Death of a Dissident (19 page)

Grozny, January 27, 1997: Voters cram the polling stations across Chechnya in what European Union observers call “legitimate, democratic, and free” presidential elections. Fifty-five-year-old former Soviet army officer Aslan Maskhadov, who coordinated military operations against Russia during the war, wins office with an overwhelming majority of 69 percent. The guerrilla leader Shamil Basayev, who had led a terrorist attack on Budyonnovsk, finishes a
distant second with 16 percent of the vote. Acting president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev finishes third, with 15 percent
.

One day in late April 1997, Boris Berezovsky summoned me to The Club. “Can you pretend to be a CIA agent?”

“First of all, it is a criminal offense to impersonate a federal officer,” I said, with a smile. “Second, knowing you, I hope there will be no gunfire.”

“You are a Soros representative, aren’t you?” Boris beamed, and added, “Do you have a business card? That’s impressive enough. Everyone in Russia thinks the Soros Foundation is a CIA front. Let us go to my dacha. I need you to project American authority. Your job is just to bless us with your presence.”

At the dacha I found myself at a dinner for four: Boris, myself, NSC Secretary Rybkin, and Movladi Udugov, the Chechen deputy prime minister, the leader of the Islamist wing in Maskhadov’s government. The matter at hand was the wording of the peace treaty that would formally end the war in Chechnya, which was scheduled for signing next month.

It was an improbable scene: Rybkin projected the confidence of a former Soviet apparatchik. Boris sipped his Chateau Latour. Udugov interrupted the discussion for an evening prayer. I simply tried to look important, personifying the clout of the United States as best I could.

The treaty was essentially completed. It began with half a page of lofty phrases declaring reconciliation between the two nations to end their “centuries-long” enmity. What was missing was a legal frame of reference. Rybkin and Boris wanted the agreement to be explicitly derived from the Russian Constitution. Udugov wanted to root it in international law.

They argued for nearly three hours. In the end a compromise was reached as each side added a legal reference of its choosing. In the final version the references were dropped, so the evening’s exercise was in vain. Yet I learned something valuable about the process. Both sides were more cagey with their own intransigent members than with each other.

On April 28, 1997, a bomb exploded shortly before 7 p.m. at the railway station in the southern resort city of Pyatigorsk, Russia, killing two and injuring more than forty people. The Chechen peace accord was at risk again. President Yeltsin, vacationing 150 miles away on the Black Sea, immediately imposed tight security measures on the whole southern region of Russia.

Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov blamed Chechen terrorists, announcing that two Chechen women had been arrested in Pyatigorsk who had confessed to planting the bomb. He claimed that the women were known terrorists who had taken part in the hostage incident in Pervomaiskoye in January 1996. He also disclosed that Chechens had attacked a Russian police station at the Dagestan border the previous night.

“Now everyone can see that the party of war was not in Moscow but in Grozny,” Kulikov fumed on TV.

Two days later, however, as Boris and Rybkin flew to Grozny, the Chechens announced that one of the two women named by Kulikov was alive and well and quietly living in that city. The other had been killed a year earlier. Journalists discovered that their stand-ins, the two women who had “confessed” in Pyatigorsk, had been arrested before the bombing, not afterward. Zakayev later said, “We were sure that this was some sort of provocation.”

The Chechens promptly gave their evidence to Rybkin and Boris when they landed. Rybkin immediately went on the air to attack Kulikov, using the ever-ready ORT crew that Boris brought along.

“Many people both in Chechnya and in Russia want to destroy the fragile peace, but we will put an end to these attempts … regardless of how high a post they occupy or what kind of stars they wear on their shoulder straps,” he said in a live interview from the steps of his aircraft.

“And then something really ugly happened,” recalled Zakayev, still fuming with rage at the memory. “This idiot, Salman Raduyev, claimed responsibility for the railway bombing.” Raduyev was a guerrilla leader who still commanded a militia and was looking for
ways to boost his credibility. He announced that the bombing was his way of marking the anniversary of President Dudayev’s assassination. “We knew for a fact that he had nothing to do with it,” Zakayev said. “Maskhadov was enraged. He ordered him arrested for making false statements. But that was how our own Party of War played off theirs. And it was the first time that I realized that the Russians were prepared to stage terror attacks against their own people so as to blame them on us.”

The Moscow apartment bombings were just two years away.

The Kremlin, 12 May 1997

Peace Treaty and Principles of Interrelations between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria

The esteemed parties to the agreement, desiring to end their centuries-long antagonism and striving to establish firm, equal and mutually beneficial relations, hereby agree:

1. To reject forever the use of force or threat of force in resolving all matters of dispute.

2. To develop their relations on generally recognized principles and norms of international law. In doing so, the sides shall interact on the basis of specific concrete agreements.

3. This treaty shall serve as the basis for concluding further agreements and accords on the full range of relations.

4. This treaty is written in two copies and both have equal legal power.

5. This treaty is active from the day of signing.

Boris Yeltsin

Aslan Maskhadov

Chechnya-Dagestan border, June 6, 1997: Four Russian journalists held by kidnappers are released and flown home to Moscow on Boris Berezovsky’s plane. Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov applauds the event. His recent decree imposes the death penalty for kidnappings and launches a special police operation to free any captives still held for ransom by warlords. “Maskhadov’s success will bolster his influence,” says Ivan Rybkin, the head of the Russian National Security Council. “But not everyone in Grozny and Moscow will clap their hands.”

Moscow, summer 1997

The two wars with Chechnya were really a single conflict, with a two-and-a-half-year hiatus in the middle. During that pause, events in Moscow spun out of control for Sasha, as he became entangled in the struggle between FSB top brass and Boris’s Kremlin ring. In the meantime, a bitter feud developed among the members of the Davos Pact, undermining the stability of Yeltsin’s government. George Soros and I found ourselves sympathizing with the opposing sides of the new divide. I should have seen the split coming when Boris told me in early June that he was trying to take control of Gazprom, the world’s largest producer of natural gas, and he once again needed Soros’s help.

A board meeting of Gazprom was scheduled for June 28. Boris explained that if George backed him with a major investment this would make it possible for him to become Gazprom’s chairman. He had already been assured support from Prime Minister Chernomyrdin. Once in charge, Boris planned to clean up Gazprom operations, modernize its management, and make it a transparent, Western-style company. Future demand for gas in Europe was expected to skyrocket, making Gazprom one of the most powerful companies in the world.

George was then in Budapest, visiting the European headquarters of his foundation. He was interested, he said on the phone. He would see Boris.

We flew to Budapest on the morning of Saturday, June 7, in Boris’s Gulfstream jet, which was like a second home to him. I often wondered how he managed to handle his government responsibilities on top of his business deals without showing any signs of fatigue. In the days preceding the Budapest trip he had flown to the Hague, where he took part in a roundtable on Russia-Chechnya relations; to Kiev, to negotiate the division of the Soviet Black Sea fleet with Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma; to Baku, to discuss the pipeline that would bring Caspian oil to the Russian Black Sea export terminals; and to Dagestan, to pick up the freed Russian journalists.

In the private sector, his investment fund had just signed a deal with General Motors to build Opel cars in northwestern Russia; a team of his managers at Aeroflot was preparing the Russian national airline for privatization; and he had just fought off an attempt by Vladimir Potanin, his fellow oligarch from the Davos Pact, to outbid him in the final auction for 51 percent of Sibneft, the oil company, which Boris held in trust since the days of the loans-for-shares scheme.

Potanin’s bid came as a total surprise to Boris. Although it was disqualified on a technicality, it pointed to trouble brewing in the coalition that brought Yeltsin to power one year before. Back in 1995, when Chubais carved up government assets in the loans-for-shares policy and distributed them among a small group of bankers, the agreement among all of them was that those deals could not be revised. In fact, the loans-for-shares policy was Potanin’s brainchild, and he was its biggest beneficiary: his Unexim Bank had grabbed Norilsk Nickel,
the largest producer of nonferrous metals in Russia, and Sidanko, the oil company, which was even larger than Boris’s Sibneft.

“Potanin and Chubais are building a power base for Chubais’s presidential campaign in 2000,” said Boris as we flew to see Soros.

Potanin was the oligarch closest to Chubais. After the 1996 elections, he became first deputy prime minister for economics. His Unexim Bank received the most lucrative state contracts, including the accounts of the Federal Customs Service. In March 1997 Yeltsin reshuffled his administration, launching what has been dubbed the government of “young reformers.” Chubais took Potanin’s place as the economic supremo in the cabinet. To beef him up, a new face, not associated with the privatization scandals, was brought in: the thirty-six-year-old Boris Nemtsov. Chubais’s previous job as Kremlin chief of staff went to Valentin Yumashev, the journalist friend of Yeltsin’s daughter.