Death of a Dissident (36 page)

Whichever theory is correct, “Putin’s reversal” came as a total surprise to Boris.

In mid-April 2000, shortly after Putin’s victory, I stopped in Paris on my way to Moscow. Boris was in town on a long vacation. We had dinner together.

I had not seen much of him during the previous year. He had been busy with his political battles and I had spent much of my time traveling throughout the Siberian Gulag, running my TB project. But I had followed his spectacular successes in the press. He was widely credited with masterminding Putin’s victory. He was ranked the richest man in Russia and labeled the most influential among Putin’s advisers, outranking even Chief of Staff Voloshin. Little did I know that he would soon be in exile, a dissident, and that Sasha Litvinenko would follow in his wake. The postelection calm was deceptive: the year 2000 would prove to be a turning point for all of us, and for Russia itself.

Boris invited me to visit his electoral district of Karachayevo-Cherkessia, where he was planning to develop a huge ski resort on the slopes of Dombai, in the southern section of the Main Caucasus Range.

“We are planning to build a highway from the Sochi Airport and make it the best winter spot in Europe,” he declared.

“I don’t see how people will go there with a war raging a hundred miles away,” I said.

“That’s true,” he agreed. “Volodya has to stop that. Chechnya is the one thing that we disagree about.”

“Volodya can’t stop it,” I said. “He is a war criminal. As soon as the war ends, there will be crowds of human rights monitors all over Chechnya, digging out dead bodies, and he will be in big trouble. He has probably outdone Milosevic by now.”

“You dissidents, you don’t understand politics,” Boris retorted. “Russia is not Serbia. I’ve heard Tony Blair is taking Volodya to tea with the queen this week, isn’t he? And if bad comes to worse, he will find some generals to take the blame.”

“You oligarchs, you don’t understand history,” I replied. “When Volodya goes after you, you will run to the dissidents for help.”

“Volodya will not go after me,” he replied. “He is a team person. And I am part of the same team and we share a mission. For him, going after me would be like going after himself.”

While Boris was taking a long vacation, the power configuration in the Kremlin was undergoing momentous change. With Yeltsin gone, the Tanya-Valya team rapidly lost influence. Alexander Voloshin, who had distanced himself from Boris long before, now controlled the Kremlin. Voloshin was even more of a recluse than Putin. The Kremlin became a castle of introverts. A clique of mysterious KGB types appeared on the scene, brought by Putin from St. Petersburg. Boris was already effectively pushed out from the center of power, although he didn’t realize it.

One afternoon in mid-May I went for a jog in a birch tree forest surrounding the Holiday Inn in a leafy Moscow suburb. My cell phone, strapped to my belt, suddenly rang; Boris was on the phone from France.

“Tell me, in America, can the president fire a governor?”

“No,” I said, “no way. That’s the whole point of the federal system.”

“Have you heard what they are doing? They want to assume the right to fire governors!”

He was referring to the regional reform package proposed by Putin. It was his first major legislation. He called it strengthening “the vertical axis of power.” This was a major reversal of the Yeltsin revolution, which, for the first time in Russian history, had granted the eighty-six provinces the right of self-government.

“I am flying to Moscow tomorrow,” said Boris. “Please get me some background info on federalism. I need to explain that to him.”

By the time he landed in Moscow, I had compiled a short history of democracy and federalism, from the Magna Carta to the Federalist Papers to the desegregation battles of John F. Kennedy.

For the next several days a hastily assembled team drafted a memorandum to Putin in the back room of The Club. Boris’s passionate call for freedom gradually merged with political theory and legalistic arguments. The end result was a six-page document blasting the regional reform for historical, spiritual, economic, legal, and political reasons.

The letter extolled the role of federalism as a safeguard of democracy. It warned that the proposed legislation would “consolidate the powers of the central government, but weaken the feedback” from below, because local authorities would no longer be accountable to the people. It would make the government less, not more efficient. The measures would throw the system back to the old Soviet model.

The memo began, “Dear Volodya.” To set the right tone Boris added two epigraphs. One was from Aristotle:
“Amicus Plato, sed amica veritas”
(Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth). The other was from the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who had been killed in Stalin’s Gulag: “I am lawfully wed to Liberty and will never discard this crown.”

As we were laboring over the final draft of the letter, the evening news carried reports of another high drama unfolding in the shadows of the Kremlin. On May 11 masked police toting machine guns raided the offices of Gusinsky’s Media-MOST, the parent of NTV. Federal prosecutors were investigating Goose’s finances. It appeared that the Kremlin’s threat to destroy NTV for airing the program on Ryazan had not been an idle one.

“Boris, shall we add a section on free speech to the letter?” someone asked.

“No, no, God forbid, let us not mix apples with oranges. That would antagonize Volodya. You see, for him, I am ‘us’ and Goose is ‘them.’ It is important to keep our polemics as an in-house discussion. Let us leave Goose aside.”

Some days later Boris called: “We are going public.” Earlier that day he had had a meeting with Putin. The president read the letter, he said, but his own advisers were of a totally different opinion.

“Volodya, browbeating is not an argument,” Boris said. “Your plan amounts to a major change in the Constitution. This should be explained and discussed not with me, but with the public at large. Instead we hear empty phrases about the ‘vertical axis of power.’ These are not explanations. There should be a national debate and a referendum, like we had in 1993 when we adopted the Constitution.”

“The proposals will be put up for a vote in the Duma.”

“Come on, Volodya, I know how things are in the Duma. It’s
$5,000 per vote. I can go out and start paying $7,000. This would not be a debate on substance.”

“Boris, I don’t understand you. We are
vlast”—
the right of power—“and you are supposed to be one of us. But if you go against us, then whom would you represent? Yourself?”

There was a pause. Finally Boris said, “Well, the problem is, I am convinced that you are making a mistake. I have no other option than to start a public discussion. Let us see what other people think.”

“You have every right to do so,” said Putin coldly.

When he repeated the conversation to me, Boris looked excited. He was gearing up for a new campaign. “Once we’ve published the letter, we’ll sponsor a debate,” he said. “An all-Russia conference on federalism. With experts. On prime-time TV. Will you help me?”

“Boris, if you go down this road, I predict in a year from now you will be an exile in your château, or worse, sitting in jail. I must tell you that. This is not politics, this is mafia war, or class struggle, whichever you like to call it. For Putin the substance does not matter—as long as he sees you as one of his gang. But if you go against him publicly, you will cast yourself out of his pack. Then, whatever you do, you are the enemy, like Goose. Of course, I would love to help you, because for me it’s like déjà vu. But it’s a losing game.”

“We shall see about that.”

“But why do you need it? I don’t get it. Have you suddenly become altruistic?”

“Not at all. It’s self-preservation. You are right about Putin. He is going after the governors, he is squeezing Goose because he has cast them as the enemy. Because they supported Primus. He and Voloshin are simply continuing last year’s fight, finishing them off. The problem is, he may not realize that, but he is destroying the framework in the process. If he succeeds, my turn will come too, sooner or later, because I cannot be his servant. I have my own interests. But now I still have a chance to persuade them, because Volodya sees me as part of his team. I am not seeking a confrontation. That is why I am not teaming up with anyone—doing it alone. If he sees that I am serious, he will realize he is making a mistake, and he will reverse course.”

The publication of Boris’s open letter to Putin on May 30, 2000, confused everyone, none more than American Russia watchers who arrived in Moscow in advance of a June summit, the first for Putin and the last for Clinton. Wasn’t Berezovsky supposed to be Putin’s main backer? Did it mean that Putin was also at odds with Voloshin, a Berezovsky man? Was Putin in collusion with the military? What was the meaning of the crackdown on Gusinsky?

“We Americans are simple people who like to know whom to root for in any competition, political or athletic,” wrote David Ignatius in a June 4
Washington Post
column entitled “A Complicated Kremlin Scorecard.” “Putin vs. Berezovsky” appears to be a “most interesting political contest,” but “whom should we root for?”

Bill Clinton could not make up his mind either. Before leaving Moscow, he dropped in to say hello to his old friend Boris Yeltsin and to share his reservations about the “new guy,” whom he had just seen.

Clinton’s aide Strobe Talbott reproduced the conversation in
Russia Hand
. Yeltsin told his “friend Bill” that Putin’s main qualifications for the job were twofold. He was “a young man and a strong man.” Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana “nodded solemnly”: “It really was very hard, getting Putin into the job—one of the hardest things we ever pulled off.”

“Boris, you have got democracy in your heart,” said Clinton to Yeltsin “You have got the fire in your belly of the real democrat and real reformer. I am not sure Putin has that. Maybe he does. I don’t know.”

The next shoe to drop was the arrest of Goose himself. He spent three days in mid-June in Butyrka prison and was released with orders not to leave town—just like Sasha. It shook Boris more personally than the federalism fight. The latter might be an honest mistake by a president who wanted an efficient government. The former was clearly an act of revenge.