by Amy Knight
Putin won by a landslide. Boris Nemtsov later recalled in his 2007 autobiography that Berezovsky paid him a visit not long after the presidential elections and told him: “There is nothing more to be done. We did everything we could do. Putin has won. And everything is under control. What a bore. I don’t know how to occupy myself.” According to Nemtsov: “I almost fell off my chair: ‘Borya, there is no need to be bored. Putin will change very quickly. He will never forgive you for the fact that you saw him as weak and supplicating and graciously supported him.…’” Nemtsov went on to observe: “After the monstrous murder in London of KGB officer Litvinenko, Berezovsky [now] expects killers from Lubyanka and is afraid of his own shadow. I think he curses a hundred times the day when he decided to support a man from the KGB.”4
Confrontations with Putin
Soon after his election, Putin apparently decided that he did not want the oligarchs, including Berezovsky, to play the political role they had played in the past. A key to curbing their power was to gain control over the media. On May 11, 2000, just four days after Putin’s inauguration, security police, wearing black masks and carrying guns, raided the Moscow offices of Media-Most, Russia’s largest private media empire, which included the influential NTV; radio stations; a newspaper, Segodnia; and numerous other publications. The raid appeared to be in retaliation for the media group’s criticism of Putin and his associates, as well as of the war in Chechnya, in the months leading up to the election. NTV had also aroused the ire of the Kremlin by conducting its own independent investigation of the 1999 apartment bombings. And Putin was thought to have resented being lampooned on NTV’s popular satirical puppet show.5
Vladimir Gusinsky, president and founder of Media-Most (and a close friend of Berezovsky), expressed his dismay about the raid: “It is simply a pity that just a few days after the new president of Russia took office—the president on whom many people pin hope for a rebirth of the country—it looks like everything is going backwards, the same masks, the same special services, the same witch hunting.”6 Unfortunately for Gusinsky, the raid was only the beginning of a nightmare. On June 13, he was arrested on charges of theft of state funds in a privatization deal and incarcerated in the notorious Butyrka Prison. After an international outcry, Gusinsky was released and placed under house arrest. In July, he was confronted with a choice by Russian authorities: either sell all his media assets, or face further criminal charges. He agreed to sell his holdings and left Russia immediately for Spain, never again to return. (Subsequent requests by the Russian government for Gusinsky’s extradition were denied by Spain.)
Meanwhile, Berezovsky was getting into his own trouble with the new Russian president. As part of a drive to tighten control over Russia’s eighty-nine provinces and ethnic republics, Putin introduced legislation in May 2000, creating seven new supra-federal districts. The heads of the districts, appointed by Putin directly and drawn mainly from the police, military, and security services, were to have sweeping powers over Russia’s regions. On May 31, Berezovsky, then a Duma deputy, published a lengthy open letter to Putin in Kommersant protesting the legislation. Berezovsky said that the project, if implemented, would represent a threat to Russia’s territorial integrity and democracy. In his words:
The directive that was issued and the package of federal laws are intended to strengthen vertical power. However, they are an attempt to solve the real problem by inadequate methods. The proposed changes are anti-democratic, in that if adopted, they violate the system of the balance of internal power necessary for the functioning of any democratic state and market economy, greatly expand the power of the executive over the legislature, and restrict the participation of citizens in a representative government.7
He ended by saying: “Vladimir Vladimirovich, your personal experience in St. Petersburg and Moscow, I am sure, has shown that democracy itself is imperfect, and each step toward the democratic development of society requires huge effort, because in contrast to dictates, you are obliged to convince (and not order) millions of citizens that you are right. Please do not hurry in deciding questions of historical proportions for our vast, seriously flawed country.”8
This was a direct challenge to Putin and his plan to establish strong centralized political power, bypassing democratic procedures. More was to come. On August 12, 2000, the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk sank during naval exercises in the Barents Sea. It took the Russian navy more than sixteen hours to locate the vessel, and divers spent the next four days trying to open the escape hatch. It was not until the fifth day that Putin authorized the navy to accept help from the Norwegians and British, long after the 118 crew members had perished. Initially, Russian naval commanders tried to blame the disaster on a collision with a NATO submarine. But in fact two explosions on board had caused the submarine to sink.
As the rescue efforts were going on, Putin was shown on television enjoying himself at a holiday villa on the Black Sea. He did not respond publicly until ten days after the sinking, when he met with families of the deceased sailors near a naval base on the Barents Sea. He was not well received. By all accounts, the meeting was hostile and contentious, with Putin very much on the defensive. In short, the Kursk affair was a public relations disaster for the Russian president, and his approval ratings plummeted.9
Putin was quick to blame independent Russian media for the crisis. During his meeting with the families on August 22, he came close to losing his composure when talking about the reporting on the Kursk: “They are liars. The television has people who have been destroying the state for ten years. They have been thieving money and buying up absolutely everything.… Now they are trying to discredit the country so that the army gets even worse.” In an interview on government television the next night, Putin lashed out again, with obvious reference to Gusinsky and Berezovsky: “They’d better sell their villas on the Mediterranean coast of France or Spain. Then they might have to explain why all this property is registered in false names under front law firms. Perhaps we would ask them where they got the money.”10
Open Conflict Between Putin and Berezovsky
Berezovsky did not hold back. On September 2, ORT (where Berezovsky was a major shareholder) broadcast an hour-long special on the Kursk, hosted by Sergei Dorenko, a prominent journalist known for his in-depth reporting. (He was dubbed by Alex Goldfarb “the Peter Jennings of Russian television.”) The program was an unflinching indictment of Putin and the Russian military establishment, and included footage of Putin’s disastrous meeting with families of the victims. Dorenko ended by saying “The story of the Kursk is not over. The main conclusion is that the government does not respect any of us, and so it lies. And the important thing is that the government treats us like this because we all allow it to.”11 (Dorenko was later fired from ORT and arrested on bogus charges of hooliganism.)
In October 2000, Putin gave an interview to the French newspaper Le Figaro, in which he suggested that media oligarchs were blackmailing him. He addressed a warning specifically to Berezovsky and Gusinsky: “The state has a cudgel in its hands that you use to hit just once, but on the head. We haven’t used this cudgel yet. We’ve just brandished it.… [But] the day we get really angry, we won’t hesitate to use it.”12 Then on November 1, Russian prosecutors ordered Berezovsky, who was residing at his villa in Cap d’Antibes, France, to return to Moscow for questioning in a fraud case involving Aeroflot. Berezovsky refused to comply. Instead, he responded by publishing a long statement in Kommersant:
Today I took a difficult decision—not to return to Russia for questioning. I decided on this step due to the ever-increasing pressure put on me by the regime and President Putin personally. In essence, I was forced to choose—become a political prisoner or a political emigrant. The so-called Aeroflot case was thought up by [former prime minister Evgenii] Primakov and now revived by Putin, who is unhappy with my criticism of his politics. Putin, as a presidential candidate, was absolutely not bothered when the profits of Swiss companies work
ing with Aeroflot were used to finance the “Unity” bloc and [his] presidential campaign. But Putin, as president, shamelessly has arranged to transfer me from a witness to a defendant in the Aeroflot case, and then threatens me with a blow on the head just because ORT told the truth about the tragedy of the submarine Kursk.… The president is trying to establish control over the major media outlets in order to establish a regime of personal power. And finally he has put the country at the mercy of the secret services and officials who stifle the freedom and initiative needed for Russia to progress.… I am certain that, if Putin continues his politics that are destructive for the country, his regime will not last until the end of his first constitutional term.13
According to Alex Goldfarb, who visited Berezovsky at his French villa several days after the oligarch received the Russian prosecutor’s summons, Berezovsky had fully intended to fly back to Russia to appear in court and would have done so if it had not been for Goldfarb’s stepping in: “Boris, in a bout of apparent madness, wanted to go. His plane was waiting at the airport. I literally pulled him out of his car.”14 As Goldfarb learned, the main reason Berezovsky had intended to go to the court hearings was because his loyal manager of Aeroflot, Nikolai Glushkov, was a hostage of Russian authorities. Berezovsky thought that if he did not answer the summons, it would make things worse for Glushkov.
In fact, Glushkov was arrested three weeks later. The price of his release, it turned out, was Berezovsky relinquishing his 49 percent ownership of ORT. Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who owned a villa not far from Berezovsky, conveyed a message from Putin: if Berezovsky sold his ORT shares to Abramovich for $175 million (a ridiculously low price), Glushkov would be a free man. Berezovsky had no choice but to agree to the deal. But, as it turned out, Glushkov remained in prison anyway.15
Berezovsky Pursues His Agenda
Berezovsky moved to London and applied for asylum in October 2001. In the meantime, he had already launched an important initiative. His new Berezovsky Foundation (later called the International Foundation for Civil Liberties, or IFCL) was formed with the intention of creating a grassroots network of opposition to the Kremlin. The first grant, three million dollars, was given to Elena Bonner, the widow of the famous Soviet dissident and physicist Andrei Sakharov, as an endowment for the Sakharov Museum and Civic Center in Moscow. As Goldfarb, who was put in charge of the foundation, put it: “The grant to the Sakharov Center was meant to underscore the continuity of Soviet oppression under Putin and the permanence of dissidents’ resistance.”16
According to Goldfarb: “By May 2001, the IFCL had awarded 160 more grants to NGOs across Russia, which collectively represented, Boris hoped, ‘crystallization centers,’ for protest movements: antiwar groups like Soldiers’ Mothers, supporters of prisoners’ rights, the Greens, defenders of ethnic minorities, and local human-rights watchdogs.”17 And then of course there was the formation of a new political party, Liberal Russia, by Berezovsky and Sergei Iushenkov, announced in May 2001. As mentioned earlier, the party’s platform was anti-Putin and included as its central purpose revealing the truth about the 1999 apartment bombings.
Needless to say, Berezovsky’s initiatives did not sit well with the Kremlin. In September 2001, the Procurator-General of Russia indicted Berezovsky in absentia on three counts: complicity in fraud, failure to return currency proceeds from abroad, and money laundering. He was put on the Russian federal wanted list. In August 2002, Russian authorities opened a criminal investigation of Berezovsky, along with his two former partners, Badri Patarkatsishvili and Iulii Dubov, for the theft of 2,323 cars when the three owned the car dealership LogoVAZ in 1994 and 1995. The funds they received from the sale of these cars were allegedly used for the purchase of homes in the Moscow region, totaling more than seven million rubles in value, as well as shares in media outlets.18
And so it went. In October 2002, Berezovsky was charged by Russian authorities with large-scale embezzlement and put on the international wanted list, along with Dubov, who was also in London, and Patarkatsishvili, who was residing in Georgia. The next month, Russian prosecutors sent British authorities a formal request for the extradition of Berezovsky and Dubov. After subsequent hearings on the matter, Berezovsky and Dubov were granted political asylum in Great Britain in September 2003, and Russian requests for their extradition were officially refused.19
As noted, Berezovsky was an enthusiastic supporter and financier of Litvinenko’s ventures, including his book Blowing Up Russia, which blamed Putin and the FSB for the 1999 bombings in Russia. “I’d give a lot to see Volodya’s [Putin’s] face when he reads it,” the oligarch told Goldfarb.20 One wonders, however, if Berezovsky did not feel some culpability for these attacks, given his key role in catapulting Putin to the Russian presidency. As a member of the “family” that surrounded Yeltsin and therefore privy to many of the Kremlin’s darkest secrets, did he not suspect right away that Putin and the FSB were behind the attacks, while independent Russian journalists were voicing these suspicions left and right?
Whatever his past, after he left Russia, Berezovsky did everything in his power to make up for his sins. In January 2006, he told a correspondent for AFP that he was planning a coup against Putin: “President Putin violates the constitution and today any violent action against him would be justified. This concerns a forcible seizure of power, and that is what I am working on. The last year and a half we have been preparing to take power in Russia by force.”21 Berezovsky said that the operation would be financed by him personally, with funds that in the past five years had grown into billions of dollars. He voiced similar views on Ekho Moskvy Radio the same day, prompting a warning from British Foreign Minister Jack Straw that he could lose his refugee status if he continued to make such incendiary statements.22
Berezovsky’s support for the Orange Revolution in Ukraine was doubtless another issue that rankled the Kremlin. Reportedly he transferred fifteen million dollars to the campaign of Viktor Yushchenko, who won a victory over Kremlin-backed Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk in December 2004. Berezovsky apparently hoped that a victory for the Orange Revolution would trigger a similar revolution in Russia and bring the Putin regime down. Of course, in the end the Orange Revolution failed to meet expectations. Berezovsky did not live to witness the second people’s revolution in Ukraine, in December 2013 and January 2014, which led to the ouster of Viktor Yanukovich, a successor to Yushchenko.
In June 2007, Berezovsky was told by Scotland Yard that they had arrested a Russian man on charges of conspiracy to commit murder and that he was the intended victim. British authorities sent the man back to Russia. At a press conference, Berezovsky stated: “I think the same people behind this plot were behind the plot against Alexander Litvinenko. Not only people in general but Putin personally.”23 The Kremlin did not let up on Berezovsky. By the end of January 2010, Russian authorities had initiated a total of twelve criminal cases against Berezovsky—for fraud, embezzlement, money-laundering, and a host of other charges.24
The Death of Patarkatsishvili
Everyone knew him as Badri, and he was by all accounts a flamboyant character. Born and raised in Georgia, Badri started accumulating his substantial wealth when he hooked up with Berezovsky and LogoVAZ in the mid-nineties, and later became a senior executive at ORT. Like Berezovsky, Badri was under constant fire from Russian prosecutors for various alleged financial crimes, and he finally left Russia to settle back in Georgia in 2001. He balanced his time between Georgia, where his major business interests were, and Britain, where he maintained a lavish home in the London suburbs. As mentioned earlier, he relied on the services of Litvinenko’s accused killer, Lugovoy, for security when in Georgia. Badri and Berezovsky were the closest of friends, in addition to their business partnerships, so when Badri died suddenly on February 12, 2008 at his home outside London, it must have been a terrible blow for Berezovsky.
Badri was only fifty-three years old and had not complained of health problems. His death was
from a reported heart attack, but of course there was the usual speculation. He was, after all, on Putin’s black list, and only a week earlier a conversation Badri had had with a Georgian official about Putin had been leaked to the Russian press.25 In this conversation, Badri recalled how down and out Putin had been when his mentor Sobchak lost the mayoral election in St. Petersburg in 1996. He said that Putin wore the “same dirty green suit every day.” Putin had provided Badri with a krysha for his business activities in St. Petersburg and urgently needed Badri’s help in return to get him a sinecure in Moscow. According to Badri, “Putin called me twice a day and pleaded, saying I don’t want to stay here.”
Badri said that he managed to get Putin a job as the assistant to Pavel Borodin, the Kremlin’s property manager, and later, according to Badri, Putin became prime minister, and Yeltsin’s designated successor, partly because of his efforts, along with those of Berezovsky. Badri then talked in the conversation about how badly Putin had handled the Kursk submarine affair, which was doubtless something Putin did not want to be reminded of. This leaked transcript, shortly before the March 2008 presidential elections, with Putin’s designated candidate, Dmitri Medvedev, set to replace him, must have infuriated Putin. Although there was no evidence of foul play in Badri’s death, Putin was probably gratified to have him out of the picture.
Berezovsky versus Abramovich
In October 2011, Roman Abramovich, forty-six years old and the third-wealthiest man in the United Kingdom, with a fortune estimated at over twelve billion dollars and the world’s largest yacht, entered a London courtroom. He was the defendant in a civil suit filed by Berezovsky. As the owner of the Chelsea football club since 2003, Abramovich was spending most of his time in Britain, although his cordial relations with Putin meant that, unlike Berezovsky, he was always welcome in Moscow.
