Death of a Dissident (37 page)

Goose’s arrest happened while Putin was on a state visit in Spain.
As soon as he returned Boris went to see him. He wanted to make one last attempt: perhaps Volodya was not beyond redemption.

“Volodya, why did you put Goose in jail? It served no purpose, and it harmed you internationally.”

“Boris, good heavens, of all people! Wasn’t he number one on your enemies list? He had threatened us with jail, have you forgotten?”

“Yes, but we’ve won, this is a senseless vengeance.”

“When he threatened me, he should have known better. But he is free now, so what do you want? In any case, go speak to Voloshin. Goose is his favorite project.”

“Goose is a traitor,” Voloshin told him. “He stabbed us in the back, and he will do it again. He said that we blew up those houses.”

“But you didn’t, did you?”

“We did not, and he had no right to say that. Anyway, no one will harm him, but he must give up NTV, and he will. He has no way out. He is cornered.”

Boris gave a series of interviews comparing Putin’s policies to those of Chile’s Pinochet: a free economy combined with a lack of political freedom. “This will not work in Russia,” he predicted. “Russia is a maximalist country. Once you start on that road you will end up with Stalinist terror.”

After that, the Kremlin stopped calling him.

On July 18, the Duma approved Putin’s federalism proposals by an overwhelming majority. Boris resigned his Duma seat to protest “the imposition of authoritarian rule.” On July 20, threatened with another arrest, Goose signed an agreement to sell his media holdings to Gazprom, which was still controlled by the government. He immediately left for his villa in San Roque, Spain. Later, he announced that he considered the sale of NTV null and void because it had been signed under duress.

And then came
Kursk
, and Boris’s exile into the political wilderness.

Kursk
was a nuclear submarine armed with cruise missiles, a part of Russia’s Northern Fleet, named after the city of Kursk in central Russia.
On August 12, it was conducting firing exercises when a huge explosion occurred, apparently resulting from a faulty torpedo launch. Kursk sank eighty-five miles off Severomorsk, in the Barents Sea, to a depth of 350 feet. There were 118 sailors aboard. When it hit bottom, another huge explosion occurred. At least twenty-three men survived the blasts, only to face several days of agony on the ocean floor while the world watched a fiasco unfold.

For Putin, the
Kursk
catastrophe turned into a PR disaster. For twenty-four hours after the submarine went down, ORT and NTV showed shots of icy waters and grieving families onshore, alternating with footage of Putin water-skiing and enjoying a barbecue at his dacha in Sochi.

The media coverage made much of the fact that the Russian government, unable to mount a rescue on its own, stalled for four days despite British and Norwegian offers of assistance. After the help was accepted, it took another three days to get the rescue vessels to the site. When British divers finally reached the escape hatch of the
Kursk
it was too late.

When Boris heard about
Kursk
he was in France in his Cap d’Antibes château. He started calling Putin immediately, but could reach him only on August 16, the fifth day of the unfolding tragedy.

“Volodya, why are you in Sochi? You should interrupt your holiday and go to that submarine base, or at least to Moscow. You do not feel the situation and it will damage you.”

“And why are you in France? You are on a well-deserved vacation, aren’t you?” Putin sounded sarcastic.

“First, I am not the father of the nation, and no one gives a shit where I am. Second, I am flying to Moscow in the morning.”

“Okay, Boris, thank you for your advice.”

When Boris landed in Moscow on the 17th, Putin was still vacationing. He arrived in Moscow early on Saturday August 19. By then, Voloshin’s propaganda masters had woken up to the magnitude of the PR disaster. Putin’s press office reported that he immediately went into a series of emergency meetings with senior ministers about
Kursk
.

All Saturday morning Boris was calling the Kremlin, seeking a
meeting with the president. He believed that this was the moment when he could get through to Volodya, to make him learn from the lessons of the previous week, to explain how the style of his operation was hurting him. Finally he got through.

“Okay, come over, let’s talk,” said Putin.

But when he arrived, it was Voloshin who was waiting for him. He went straight to the point.

“Listen, we feel that ORT is working against the president. I am asking you, yield control and we will part amicably.”

“Say that again,” said Boris.

“Surrender your stock to someone loyal to us. If you don’t, you will follow Goose to Butyrka.”

Boris tried to find the right words for a response. Voloshin was his own former asset manager, whom he had placed in Yeltsin’s Kremlin three years ago, as his best go-getter. Now he was getting him.

“You go fuck yourself,” said Boris. “I want to talk to Volodya.”

“Okay,” said Voloshin, as emotionless as ever. “Come back tomorrow.”

In the morning, the three of them met in Voloshin’s office. Putin walked into the room holding a folder. He started off in a businesslike manner, as if at an official function: “ORT is the most important channel. It is too important to be left outside of government influence. We made a decision,” and so on.

Then he suddenly stopped, looked up with his watery eyes, and said, “Tell me, Boris, I don’t understand. Why are you doing this? Why are you attacking me? Have I done anything to hurt you? Believe me, I was more than tolerant with your escapades.”

“Volodya, you made a mistake when you stayed in Sochi. Every station in the world …“

“I don’t give a fuck about every station in the world,” interrupted Putin. “Why did
you
do this? You are supposed to be my friend. It was you who talked me into taking this job. And now you are stabbing me in the back. What did I do to deserve it?”

“Deserve what?”

“I have a report here, that your people were hiring some whores to pose as sailors’ wives and sisters to bash me.”

“They are not whores, they are real wives and sisters. Your KGB idiots are feeding you baloney, and if you believe it, you are not any different.”

Voloshin froze stiff as a wax doll; his eyes expressed horror.

“You forgot our conversation after the election, Volodya,” Boris went on. “I told you that I never swore allegiance to you personally. You promised to continue the Yeltsin way. He would never even think of shutting up a journalist who attacked him. You are destroying Russia.”

“Come on, you can’t be serious about Russia,” interrupted Putin. “Well, I guess that’s the end of it.”

“Tell me one thing, Volodya. Sending me the way of Goose, was this your idea or Voloshin’s?”

“It makes no difference now.” Putin was again his cold closed-up self. “Goodbye, Boris Abramovich.”

“Goodbye, Volodya.”

They both knew it was their last meeting.

Later that day Boris announced a donation of $1 million for the bereaved
Kursk
families, while ORT and NTV continued to broadcasted interviews with the sailors’ mothers and widows, who complained about government inaction. The Kremlin frantically tried to control the coverage, but the two defiant channels used round-theclock special reports to expose chaos in the navy, indifference in the Kremlin, and human tragedy at the submarine’s home base, with aloof, ice-cold Putin presiding over the mess.

When Putin finally arrived at Severomorsk, ten days after the catastrophe, he faced an angry crowd of sailors’ families. About five hundred people waited for hours in the rain for the president’s arrival, before they were allowed into the hall of an officers’ club. They asked sharp questions, wanting to know who was responsible for what everyone believed was a botched government response.

In an attempt to turn the tables, Putin lashed out at the media, without quite naming the two oligarchs, Boris and Goose. “They are liars. The television industry has people who have been destroying the
state for ten years. They have been stealing money and buying up absolutely everything,” he said. “Now they’re trying to discredit the country so that the army gets even worse.” In a clear reference to Boris, he said, “There are some who have even given a million dollars…. They would have done better to sell their villas on the Mediterranean coast of France and in Spain. Only then could they explain why the property was registered under false names and behind firms. And we would probably ask the question, Where did the money come from?”

We watched the news at Boris’s dacha at Rublyovka. Boris pointed at the screen. “This expression,” he said. “Note this expression. This is how he is when he loses control. He is like a cornered animal, barking, snapping. This does not happen to him often.”

Yuri Felshtinsky, a journalist and historian specializing in the Russian secret services, comes from my cohort of Russian American expatriates. He has lived in Boston since the late 1970s, visiting his old homeland only after the fall of Communism. Like me, in the late 1990s he became a peripheral planet in Boris’s solar system, orbiting once every few months, advising him on various matters.

Felshtinsky befriended Sasha Litvinenko after his 1998 press conference. They grew particularly close after Sasha’s release from prison in December 1999. Many of Sasha’s FSB stories interested Felshtinsky professionally, so he used every opportunity to meet up and talk.

Like me, Felshtinsky was highly skeptical of Boris’s relationship with Putin and was happy to learn that there was a disagreement brewing between them. In May 2000, Felshtinsky flew to Moscow to take part in the group that was helping Boris write the federalist memorandum. As he later told me, on one day of that trip he took a break from our labors and went to see Sasha.

He found him in a bad mood.

It was still two weeks before Boris’s conflict with Putin would splash across the front pages, but the raid of masked thugs on Media-MOST had already been featured on prime-time television. Sasha was convinced that Kontora had taken over the Kremlin in the person of
Putin and would start cracking down on everyone on its hate list. In general terms, this meant journalists, Chechen lovers, Jews, and oligarchs; more specifically, it meant Berezovsky and Goose, who epitomized all of the above.

As for Sasha, the Kafkaesque investigation of him continued without any end in sight. He was now fighting a third set of charges, after the two previous ones had been thrown out by the courts.

After he had been conditionally released from Butyrka in December, the accusation that he had beaten a suspect and extorted some vegetables at a Moscow market on May 30, 1996, fell apart. As it turned out, on that day in that market, the FSB did indeed beat some people, but Sasha was a thousand miles away in Armenia. He was busy intercepting five truckloads of arms being sent to Chechnya via Georgia. The Armenian Security Ministry provided evidence of his whereabouts. The charges were dropped and two “eyewitnesses” dismissed.

On the day he was cleared, however, he was slapped with new charges. Allegedly, some years earlier, while pursuing a case in the town of Kostroma, five hundred miles northeast of Moscow, Sasha had stolen some explosives from an FSB depot and planted them on a suspect, a local gangster, to frame him. A new criminal case was opened, and Sasha’s restraining order not to leave Moscow was extended. This time, however, the charge had an ominous twist: should the case be tried, it would not be in Moscow. It was unlikely that a provincial judge would have the guts to stand up to FSB pressure, as two Moscow judges had managed to do.