The New Tsar (23 page)

The result was extraordinary discretion. When he once invited a pretty young reporter from the Kremlin press pool out for lunch at Izumi, one of the capital’s new sushi restaurants, she arrived to find the new director of the FSB waiting for her alone, having cleared the place of other diners. The reporter, Yelena Tregubova, found him to be flirtatious, calling her Lenochka and encouraging her to join him in drinking sake. That she did not honor his discretion but rather included the scene in a book hardened his opinion of the media and reporters, who were in his view little more than vultures who sought to exploit or embarrass officials for personal gain.
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O
n the evening of August 20, less than a month after Putin’s appointment to the FSB, a journalist in Petersburg, Anatoly Levin-Utkin, left the office of a recently created newspaper called
Legal Petersburg Today
. He carried a thousand rubles, then about $140, and a briefcase full of papers and photographs for articles in the next issue of the newspaper, which was only its third. Levin-Utkin was a deputy editor at the newspaper, which had already gained attention with articles delving into the city’s banks and the competing spheres of influence. One of the investors noted was Boris Berezovsky, who had publicly clashed the year before with other oligarchs over the privatization of Svyazinvest, the country’s largest telecommunications company. Another article concerned Anatoly Sobchak’s escape from Russia and the activities of his deputy for foreign investments, now the director of the FSB. Its headline read “Vladimir Putin Became Head of the FSB Unlawfully.” Levin-Utkin had written neither, but had contributed reporting for the articles. The newspaper’s editor in chief, Aleksei Domnin, said that both articles had prompted vociferous complaints from their subjects. “Putin’s people” met with him to complain, he said, though he did not say who. The meeting had “an obviously political nature” that he did not detail.
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Complaints about press coverage were nothing unusual—and often warranted—and the furor over the articles would have quickly been forgotten, except for what happened next.

Levin-Utkin entered the foyer of his apartment building on Rednova Street and was checking his mailbox when two men approached from behind and beat him so badly they shattered his skull in several places.
The assailants took the briefcase and everything in his pockets, including his newspaper identity card. A neighbor found him unconscious in the foyer, and he was taken to the hospital. Surgeons operated twice, but he died on the morning of August 24, having never regained consciousness. Contract hits in Petersburg had become so common—happening at the rate of one a day for a while—that Levin-Utkin’s murder would not have ranked highly if the journalists’ organizations had not taken up his cause, appealing to the United Nations to press the Russian authorities for an investigation.
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There was never any evidence linking either Putin or Berezovsky to the fatal beating; prosecutors doubted that the murder had a motive beyond simple robbery, though it was never clear that they seriously investigated the crime. It was the first time, though, that Putin’s name, and Berezovsky’s, surfaced in media reports in connection with the same death, and it would not be the last. The case, as it happened, was overshadowed by far more shattering events that August.

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T
hree days before Levin-Utkin’s murder, Russia defaulted on most of its debts and devalued the ruble, wiping out the savings of millions of investors and ordinary citizens. Russia was on the brink of total economic collapse. The crisis deepened the political turmoil surrounding Yeltsin, seemingly signaling the end of his political career. On August 21, the Duma called for his resignation. Two days later, he fired Kiriyenko instead. He had lasted a mere five months. Yeltsin then appointed as prime minister the man he had dismissed from the post five months earlier, Viktor Chernomyrdin. Yeltsin, the great democratic hope for Russia, had clearly lost his way. The “bold” moves he claimed to favor now seemed desperate. Four days later he appeared on television to declare that he would not seek reelection in 2000, and then all but disappeared for two weeks, making only six brief visits to the Kremlin at the height of the country’s financial and political panic. The Duma, as it had with Kiriyenko’s appointment, twice voted against Chernomyrdin’s return, but this time Yeltsin no longer had the power to bluff since the parliament had prepared impeachment proceedings and under the Constitution the president could not dissolve parliament if an article of impeachment had been passed.
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A new confrontation loomed, as did rumors of a coup, fueled by reports that military units near Moscow had been ordered on high alert. The Communists in the Duma braced for a repetition of the siege of
1993; in fact, they seemed to dare Yeltsin to order it. Then, on September 1, Putin went on national television to deny that the Kremlin intended to use force to resolve a political conflict. He gravely declared in his televised remarks that the FSB would secure the interests of the people. “Those who violate the Constitution and try to undermine Russia’s state system by unconstitutional methods and with the use of force will run up against appropriate resistance,” he said. “This is something you can be sure of.”
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Later, when a Communist member of parliament, Albert Makashov, denounced Jews as a scourge that should be removed from the country, Putin announced that an investigation had begun into his remarks, even as the prosecutor general’s office and the Duma itself equivocated.
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The controversy caused a furor in Moscow, with people taking to the streets during the Communist celebrations of the revolution to defend Makashov and his anti-Semitic rants. Putin made his announcement with Lubyanka in the background, sending a message not only to the protesters but also to the secret service, still infested with bigotry, that hateful expressions would not be tolerated. After just a few weeks on the job, he no longer seemed the inconspicuous aide he had always been, blending into the background. He exuded the full authority of the country’s secret service and a fierce determination not to let political or popular unrest undermine the state’s authority. As a grateful Yeltsin wrote, “I think his cold expression and the almost military precision of his formulations discouraged many people from causing trouble.”
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Putin’s public support did little to help Yeltsin, who had to abandon his nomination of Chernomyrdin. His aides, working with deputies in the Duma, settled on a candidate least objectionable to all: Yevgeny Primakov, who had been Yeltsin’s foreign minister since 1996. Primakov was an old, genial Soviet academic, an Arabist by training, who had spent fourteen years as a journalist in the Middle East, working closely with the KGB. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he took over the foreign intelligence service that had emerged from the ruins of the KGB, and where from 1992 to 1996 he all but disappeared from public view, trying to revive the agency in much the same way that Putin had its domestic counterpart.
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Each was suspicious of the other. Primakov had far more experience in the world of intelligence, having been deployed undercover on missions not only to the Middle East, but also to the United States.
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Eager to bring the FSB under his influence, he was
among those who suspected Putin of packing the ranks with colleagues from Petersburg. Putin took “the whole FSB leadership” to meet with him to prove he had not conducted a purge.
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On September 11, the parliament voted overwhelmingly to install Primakov as prime minister, and the immediate political crisis eased. The desperate decisions of Yeltsin’s government to default on bonds and devalue the ruble had sent shock waves through society but ultimately proved to be “a revitalizing tonic,” allowing the economy to resume growing, aided by a recovery in domestic production and the beginnings of an oil boom.
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Yeltsin’s fortunes—and health—continued to decline, though. He was repeatedly hospitalized in the fall and winter, and the impeachment proceedings against him had not ended with Primakov’s appointment. Meanwhile, a far more menacing threat to Yeltsin was emerging, and Putin’s loyalty would prove decisive in defending against it.

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P
utin had not been long in Lubyanka when he found himself at the center of a public scandal greater than any he had faced before. On November 17, 1998, six men held a strange and sensational press conference in Moscow. Four wore masks and dark glasses. The other two, unmasked, were Aleksandr Litvinenko and Mikhail Trepashkin. All were veterans of the FSB, and before national and international journalists they sketched an alarming tale of corruption and conspiracy. The organized-crime unit they worked for, they said, had itself turned into a criminal enterprise, running rackets with Russian mobsters and Chechen independence fighters, extorting businesses they were supposed to protect and offering their services for hire, often with lethal effect. Their superiors, they said, planned to kidnap the brother of a prominent businessman, Umar Dzhebrailov. They had ordered the beating of Trepashkin after he was relieved of his duties for investigating wrongdoing. Most sensationally of all, they explained how they had been ordered by the officers at the agency now headed by Vladimir Putin to assassinate Boris Berezovsky.

Berezovsky, whose influence inside the Kremlin was never as great as he pretended it was, had privately told officials about the alleged plot against him. He even believed it to have been a factor in the dismissal of Kovalyov. Among Putin’s first acts as FSB head had been to disband the organized-crime unit that these men were now accusing of having gone rogue. He had dismissed or transferred most of the unit’s officers, but
an internal investigation into the assassination order against Berezovsky failed to result in any criminal charges against the unit’s commanders. (One prosecutor told Berezovsky that the order to kill him had been a joke.) The closing of the case prompted Berezovsky to go public. He appealed to Putin directly in an open letter published in
Kommersant
on November 13.

“Vladimir Vladimirovich,” he wrote, “you have inherited a difficult legacy from your predecessors. Criminal elements and officials at various levels, whom they have corrupted, including officials in your agency, are striking out at people who are unwilling to go back to being cattle. Criminal terror is on the rise in Russia.”
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Berezovsky never explained the reason for his direct appeal; some officials and newspapers suspected he was now trying to discredit Putin or others in the Kremlin—or, contrarily, to regain some of the influence that he had once had inside it.

When the letter failed to accomplish much, the agents involved went public four days later. Aleksandr Litvinenko, the ringleader of the press conference, had worked for the KGB’s military counterintelligence directorate in the late 1980s, and then for the FSB in the 1990s, focusing on terrorism and organized crime. He was never a spy or an undercover operative, but rather an investigator and enforcer. Like Putin, he was fit, patriotic, and loyal to the security services, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel, but by then Litvinenko had grown disillusioned. He came to see the FSB as a rogue agency, especially the unit created in 1996 to fight organized crime, which was notorious for its ruthless brutality and corruption.
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The line between service to the state, to the oligarchs, and to the mafia became less and less clear, and Litvinenko himself crossed it. In 1994, he had been assigned to investigate an assassination attempt against Berezovsky, who had just left his auto dealership in a chauffeured Mercedes when a remote-controlled bomb exploded, raking the car with shrapnel. The driver was decapitated but Berezovsky somehow survived. As Litvinenko collected evidence, he became enthralled with the ambitious tycoon and soon went on Berezovsky’s payroll as his personal security guard and adviser, even as he continued to serve the FSB. Many officers, their meager wages often in arrears, moonlighted for the men with money; it was a symptom of the decay of the intelligence apparatus. When, according to his account, he received an order to kill Berezovsky in the winter of 1997, he refused and went to Berezovsky with details of the plot.

Litvinenko began the press conference by reading a statement, then
emphasized that the corruption they were disclosing occurred before Putin’s arrival at the FSB at the end of July, and he appealed to Putin to cleanse the agency. “We do not seek to compromise the Federal Security Service,” Litvinenko said, “but to purify and strengthen it.”
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They had no proof other than their testimony, though they claimed otherwise. “I have made several attempts to get through to Vladimir Vladimirovich and present all these facts to him, but we did not have such an opportunity. We were simply denied access to him,” he went on. And then he appealed directly to Putin. “I will take this opportunity. I think he will look at this taped press conference and I would tell him the following: I have proof that his deputies are deceiving him. I can provide documentary proof. If he calls me to his office, I will show him these materials.”

The subsequent furor put Putin in an awkward position. He could not simply rebuff Berezovsky, who still claimed to have influence within the Kremlin; at the same time, the charges were scandalous, and they infuriated him. Putin responded to Berezovsky’s letter with one of his own, sent to
Kommersant
the day of the press conference. “We are not afraid to wash our dirty linen in public,” he went on, saying that internal investigations would be conducted into any accusations. Obliquely, though, he warned Berezovsky, “who is well known for his devotion to democratic values,” that he was running a risk by interfering in FSB affairs. And he warned that if the allegations proved false, the FSB would have no recourse but to sue for slander—not only against Berezovsky, but also against the newspaper’s editorial staff for printing his letter.
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Putin proved to be exceedingly intolerant of criticism of his agency—and dissent within it.