakov had been right at the Presidential Club; the public would have had trouble envisioning a man like Berezovsky at the head of the nation’s largest television network. But Vlad was a national treasure. He had the respect and experience necessary to run ORT, and a face that could easily help elect the president to his next term. No matter how much Yeltsin’s health deteriorated, Berezovsky was convinced that ORT, with the help of Vlad Listyev, could prop him up through 1996.

  Unfortunately, however, it was rapidly becoming apparent that there was more to Vlad Listyev than just his famous face.

  “You disagree?” Vlad was half off his armchair, his eyes searing behind his square glasses. “This corruption, it’s like a disease. These gangsters are like tumors, choking ORT from the inside.”

  “Your passion is inspiring,” Berezovsky responded. “But we’re not talking about life and death. These are television commercials.”

  Vlad’s cheeks turned red as he shifted back into his seat.

  “We’re talking about more than commercials. We’re talking about a system that is rotting at its core.”

  Vlad glanced past Berezovsky, toward an employee carrying a tray of exorbitantly expensive caviar. Berezovsky knew that Vlad was speaking about more than just ORT. Berezovsky did not doubt for a moment the anchorman’s liberalism or his belief in President Yeltsin. He had been a voice for democracy from the very beginning. But he was also in a unique position to see the grime that was oiling the gears of this new capitalism.

  Yet, despite his protestations, the grime in this situation really did have to do with television commercials. ORT wasn’t losing a quarter of a billion dollars a year because people weren’t watching. Vlad’s own show had been getting ratings, which in America, would have been the equivalent of adding ABC, NBC, and CBS together. ORT was bleeding money because of a unique, very Russian advertising structure.

  Instead of the network selling ads directly to independent companies, all ORT advertising was controlled by a single entity—a holding company made up of a consortium of shareholders. This arrangement had led to an incredible amount of graft—of which Berezovsky was intimately aware, since LogoVAZ was, in fact, one of the minor shareholders in the consortium. Though he agreed with Vlad’s assessment—that the advertising structure was utterly corrupt—he admired the creativity behind it, though he couldn’t take credit for its invention. That honor fell to a young, reportedly well-connected businessman who had built his wealth running disco clubs and dance halls.

  “It’s a complex business,” Berezovsky started.

  “There’s a difference between businessmen and gangsters.”

  “Yes,” Berezovsky said. “Usually it’s the size of their wallet.”

  That got a grunt from Badri on the other side of the alcove.

  Vlad brought a hand down against his knee, then removed his glasses and lowered his voice.

  “It’s time to change things. And I think I know how we should do this. I’m going to enact a moratorium on all advertising for the next few months. For the time being, ORT will sell no ads until this corruption is shaken out.”

  Berezovsky heard Badri’s newspaper ruffle. Berezovsky cleared his throat.

  “There are often better ways to treat a tumor than immediately reaching for a knife.”

  “We don’t need to treat the tumor. We need to take it out.”

  Berezovsky looked at the famous man. A moratorium on advertising was going to cost a lot of people an enormous amount of money. He began to calculate, thinking forward through the possible outcomes of such a maneuver. Who was going to lose and who was going to gain. What mattered most, of course, was where he landed on that spectrum. Initially, he would certainly lose; but as a major part of ORT, if Vlad could somehow right the ship—it could make things very interesting.

  “Perhaps a drink as we think this through,” Berezovsky said, but Vlad cut him off, rising from his seat.

  “None for me, thank you.”

  “Of course.”

  Berezovsky had read that the man had recently beaten his alcoholism—one of the many obstacles the man had overcome. Vlad’s biography read like something out of a Dostoyevsky novel: a father who had committed suicide when he was young, a mother who drank, two children who had died young.

  What could Berezovsky teach a man like that?

  It wasn’t until Vlad had entered the elevator leading down to the security driveway, the twin steel doors closing shut behind him, that Badri lowered his newspaper and glanced at Berezovsky. As usual, the Georgian’s expression was hard to read. His eyes were bright and amiable, but most of his features were hidden behind his handlebar mustache, which he twisted between the fingers of his left hand.

  “It’s not going to go over well. This moratorium.”

  “You think he will be a problem?” Berezovsky asked.

  “The dance hall king? Of course. He’s always a problem.”

  “Not him.”

  Vlad’s floral cologne still hung in the air. He was a legend, beloved by everyone. He was also very smart.

  “He’s a good man. He loves his country almost as much as we love him. He wants things to be better.”

  Berezovsky nodded, still thinking.

  “And the dance hall king? You can talk to him?”

  It was what Badri did. He had been one of the heads of LogoVAZ since the beginning, and now he was an official with ORT—but his real job, his real skill, was communication. Specifically, he could communicate with the type of people Vlad was trying to chase out of television.

  “It’s going to cost us a lot of money,” Badri said.

  Berezovsky grunted. In the short term. ORT in general was going to cost a lot of money, but, as he’d told K
orzhakov, that wasn’t the point. His thoughts immediately turned to the young man on the Caribbean yacht. Roman Abramovich’s integrated oil company—and his payment of thirty million dollars a year—would be just the beginning. The possibilities were endless. Oil to prop up television to prop up a president who would prop up Berezovsky.

  Round and round and round it went.

  Which brought him back to Vlad Listyev. Did Berezovsky need to reassess his previous opinions? Had choosing the anchorman to run ORT been a stroke of genius, or a mistake? Vlad was a good man—a truly good man. Did that make him a liability?

  For once, Berezovsky wasn’t sure.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  * * *

  March 1, 1995, 8:55 p.m.,

  Novokuznetskaya Street, Moscow

  IT WAS THE MOST incredible feeling in the world.

  The warmth of the bright spots trained on his makeup-caked face, the hush in the studio as the producer counted down the seconds, the soft breeze from the boom mike lowering above his head. And then that frantic burst of adrenaline, as the camera blinked on, capturing the particles of light reflecting off his face, translating his visage into electronic packets, streaming him through cables and off satellite dishes and into wire antennas all over his beloved country, multiplying him a hundred million times, delivering him into living rooms and kitchens and appliance stores on every block in every city across the greatest nation in the world. His essence, everywhere, for everyone—because that’s really all anyone was, after all—light reflected off skin and clothes and bones.

  Vlad Listyev was not a religious man. Hell, with a background like his it was impossible to believe in much beyond some twisted game of fate—but when that camera flashed on, he felt connected to the world in a way that truly hinted at a higher power. Even now, walking home from the evening broadcast of his signature show, Chas Pik, the cold night air biting at his skin, he could still feel that energy pulsing through him. The pretty, tree-lined street near the heart of Moscow was quiet, save for the odd car rumbling past, and the sound of the breeze riffling through the nearly bare tree branches above his head. But in his mind, one hundred million voices pushed him on. They were listening, they were watching. They were always watching.

  Vlad’s pace quickened as he caught sight of his apartment building, just a dozen yards ahead. The first day of March in Moscow was often indistinguishable from the heart of winter—but tonight, it felt much more like the first day of spring. A moment of rebirth and change.

  Most of Vlad’s closest friends thought that perhaps he had gone completely crazy. Accepting the position as the head of the newly privatized ORT, dipping his toes into the business world at a time like this—the water so infested that it was impossible to tell the sharks from the fish—certainly seemed to have the color of madness.

  What his friends did not understand—it was his love for his people that pushed him to make this decision. He wasn’t a businessman, but he didn’t see ORT as a business.

  He pulled his overcoat tighter against his throat as he reached the entrance to his apartment building. A man like Berezovsky might never be able to understand, but Vlad’s plan to chase the corruption out of television by imposing a moratorium on ads wasn’t a business strategy. He didn’t want to clean up ORT to make Berezovsky richer. He saw television as something much, much bigger than a corporation. Just as the cameras captured his reflection, spinning it a hundred million times across the country, those same cameras reflected something back—a picture of what his nation had become. So much promise, so much possibility, but tethered to a corrupt time.

  Almost out of instinct, Vlad glanced behind himself at the empty sidewalk, taking note of the few cars on the street beside him. He knew that it was a risky game he was playing. The corrupt forces aligned against him were not going to look kindly on his moratorium or the tens of millions of dollars they would lose because of it. But Vlad was optimistic. He believed that eventually, they would find other businesses to conquer—or they would simply accept what he was trying to do. The idea that he might come to physical harm over television ads seemed incredibly unlikely.

  Even so, he wasn’t a fool. In fact, just a day ago, he had been visited by a pair of government agents who had told him that although there weren’t any specific threats against him, he needed to be careful. But, despite his wife’s insistence, he wasn’t going to lock himself up like an Oligarch, with bodyguards and armored cars. Despite the corruption of the moment, despite what he read in the newspapers every day and reported on his television shows, he believed in his people.

  Perhaps that was part of the Russian condition, to love something so broken and bruised. Perhaps it was the same reason his people had embraced him—a man who at times had been so broken and bruised. Hell, if he couldn’t take a stand, then who could?

  He took the steps up to the doorway to his apartment building, undid the dead bolt, and stepped inside.

  To his surprise, the foyer was darker than usual; he noticed that one of the bulbs in the stairwell leading up into the interior of the building had blown out—but there was still just enough light to make out the steps.

  He was halfway to the first landing when he realized that he hadn’t heard the front door shut behind him. He was about to turn to see why—when he noticed movement a few feet above him.

  He squinted through his glasses—and made out a man, dressed entirely in black, his face covered by what appeared to be a ski mask.

  Vlad froze midstep. His mind started to try to make sense of what he was seeing, and he reached down toward his coat. He had a fair amount of cash on him, and the rational portion of his brain thought maybe this was a robbery.

  And then he heard the two sudden pops. Something bit at his arm, right above the elbow, and then something else touched the back of his head. Suddenly he was falling, the muscles in his legs giving out. A warm river was running down the back of his neck—but his mind was already beginning to disconnect as he toppled down the stairs.

  Before his eyes stopped working, he caught a glimpse of one of the men standing in the open doorway behind him, also dressed in black. In the man’s hand was a 9mm handgun, attached to a cruel-looking silencer.

  Perhaps Vlad’s final sense, his final emotion, was pure disbelief; that even in this new and brutal Russia, a man could be murdered over television commercials.

  And then his body hit the ground.

  CHAPTER NINE

  * * *

  March 2, 1995, 3:00 p.m.,

  Logovaz Club

  IN MOMENTS LIKE THESE—JUST the two of them, alone in Berezovsky’s private office on the top floor of the club, the slight businessman hunched over his desk, Litvinenko standing a few feet away, his hip against an ornate window sill as he watched the Oligarch work—Litvinenko could almost forget the gulf between them, the marathon of education, wealth, and political status that would forever mark them as employer and employee. He could almost forget that he was little more than a glorified cop, moonlighting for a few extra dollars and perhaps a chance at something more, while Berezovsky was a man with hundreds of millions in the bank, who had, on at least two occasions that Litvinenko knew of, dined with the president. Marina, Litvinenko’s ballroom dancer, liked to joke that Litvinenko was a member of the chorus brushing elbows with one of the principal players, whenever he made his weekly visit to the Logovaz, but Litvinenko liked to believe that the relationship had progressed a bit beyond that.

  In fact, in his mind, in less than a year, he and the Oligarch had developed something that could almost be called a friendship. At first, Berezovsky had been understandably wary of the FSB agent. Even though Litvinenko had been an officer investigating the assassination attempt on Berezovsky’s life, the businessman had not expected more than a few cursory Q-and-A sessions, maybe a couple of arrests that would eventually lead nowhere. He had been surprised by Litvinenko’s apparent dedication to unraveling the details of the bombing. Although the FSB had eventually run into dead en
ds, Litvinenko had managed to impress Berezovsky with his willingness to turn over as many rocks as he could, and more significantly, with his sincerity and compassion.

  Eventually, Berezovsky had begun to invite him to meet on a more regular basis to discuss things even beyond the assassination attempt. They had discovered many similar beliefs and predilections; Litvinenko had told him all about his ballroom dancer, how he had fallen in love with her the first time he’d seen her dance, vowing that she would one day be his wife. Berezovsky seemed to have a blonde for every day of the week, but he understood the importance of passion, and his love for all things beautiful informed most aspects of his daily life.

  Surprisingly, the two men also held many similar political opinions, and they shared a growing dislike of the war in Chechnya. For his part, Berezovsky was against the war because it wasn’t particularly good for business. Litvinenko had served in the Chechen expansion, had seen the violence up close. He’d been waist high in the mud of that war, but, as he’d told Marina when he’d finally made his way home, he’d done all he could to still be able to hold her with clean hands.

  Litvinenko couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when his and Berezovsky’s association had shifted enough to the point where the Oligarch felt comfortable trusting the FSB agent with some of his business needs, but sometime in the past six months, Litvinenko had found himself on the businessman’s payroll. Although he had once looked down upon his colleagues who had taken moonlighting jobs, after he had begun enjoying the fruits of employment outside the leaky government bureaucracy, he had found the steady addition to his income quite seductive. Berezovsky’s demands so far hadn’t been extreme; a background check here, a phone record there. He’d still been able to come home to Marina each night with clean hands.

  Usually, when they met here in Berezovsky’s office, the conversation remained light and airy. This particular early evening session had been quieter than usual; the event of the previous day infused every passing thought. Even if Alexander hadn’t been an FSB agent who specialized in counterterrorism and acts of crime, and Berezovsky a businessman personally connected to the tragedy, the sense of mourning in the air would have been just as palpable.