Death of a Dissident (32 page)

As Berezovsky explained to me years later, Putin’s bellicose image was actively promoted by his campaign managers in 1999. It resounded with the mood of the majority of Russians. Their wounded national pride in the aftermath of the cold war, their yearning for a “strong hand” that would bring about order and stability, and their outrage at the disparity in wealth between a few superrich and the impoverished masses—all were reasons to cheer for an ascetic, introverted, steely little man, the underdog who fights and wins against all odds. Putin was a longed-for conduit of national frustrations.

Unlike American pundits, the political class in Moscow was very much aware that Putin was being groomed as Yeltsin’s successor. I remember talking to Masha Slonim, an old friend from my Soviet dissident past who had become a doyenne of Moscow political journalism.

“Tell Boris,” she said, “that he is making a big mistake. Putin is KGB, and you don’t dance with the KGB—they will outdance you. Surely Primus is also KGB. But at least Primus is old. He won’t last long. This one will be with us for a very long time.”

Masha and I belong to a class of people who are automatically biased against the KGB. We are not inclined to grant Kontora members the presumption of innocence.

I did speak of this to Boris, but he told me that he trusted Putin. When they disagreed, Putin was straight with him, for example when he called Sasha Litvinenko a traitor. Putin shared Boris’s politics. Most important, Putin displayed genuine loyalty. Boris gave me an example.

“I told him, ‘Volodya, there is a sure way for you to win the elections.
Put me in jail for the duration of the campaign. It will knock Primus’s feet out from under him. After the elections, you can let me out.’”

“So what was his response?”

“He agreed with my analysis, but was sure that I would find a better way to win.”

A year later, after President Putin had chased Boris out of Russia, I reminded him of this conversation.

“Well, I guess he was saying what I wanted to hear.”

“Looking back, was there anything that you noticed, any sign that the man was pulling the wool over your eyes?” I wondered.

“Well, there was a moment when I had second thoughts about him.”

It was late August 1999. Boris was on his way to his dacha when Putin called and asked him to come see him right away. Boris made a U-turn and went straight to the White House. Putin received him in Primakov’s old study. Everything was much the same, but Boris noted that the bronze statuette of Dzerzhinsky, the KGB founder, which he had seen in Putin’s office at the FSB, was now standing on the prime minister’s desk.

Putin was white with rage.

“Your friend was here. Goose. He threatened me.”

“What with?”

“He said that when Primus becomes president, which is inevitable, all of you will go to jail. Tanya, Valya, you—and I will go too, for covering up for you.”

“Volodya, I don’t know about Tanya-Valya, but I can assure you that the Aeroflot case is nothing but Primus’s grudge …”

“I know, I know,” he interrupted. “Our service was greatly hurt by you guys, wasn’t it? That’s not the point. He threatened me.”

“Well, Goose is a son of a bitch. He was testing you, that’s his style.”

“Nobody threatens me. He will live to regret it. I just wanted you to know.”

Boris left, not really having understood why Putin wanted to see him.

“That was the second time I saw that emotion in him,” Boris recalled
later. “It was the same expression as when he talked about Sasha’s betrayal. This, and also the Dzerzhinsky statuette, made me wonder.”

Boris vacillated for nearly a month. Should he support Yeltsin’s chosen successor? Yeltsin’s premise was that Putin had left the service eight years earlier once and for all and had joined the reformist brotherhood. But was he a true reformer? Or was he fundamentally a KGB man? Perhaps it was not too late to find a different heir apparent? Boris discussed his doubts with Roma Abramovich and asked him to go to St. Petersburg on October 7 to attend Putin’s birthday party. If Kontora still maintained a hold on him, it would surely manifest itself in the spirit of the celebration.

Roma came back reassured.

“You sent me to spy on spies,” he said, “but I found no spies there. Normal crowd, his age, wearing denim, someone playing guitar. No KGB types around whatsoever.”

“What about his wife?” Boris inquired. “Is she recovering?”

Lyudmila Putina was nearly killed in a car crash in St. Petersburg in 1993. She sustained a serious spine injury, requiring neurosurgery and several years of rehabilitation.

“I found her a little stiff still,” reported Roma.

“Any other women?”

“I checked the past five years,” said Roma with a wicked smile. “None whatsoever.”

Elena Tregubova was one of the attractions of the Kremlin in the 1990s. Young, tall, good-looking, and emancipated, she knew how to make her presence felt, and she had no scruples about using her charms to get scoops. She was the Kremlin correspondent for
Kommersant
, Russia’s
Financial Times
. She emanated a certain disdain toward ambitious and politicking Kremlin staffers, labeling them “mutants” in her best-selling tell-all,
Tales of a Kremlin Digger
, published in November 2003. Perhaps it was this aura of mystifying superiority that loosened the lips of her highly placed interlocutors. Time and again, they sought interviews with her, even though she usually treated them harshly.

Tregubova claims credit for introducing Vladimir Putin to the world. Her first interview with him was in May 1997, when he had just moved from the Real Estate Office to the Audit Unit at the Kremlin. At the time she found him a “barely noticeable, boring little gray man … whose eyes were not merely colorless or disengaged—they were simply absent …; [he] seemed to disappear, artfully merging with the colors of his office.”

Apparently she hid those reactions at the time, because Putin granted her an exclusive interview about the role of the secret services in the fight against corruption.

“The FSB, or rather its parent, the KGB, has not been dealing directly with the criminal world,” he lectured. “It has focused on intelligence … [and] therefore remained relatively clean.” The services, he argued, represented the country’s last hope to rein in corrupt officials. “If need be, we will put them in jail.” Tregubova noted that “the most belligerent words he pronounced with a particularly cool movement of his lower lip, a sort of indulgent half-smile of a juvenile delinquent. Obviously, he imagined himself as someone who could, here and now, without even rising from his desk … zap all of Russia’s corrupted politicians and anyone else who would stand in the way of his beloved ‘services.’”

Seventeen months later, in December 1998, when Putin was the FSB chief, Tregubova again interviewed him, now at his office at Lubyanka. Suddenly he asked her out.

“I managed a casual smile, trying to figure out whether he was recruiting me as an agent or making a pass at me as a woman,” she wrote in
Tales
. In the end, the reporter in her won out over the woman, who was “horrified at the very thought.” She accepted.

What followed was an intimate meal in a trendy sushi restaurant, cleared of customers by his security detail, where she tried to act like a reporter while he pressed “inept” advances.

“Lenochka,” he said at one point, “why do you keep talking about politics and only politics? Wouldn’t you rather have a drink?”

Noting that there was no one else in the restaurant, and no agents outside, she asked, “Did you clear the whole block?”

“Come on,” protested Putin. “I just booked a table for the two of
us, that’s all. After all, do I have a right, as a normal man, to have a lunch with an attractive young woman and a talented reporter to boot? Or do you think that as FSB director, this never happens to me?”

“How often does it happen?” she asked teasingly, and immediately regretted it, sensing that he took the question “too personally.”

“Well, not often … not really.”

At that point she felt that she had gone too far, and after declining a thinly veiled invitation to travel together to celebrate New Year’s Eve in St. Petersburg, she backpedaled away from him.

As she wrote in
Tales
, she was amazed at Putin’s ability to adjust to the wavelength of his interlocutor.

“He is a phenomenal ‘reflector’; he copies his counterpart like a mirror, making you believe that he is just like you, a soulmate. Subsequently, I saw this exceptional gift in action during his summits with foreign leaders whom he wanted to win over.” He would mimic their body language. Even in official photographs, “one gets a feeling that instead of, say, the Russian and American Presidents, there are two [George] Bushes sitting, smiling at each other…. He does it so skillfully that his counterpart does not notice.”

The sushi scene sold Tregubova’s book. The book earned her many powerful enemies. One day, as
Tales
was nearing the top of Russia’s best-seller lists, a small bomb exploded in the hallway next to her apartment, denting her door but failing to harm her. Ever since, Tregubova has spent most of her time abroad, and in April 2007, she applied for asylum in the UK.

By the beginning of September Sasha Litvinenko’s case had finally moved through each step of the prosecution process and reached the court. Marina and her lawyer went to see the president of the Moscow district military court, a general.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I am an old man and I promise you that you will get a fair hearing.” He scheduled the trial for the beginning of October and assigned a judge to the case.

The defense immediately moved to change the “restraining measure,” a Russian legal term that resembles a writ of habeas corpus.
Sasha’s lawyer was asking that he be released until the trial; as a first offender he was not dangerous to the public and had no reason to flee.

On September 15, Judge Vladimir Karnaukh considered the request. He looked supremely bored. He read the petition, sifted through the case file for a few moments, made faces as he peeked at random pages of the fat volume, and ruled to approve. Marina could not believe it.

“I was doubly shocked,” she recalled. “After all these months, I was close to desperation, and now I realized that within this monstrous system there could be normal, reasonable people—that, after all, justice was possible. But then I got so angry. It took this apathetic man just a few moments to nix months of our agony as if it was nothing! It looked almost like an accident. He could have ruled otherwise, or somebody else could have released Sasha months earlier. There must be something wrong with the world if people can be thrown in jail and released with such ease, I thought.”

The lawyer interrupted these thoughts. “Come on, let’s not lose any time.” For some reason he looked worried.

They rushed to Lefortovo.

The duty officer took the court order, checked something in his records, left the room apparently to make a phone call, and then returned to say, “Sorry, this document is no good. It does not have a court stamp.”

They rushed back to the court.

“Strange,” said Karnaukh. “They know my signature. Why didn’t they call me?”