Death of a Dissident (11 page)

The twists and turns of Goose’s rivalry with Berezovsky had been the talk of Moscow for months. At one point, Goose even had to flee the city for London for five months, after Boris’s Kremlin pal, General Korzhakov, sent some goons to harass him in what became known as the Most-Bank raid.

On that memorable day in December 1994, Goose’s motorcade left his country dacha as usual. In the lead was a fast car with watchers scanning both sides of the road. Then came Goose’s armored Mercedes, followed by an SUV swaying from side to side to make sure that no one attempted to pass, and finally a windowless van carrying a team of former paratroopers led by a fierce, egg-headed gorilla nicknamed Cyclops.

Suddenly, word came through the guards’ earphones: “We have company.” Someone was tailing the convoy. Gusinsky’s driver floored the gas pedal and they screeched up to the Most-Bank headquarters, located in one of the city’s tallest buildings, which also housed City Hall. It was formerly the headquarters of Comecon, the economic command center of the Soviet bloc. Shielded by bodyguards, Goose quickly disappeared inside and rushed straight into the safety of the mayor’s office.

Moments later his pursuers arrived, about thirty strong, in flak jackets and balaclavas, armed with automatic weapons and grenade
launchers. For the next two hours, in horrified disbelief, Goose watched from the mayor’s window. The attackers, who evidently belonged to a branch of the secret service, disarmed his men and put them facedown in the snow, where they remained for nearly two hours, in full view of a crowd of spectators and TV cameras. The city police, called to the scene, exchanged a few words with the attackers and then quietly drove away. So did an FSB squad, alerted by Most-Bank staff, who thought a robbery was in progress.

Eventually the assailants left, as mysteriously as they appeared, without identifying themselves or explaining the reasons for the raid. The next morning Goose took his family to London and the safety of the Park Lane Hotel, where he remained for several months. The managers of his vast business empire shuttled back and forth from Moscow to London.

The mystery of the Most-Bank raid cleared up a few days later when Korzhakov confessed. His people had roughed up Goose’s men, ostensibly as part of a search for unlicensed weapons. Korzhakov claimed he was just being cautious. Goose’s convoy was taking the same route as the president on his way to the Kremlin, so he couldn’t be too careful. But the general also suggested that the raid was partly a matter of personal pleasure. “Hunting geese is among my favorite hobbies,” Korzhakov gleefully told the Russian weekly
Argumenty i Facti
on January 18, 1995. Many felt it was his revenge for NTV’s criticism of the war in Chechnya, launched in December, and for mocking him as a hopelessly dumb puppet on the Kukly show.

At the time, many believed that the Most-Bank raid was encouraged by Berezovsky. After all, he was friendly with Korzhakov. Four months later, when Berezovsky was nearly taken away by Moscow police in the aftermath of Listyev’s murder on March 1, 1995—and saved by Sasha Litvinenko—the same logic suggested that it was the mayor’s revenge for the Most-Bank raid.

Now, in February 1996, Berezovsky and Goose were direct competitors in network television, and yet Berezovsky had the nerve to call and invite Goose for a drink. But Goose thought that he knew what it was all about. The way things were going, he would dine
with the devil himself if he could get some guidance on how to prevent the catastrophe looming in Russia’s presidential elections.

Just a few months earlier, the privatization dream machine had ground to a halt. For months, lucky bankers had been waking up to discover that they were now industrialists. But in December, without explanation, the government canceled three loans-for-shares auctions in the aviation industry, including a deal for KB Sukhoy, the producer of the famous fighter jets. Rumors flew that the stoppage was the work of Defense Minister Pavel Grachev, one of the Kremlin’s leading hawks.

Chubais’s standing grew more and more shaky. As the June elections loomed in everyone’s mind, he was unquestionably becoming Yeltsin’s main liability. Communist propaganda made him Public Enemy No. 1. The chant “Retire Yeltsin, Jail Chubais!” reverberated at rallies. His enemies ruthlessly exploited Chubais’s non-Russian surname and his peculiar looks, especially his red hair. In Russian folk tradition, a redhead is someone to watch out for, a devious and suspicious character. In support of this view, an ancient edict of Czar Peter the Great prohibiting redheads from giving legal testimony was handily discovered in the archives and trumpeted on the airwaves.

By early January, a split had developed in Yeltsin’s inner circle. An anti-Chubais faction, headed by Korzhakov, began whispering into the president’s ear that it was about time he sacrificed “the privatizer” to raise his popularity at least a little bit.

Korzhakov’s group included Sasha’s top boss, FSB director Mikhail Barsukov, and First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets, a man whom Korzhakov hoped one day to install in the president’s office. The liberals who supported Chubais included Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, Chief of Staff Sergei Filatov, and the journalist Valentin Yumashev, whose friendship with Yeltsin’s daughter would eventually deepen into marriage and who would become a major Kremlin power broker in his own right. Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, the former Soviet gas and oil chief, maintained strict neutrality, as did Boris Berezovsky. An important trump card for
Chubais was his favor with the West, from the Clinton administration, to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to the flock of Harvard University advisers who were helping him build such capitalist institutions as a stock market and a tax service. But that card was, if anything, a liability in the public’s mind.

On January 17, 1996, Yeltsin opened his election campaign with a bombshell. He fired Chubais and several liberal members of his Cabinet, claiming, “Chubais is to blame for everything.” The phrase thundered throughout Russia. It was a total defeat for the reformers. To manage the economic portfolio in place of Chubais, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Kadannikov, the director of the Volga Automobile Factory, the plant that Boris had been trying to privatize at the time of his attempted assassination. Pro-Western Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev was replaced with an arch-hawk, the foreign intelligence chief Evgeny Primakov. The liberal Chief of Staff Filatov resigned, and another hardliner, Nikolai Yegorov, was put in his place.

In one fell swoop, Yeltsin appointed Chubais’s nemesis, First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets, to chair his reelection committee, with the two generals as his deputies: the FSO’s Korzhakov and the FSB’s Barsukov. At the time, according to opinion polls, the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, was in the lead, with 24 percent of likely voters; Grigory Yavlinsky, the socialist democrat friend of Soros, stood at 11 percent; the fascist Vladimir Zhirinovsky had 7 percent; the maverick paratrooper Gen. Alexander Lebed had 6 percent; and Yeltsin had a meager 5 percent, just above the margin of error. Half of those surveyed remained undecided.

When Berezovsky arrived in Davos on February 1 he discovered that Gennady Zyuganov, the potential future Communist president of Russia, was one of its main attractions. Western CEOs “flew to him like flies to honey,” in his words. Meanwhile, Chubais, unemployed, roamed the Swiss ski resort “like a lonely ghost.” He was old news.

Zyuganov, a husky, balding apparatchik of fifty-one, did his best to portray himself as a Western-style social democrat.

“We want a mixed economy,” he said in William Safire’s column
in
The New York Times
. “Communism means collegiality, sustainable development, spiritual values, major investment in the human being.”

“I was shocked to see all these Westerners, including Soros, snowed by Zyuganov,” Boris recalled. “They didn’t get that Zyuganov was nothing but a front for the old Central Committee! They would start jailing people immediately. How could the West not understand this?”

But the West, by all accounts, had already written Yeltsin off. According to a CIA analysis leaked to the press, the Russian president was an alcoholic who had suffered four heart attacks and would lose the ballot if he managed to live that long. The choice in Russia was between the Communists and a coalition of the military and secret services.

“Your game is over,” Soros told Boris when they met in Davos for breakfast. “My advice to you is to take your family, sell what you still can, and get out of the country before it is too late.”

But Boris was stubborn and adventurous. The conversation with George had the opposite of its intended effect: it only added to his urgent desire to win at all costs. He picked up the phone and called Goose.

Goose was an essential ally for Yeltsin on two accounts. First, his pal, Mayor Luzhkov, a stocky, bald man in a proletarian cap with the demeanor of Mussolini, was in control of Moscow, where 10 percent of the electorate lived. Without Luzhkov, no victory at the city’s polls was possible. Second, Gusinsky’s NTV was particularly popular among Russia’s educated class, which made up about 15 percent of the vote.

When Boris sat down with Goose for a drink, he went straight to the point: “Volodya, do you know what the Communists will do when they get to power? They will put you in jail for being a rich Jew.”

Goose agreed. Boris then launched into his pitch. The situation was salvageable only if they joined forces. Goose had to discard Yavlinsky and get Mayor Luzhkov to endorse Yeltsin’s candidacy.
Boris even wanted to bring Chubais back into the game. Boris never did anything halfway.

Gusinsky had good reasons to refuse. He had a number of long-standing grudges against the Kremlin crowd, from Korzhakov’s thugs holding his men facedown in the snow to Chubais cutting his bank out of the loans-for-shares bonanza. As for the mayor, it would be quite a challenge to make him work with Chubais: they were in perpetual conflict over privatizing Moscow-based enterprises, arguing whether they were municipal or federal.

“If the Communists come to power …,” Boris started again, but Goose interrupted him by reciting Boris’s own arguments: the Communists aren’t going to care whether the privatizations were for Moscow or for the Kremlin, they would rescind them all; Yavlinsky was a nonstarter—being a Jew, he would never get more than 12 percent of the vote. By default Yeltsin appeared to be the lesser of all evils. Goose was already ready to say yes.

But, Goose added, Yeltsin’s secret services and the military were no less a threat than the Communists. And the war in Chechnya should be stopped at any cost. Boris could not have agreed more. They shook hands on a deal. Common enemies have united stranger bedfellows, but nobody in Moscow predicted this pairing.

Boris began calling fellow Davos oligarchs who had fallen into various states of dejection, inviting them for a strategy meeting. Chubais was invited, too. Upon seeing the archenemies Berezovsky and Gusinsky chatting like old friends, a spark was lit, and the “Davos group” was born. Boris was authorized to seek a meeting with the president for the group.

To get to the president over the head of Korzhakov, Boris used his connection with Tanya-Valya, as the inseparable duo of Tatyana, the president’s daughter, and Valentin Yumashev, the journalist, was known. He had no doubt that the all-powerful FSO director would learn of his role, and their relationship would be finished. Korzhakov blacklisted anybody who bypassed him to see the president, even on a completely innocent errand. And this was no innocent errand: Boris was plotting to reverse Korzhakov’s coup.