Once Upon a Time in Russia

by Ben Mezrich

  Today, on this day that is so extraordinarily important for me, I want to say just a few more personal words than usual.

  I want to ask for your forgiveness.

  For the fact that many of the dreams we shared did not come true. And for the fact that what seemed simple to us turned out to be tormentingly difficult. I ask forgiveness for not justifying some hopes of those people who believed that at one stroke, in one spurt, we could leap from the gray, stagnant, totalitarian past into the light, rich, civilized future. I myself believed in this, that we could overcome everything in one spurt.

  I turned out to be too naive in something. In some places, problems seemed to be too complicated. We forced our way forward through mistakes, through failures. Many people in this hard time experienced shock.

  But I want you to know. I have never said this. Today it’s important for me to tell you. The pain of each of you has called forth pain in me, in my heart. Sleepless nights, tormenting worries—about what needed to be done, so that people could live more easily and better. I did not have any more important task.

  I am leaving. I did all I could—not according to my health, but on the basis of all the problems. A new generation is relieving me, a generation of those who can do more and better.

  In accordance with the Constitution, as I resign, I have signed a decree placing the duties of the president of Russia on the head of government, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. For three months, again in accordance with the Constitution, he will be the head of state. And in three months, presidential elections will take place.

  I have always been certain of the surprising wisdom of Russians. That’s why I don’t doubt what choice you will make at the end of March 2000.

  Bidding farewell, I want to tell each of you: Be happy. You deserve happiness. You deserve happiness and calm.

  Happy New Year! Happy new century, my dear ones!I

  As Yeltsin finished with his resignation speech, Berezovsky managed to tear his eyes from the television screen. There were more than a handful of men and women in the club at that time—the middle of the day, on the eve of the new millennium—and yet every one of them seemed rooted to the floor. The expressions on each face ranged from confusion to total shock. Not only was this event unexpected—it was entirely unheard of: a seated president, one who had held on to power through every means possible, resigning on New Year’s Eve, six months before the presidential election. Handing over the presidency to his prime minister—Vladimir Putin, a man who had really seemed to come from nowhere, a former KGB officer and recent head of the FSB, a prime minister who had thrilled the country by his use of force in Chechnya, but who otherwise had a fairly blank résumé, a shadow for a history.

  Yeltsin’s exit had come without warning. As he had said in his own resignation speech, the expectations had been for him to try to hold onto power no matter what the cost—eventually, the assumption was, he’d have to be dragged out of office by his hands and feet. After all, this was a man who had survived multiple coup attempts, multiple heart attacks, the fall of an economy, and two wars in Chechnya. And yet he had just handed the presidency over without a single shot fired.

  “Our hippie writer has certainly outdone himself this time,” Badri commented, when he’d found his voice. “That was a hell of a speech.”

  Whether Yumashev had written the words or Yeltsin had been involved in the writing himself, it really had been a perfect speech for the most shocking and brilliant turn of events. Putin had been riding high on his popularity as a strong, decisive prime minister—and now suddenly he was acting president. Yeltsin had said there would still be an election in three months—but in three months, with Putin running the country from a position of strength, with the new Unity Party behind him—hell, he would now be going into the elections as the front-runner, when yesterday he had been going in as a distant second.

  “Winning by resigning,” Berezovsky said. “I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.”

  Tomorrow, Vladimir Putin would be sworn in as acting president. And then, with much fanfare, Vladimir Putin would take over as the new president of Russia.

  And it was also clear—the young president would owe a debt to Boris Berezovsky. This time, Berezovsky might not have bought and paid for the government, as in 1996—but this president still owed his ascendancy, in part, to the onetime car salesman and current Kremlin power broker.

  Berezovsky exhaled, speaking mostly under his breath.

  “But still, business as usual,” he said, and he could see from the Georgian’s face that his friend was hoping it was true.

  Boris Yeltsin had made history. Vladimir Putin was now president. But for Boris Berezovsky, this was really about the business of Boris Berezovsky. And all indications pointed to the notion that, as usual, business was good.

  * * *

  I. Used with permission of The Associated Press Copyright © 2014. All rights reserved.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  * * *

  June 15, 2000,

  Alexandrovka Dacha

  BEREZOVSKY’S WORLD HAD FLIPPED upside down many times over the past decade, so he shouldn’t have been surprised when once again it spun out from beneath his feet. This time, though, it happened in the course of a mere six months—a lifetime in modern Russia, where it took no longer than a five-minute speech for an unknown man to become president.

  Still, Berezovsky had found himself floundering when this new existential challenge blindsided him. Maybe it was fitting that this new threat came from the same nowhere man they had just installed as president. It wasn’t just those in the outside world who had little information about Putin’s past, before his days at the Kremlin. Berezovsky and the Family had been impressed by his service in the mayor’s office of St. Petersburg, but much of his work at the KGB before that was barely documented. How well did any of them really know the man?

  Even after the imprisonment of Litvinenko, Berezovsky had believed they had chosen someone who could be controlled from behind the scenes. But a few weeks before the official election, with Putin already ahead in the polls, the acting president suddenly revealed a side he hadn’t shown before.

  On March 26, he had called a television press conference and had spoken about the chaotic business environment gripping the country, and the role of businessmen going forward. Berezovsky had been sitting exactly where he was now, at his breakfast table in his dacha, watching the conference before he headed to the Logovaz Club. Putin had looked impressive on the television screen—exactly as he had been designed to appear, young, handsome, brimming with confidence and strength, exactly the man depicted in all the feature stories they had played on ORT over the months of the campaign—often showing Putting in judo gear, riding horses, or swimming. A very different leader from the aging, sick Yeltsin, Putin was a symbol of the new generation, of youth. And then he began to speak.

  “Those who combine power and capital—in the future, these Oligarchs will cease to exist as a class.”

  Berezovsky had been shocked by the sweep and ferocity of the statement. As different news programs analyzed the conference, the consensus was that Putin was calling for the elimination of Berezovsky and his colleagues as a power bloc. These were frightening words—and to Berezovsky, who had been funding Putin’s rise in the polls, they’d come out of nowhere.

  As he’d watched the fallout on TV, he’d realized that Putin’s statement only made the president more popular. The public, most of whom lived at or near poverty, had grown increasingly frustrated watching men like Berezovsky living like royalty, right in their midst. The people didn’t know, or care, that Berezovsky and his colleagues believed they had saved capitalism and democracy from the communists. In Berezovsky’s view, the Oligarchs had benefited only because they had been smart enough and quick enough to do so. Yet all the people cared about was that Putin was now presenting himself as the man who would clean up the chaos and drive the Oligarchs out of politics.

  It was as if the m
an had awakened one morning with a brand-new morality, intending to clean up the business world that had propped him up, that had invented the very party he was leading. He was suddenly hungry for the hand that fed him.

  And it hadn’t ended there. Putin easily won the election, and his inauguration was an event befitting a new kind of royalty, conducted with all the pomp and circumstance of the Kremlin of old. Putin regally strode down an extensive red carpet to take his seat, applauded from all sides by his supporters. Shortly thereafter, he had summoned all of the Oligarchs to appear at the Kremlin right next to him, in front of the cameras, and had given another speech explaining that, from that moment on, there would be a separation of business and politics—that businessmen were to pay their taxes and run their companies, while he would run the government. No more just a matter of campaign, no more simply pandering to popular sentiment—this was going to be policy.

  Words were words. Berezovsky was a master of words, and he knew they were only as strong as the intent of the men who spoke them. But any hope that Putin had just been posturing for the cameras was dashed, as Berezovsky watched the new breaking report that was now being replayed over and over again on his own ORT. In a different time, at an earlier moment in his life, the same report would have thrilled him to the core. But now, what was unfolding in front of him stirred an apocalyptic fear in his soul.

  The episode itself had begun a few days earlier, when Putin had decided to follow his harsh words against the “Oligarchs as a class” by putting the squeeze on one of the most well-known and powerful of them all, Vladimir Gusinsky, who also happened to have supported his competitor in the election, the mayor of Moscow. Gusinsky, Berezovsky’s former enemy, had also helped keep Yeltsin in power—had been using his resources at Most Bank and his NTV network to push against Putin both before and after the election. Now Putin had struck back. A government investigation into Gusinsky had discovered that state money had been illegally moving from Gazprom, the gas giant, into Gusinsky’s television and media network in the form of loans that weren’t being paid back, and that there had also been episodes of tax evasion and corrupt enrichment. Gusinsky had immediately lashed back, angrily calling Putin a war criminal for the campaign in Chechnya. Gusinsky was promptly arrested.

  During his short stay in prison, Gusinsky had apparently been given a choice: face criminal charges that could keep him locked up for years or sell his shares in Media-Most, NTV, and much of his other businesses—many of which were on the verge of bankruptcy—to Gazprom. If he went through with the sale, essentially divesting himself from Russian business, he would be allowed to leave prison, and the country.

  Gusinsky had taken the offer. Upon his release a few days later, he sold NTV and his bank, took his remaining billions, and immediately fled to Spain.

  Once upon a time, Berezovsky had celebrated when his rival had been forced out of the country. But this time, it was different. This was not temporary as it had been years before. Gusinsky wouldn’t be coming back. One of the biggest and most powerful Oligarchs alive, a man worth billions, he would now live in exile. If he were ever to return, he would face criminal charges and, most likely, prison.

  Listening to the journalists analyze the situation, Berezovsky grew angrier. There was now no doubt: Putin intended to go after them all, one by one. Roman Abramovich, and probably Badri, would have cautioned him to stay quiet, under the radar. Putin wasn’t yet gunning for him personally, and Sibneft and Abramovich’s aluminum concerns were still bringing in barrels of money—from which Berezovsky was receiving his weekly payments.

  But Berezovsky simply wasn’t built that way—he couldn’t sit still, he couldn’t be silent. Such behavior was not in his nature. The way he saw it, he had faced many battles before. Why should he view Putin as anything more than another obstacle in his path? He had survived multiple assassination attempts, a near prosecution over Aeroflot, the battle with Korzhakov. He could survive Vladimir Putin.

  Of course, in the past he had always had somewhere to turn, a krysha in the Kremlin with enough power to protect him, to set things right. But now the Family was gone. Tatiana still worked as Yeltsin’s personal assistant without pay, but she didn’t have any real power, and would soon be leaving the Kremlin for good. Yeltsin had retired and vanished into the country. On the political front, Berezovsky had few allies and no power base.

  But that didn’t mean the Oligarch was without weapons. He had his own money, he had Abramovich’s continuing asset stream, and, most important of all, he had a television network.

  All he really needed was for Putin to give him an opening and he would strike, quick and venomous, and show the young president that it would be better to negotiate than to fight an all-out war.

  Berezovsky’s hands balled into fists against the breakfast table. At the motion, he inadvertently touched the edge of the envelope that had been delivered the morning before, which he’d opened but left right where he had first read the contents. It was an invitation—not addressed to Berezovsky, but to one of his business associates, another of the Oligarchs. The official, embossed calligraphy on the invitation itself was as ornate as Putin’s inauguration ceremony had been; but the words—and the terrifying address, where a group of his best-known Oligarch colleagues had been invited, to attend an afternoon tea—were something out of the distant past.

  Despite his anger and frustration at how quickly his world had changed, Berezovksy had to applaud Putin’s flair for the dramatic. An invitation to tea, asking the Oligarchs—as a class—to gather together in a place they all knew well—Stalin’s Moscow home, as famous for the leader’s purges as it was for various meetings of great political importance—it was a message that the Oligarchs would receive loud and clear. Putin’s work wasn’t finished; Gusinsky had been a warning shot, and they would do well to pay attention.

  Berezovksy slammed his hand down on the invite—then crumpled it into a ball and threw it toward a wastebasket in the corner of his breakfast room. He himself hadn’t yet received an invitation to the tea, but if he did, he would ignore the summons. He would go out on his yacht in the Caribbean or vacation at his home in the South of France. Let the other Oligarchs remain silent, let the others bow down to the new czar. Berezovksy wasn’t going to stand by and listen to another lecture on business in modern Russia. He had invented business in modern Russia. Instead, he would enjoy himself and his wealth, all the while waiting, like a coiled snake, for Vladimir Putin to make a mistake, to misstep in any way.

  And when it happened, Berezovsky would be ready. He would strike back, and Putin would realize who he was really dealing with.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  * * *

  August 12, 2000,

  11:30 a.m., Barents Sea

  BENEATH THE SEA IN a nuclear submarine is a setting that few people in the world will experience; but for Lieutenant Captain Dmitri Kolesnikov, it was as natural and familiar as his childhood home in St. Petersburg, or the apartment he shared with his wife of three months, or the naval training camps where he had spent much of his young life.

  Kolesnikov was crouched low in the cramped Seventh Compartment of the Oscar Class nuclear submarine—a 943-model attack vessel capable of carrying dozens of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, a battery of torpedoes, a dozen mines, a slew of antiaircraft mortars. Hell, it was one of the largest submarines ever built, over five hundred feet long, one of only five in the Northern Fleet. Bathed in the harsh, fluorescent light reflecting off the thick steel walls and iron-plated floors, he worked his way between the various hissing pipes and clicking knobs of his turbine station.

  The vessel was still at periscope depth—right below the surface of the churning, frozen waters of this area of the Barents Sea, near the desolate northwestern coast of Russia—and he could feel the slight rocking of the current, something that might have bothered the stomach and the inner ear of a less-experienced sailor but barely registered with him.

  To say that Dmitri had been born
a submariner would not have been an exaggeration; he had followed his father’s footsteps into the navy, and into the company of men who lived much of their lives beneath the surface. His proudest achievement was the day he had gained command of this Seventh Compartment, making him an integral part of his crew of one hundred eighteen officers and enlisted men. They were brothers, all, who had chosen a way of life defined by the close, unique environment inside that submerged steel tube.

  Dmitri worked diligently and efficiently at his station, as orders filtered through the intercom system above his head from the command compartment, four sections ahead along the chassis of the narrow vessel. Even though this was only a training mission, his crew was taking part in a series of naval games being conducted by the Northern Fleet, and he took his duties seriously. The truth was, every moment aboard a nuclear submarine had to be taken seriously. Every submariner knew there were no margins for error, that the only thing that separated them from certain death was a hull made of steel, titanium, and iron and the diligence of the brothers who also wore the uniform.

  The brotherhood was so thick Dmitri could taste it in the air they all shared. A hundred and eighteen men breathing the same recycled oxygen, bathing in and drinking from the same recycled water. An almost organic system, unlike any in the outside world. The significance of every moment was made more real by the fact that there was no sense of night or day, no windows. The fluorescent light, a constant glow, penetrated Dmitri’s thoughts even when he slept on that steel shell of a bunk he called his own, in a room near the front of the sub, crowded together with brothers for months at a time.