Death of a Dissident (29 page)

“I have not been involved in business for years now, Evgeny Maksimovich. But I would like to be your assistant,” said Boris impishly.

The prime minister did not get his sense of humor. He was at a loss. “And what would the Communists say?”

“Just kidding, Evgeny Maksimovich,” said Berezovsky, and he left the room.

The next day Boris went to see Putin at his FSB office. He shivered involuntarily as the heavy iron gates closed behind his Mercedes. The car edged into the inner courtyard of the tetragonal Lubyanka building. In the old days, many thousands had passed through this gate and never returned.

A nondescript fellow—a Putin look-alike—ushered him into the elevator and to the brand new director’s study on the third floor. Putin’s office was renovated to fit his ascetic taste: light wood, strictly functional, apparently influenced by his East German years. The old executive office, where such past masters of the KGB as Beria and Andropov had plotted the cold war, had been converted into an Agency shrine, by the new director’s orders.

Putin’s small frame looked even smaller behind his huge desk, on which stood a bronze statuette of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police. He put his finger to his lips to signal silence and gestured to Boris to follow him through the back door. They passed through a private dining room and exited through another tiny passageway.

Boris looked around. They were in a small windowless anteroom in front of an elevator door, apparently a back exit from the office to the executive elevator.

“This is the safest place to talk,” Putin said.

There were two items on Boris’s agenda: Primakov and Litvinenko.

It is a peculiar quality of Russian politics that the principal of the Kremlin, be it a tsar, a general secretary, or a president, is endowed with a mystical quality of
vlast
, or “right of power,” which instills in the populace a measure of instinctive humility and respect. This regal ingredient of supreme authority links all historical rulers in Russia into a single virtual dynasty from the House of Romanoff through Lenin,
Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, down to Gorbachev and Yeltsin. From it flows the concept of heir apparent. In a practical sense, as Putin and Boris—and everyone else—well understood, whomever Yeltsin endorsed as his heir would have an automatic electoral advantage, anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the vote. It made no difference that Yeltsin himself had negligible approval ratings; the mystique of being the heir to
vlast
worked quite independently from the personality of the incumbent.

The country was just eight months away from the election year of 2000. Obviously, Primus, a seventy-year-old Soviet relic backed by a cabal of Communists, former apparatchiks, and spies, was not what the country needed as it entered the twenty-first century. He had to go; it had been agreed between him and the president from day one. The question was, who would be his replacement, the heir apparent, the next president of Russia?

As they stood in the elevator anteroom in the old KGB building, Boris and Putin understood the responsibility bestowed on them by history. Their joint opinion would probably carry “the family,” which in turn would weigh with the president.

Notwithstanding the electoral advantage of the president’s endorsement, the candidate should have one essential quality: he should be able to beat the Communist-backed candidate, possibly Primus himself, who had gained popularity in recent weeks. But as Boris and Putin reviewed the list of possible candidates, the landscape was deserted. After the previous year’s scandals and crises, reformers of Chubais’s school, such as Nemtsov and Kiriyenko, were unelectable. The same was true for Chernomyrdin, with his loser image. Lebed was electable, but he would become something of a military dictator. There were only two people of national standing who seemed minimally acceptable: Sergei Stepashin, minister of the interior, and Nikolai Aksionenko, minister of transportation. Each had his strengths and his weaknesses. Neither was a shoo-in.

“Volodya, what about you?” Boris suddenly asked.

“What about me?” Putin did not understand.

“Could you be president?”

“Me? No, I am not the type. This is not what I want in life.”

“Well, then, what? Do you want to stay here forever?”

“I want …,” he hesitated. “I want to be Berezovsky.”

“No, you don’t really.” Boris laughed.

They dropped the subject.

Boris’s next question was about Sasha.

“Look,” Putin said, “I will be straight with you. You know what I think of Litvinenko. He used you. And he is a traitor. But if you ask, I will try to help. The problem is, it’s not under my control at all. It is all in the hands of Skuratov’s military prosecutors division. Let us first get rid of Skuratov, then we will see what we can do about Litvinenko.”

All of this made sense to Boris. But there was something in Putin’s expression that he did not like.

“And, Boris,” Putin continued, “whatever you think of him, he is not clean. He did some pretty bad things.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Boris. “I know the man.”

“I have seen the evidence.”

There was an awkward pause. How strange, thought Boris. Putin and Sasha are two men in the FSB who do not take bribes, and they hate each other so much.

“He is a traitor,” repeated Putin. “But I will do what I can.”

It was getting late. Putin grabbed the door handle. It turned freely without catching the lock mechanism. “Fuck,” said Putin. “They can’t make locks work, and you want me to run the country. To call the elevator, you need a key. We’re trapped.

“Hey, someone!” he yelled, banging on the wall that separated the anteroom from the main corridor. “This is Putin here! We are locked out!”

They banged for about ten minutes before someone heard and came to their rescue.

In the meantime, in solitary confinement at Lefortovo prison, Sasha was trying to come to grips with his situation.

“Initially, I was in shock,” he later wrote in
The Gang from Lubyanka
. “The first night I did not sleep; I stared at the ceiling. On the day I was arrested, the weather was lousy, snow mixed with rain,
sludge all over. I don’t like this time of the year and by the end of March I live in expectation of the sun. The next day they took me out into a small recreation box, five to six steps across. I looked up—and the sky was blue, with the sun somewhere out there. I was pacing like a beast between those walls. Over me—the iron grid with barbed wire and blue-blue skies. I was in a terrible state: spring had arrived, and I can’t see it. I am here, in this damp, cold box. I got so upset that I asked them to bring me back to my cell.”

Some years later, on a walk through London, Sasha stopped at the inscription on the statue of Oscar Wilde: “We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.”

It instantly brought back his memories of prison. “How very right. That was how I felt. In the gutter looking at the stars.”

On his third day in solitary, he went on a hunger strike. He demanded to see a human rights representative. He was close to hysterical. They gave him a shot to cool him down. Then the warden, an old man who knew him well from the times when Sasha visited these premises as an oper, came to see him.

“Look, son,” he said, “don’t destroy yourself, this is not the end of the world. You will need all your strength. Stop it.”

That fatherly talk and familiar face from his old life calmed him down. He started eating, and he started thinking.

“I tried to sort out why I was there. Should I consider myself guilty or innocent? Formally I was innocent of course, because the charges were all fabricated. But I had seen people who were imprisoned for nothing, because of an error or a setup, and I was not one of them. I was in for what I’d done: the press conference. I did it, it can’t be denied. I’d committed a premeditated press conference. Having a press conference is not a crime. But I cannot say that I did not know that I could go to jail for it. I even discussed it with my wife: would or wouldn’t I be arrested? If you ask around, most people would say, ‘Serves him right, what business had he staging a press conference?’” And so on, endlessly.

It was during these first weeks at Lefortovo that he realized there was a connection between his revolt and his relationship with Marina. Before he met her, his bond with his service and his adherence to its
code of loyalty were absolute. Being disapproved of by his commanders, or disowned by Kontora, was the worst imaginable thing that could happen to him. But not any more. Losing her would be worse.

“You know, Marina changed the title of ownership,” he explained to me later on. “She came and claimed me. Had they put me on a polygraph before I knew her and asked what comes to my mind at the word ‘love,’ I would have said ‘Motherland.’ If they said ‘faithful,’ I would have said ‘My oath.’ If they said ‘obey,’ I would say ‘My orders.’ It wouldn’t have even crossed my mind to think otherwise. Because I belonged to them. Like a child to his parents, whom I had really never had.”

But Marina changed it all in an instant. From the moment he saw her, he belonged to her, and therefore he could not belong to anybody else. It was not like this with Natalia, his first wife. But Marina somehow found the key to the lock even he did not know he had.

“Had I gotten to URPO before her, I would have done whatever I was told, like a robot. But she broke that grip and allowed me to think. Then Boris came along, and he finished the job. Because he explained things. Not like my bosses, who could only bark ‘Because I told you so!’”

Lying with his eyes to the ceiling in Lefortovo, he was consumed by guilt about his two families. He did not have any savings. Hopefully Marina would have the good sense to go to Boris and ask for help. But then, surely, they would find a way to present even that request in a bad light, using some dirty trick, like they did with Natalia, his first wife. They had called Natalia in to Internal Affairs, taken away all records of her child support, and made her sign a statement claiming that Sasha was threatening her.

Back in November, at the peak of the scandal, Putin himself had claimed on TV that Sasha was not paying child support: “The wife of one of the press conference participants appealed to me.”

“Why did you do it?” Sasha yelled at her at the time. “Do you understand that you are endangering yourself? They will knock you off and pin it on me.”

“I didn’t know,” she cried. “I’m a silly woman. They frightened me.”

Such a dirty trick was to be expected from an oper. But for the
FSB director to lower himself to this level! Kovalev or Barsukov would never have done that.