The Oligarchs (30 page)

But Leontiev felt dissatisfied. The salaries at the newspaper, while larger than others, were still relatively paltry. And as time went by, the paper's early romanticism was dulled somewhat by immutable laws of market economics: a newspaper that lost money inevitably faced commercial pressures. “We had to buy newsprint at market prices,” Leontiev told me. “There was very little advertising, naturally. And the main source of money was sponsors.” Leontiev began to quarrel with Vitaly Tretyakov, the editor of
Nezavisimaya Gazeta,
saying that “it was unfair to drag money from sponsors and consider ourselves independent.” Leontiev added, “It was mainly I who found sponsors. Not all of them were honest people, and we had to take it into account. We made them feel happy for giving us the money. This was the system.”
¹²

Soon Leontiev and other journalists were thinking of leaving
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
and creating their own paper. Their idealism was tempered by the reality that they needed to find an owner, rather than beg for periodic injections of cash from publicity hungry sponsors. They knew that a Moscow banker would have his own desires and demands, but it seemed far more comfortable to have a single, known investor than to constantly search for, and pander to, outside sponsors. Leontiev met Gusinsky in the cooperative movement and introduced Gusinsky to his circle of friends. He quit
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
and began to press Gusinsky to bankroll a new paper. “You could become a media magnate yourself,” Leontiev told Gusinsky, and they talked about the project for months, starting in 1992, the first year of post-Soviet Russia.

Leontiev recalled that Gusinsky was entranced with the idea from the start. “He is a very ambitious person. I think that I hit the bull's-eye. He may have thought about it before. I don't claim I gave him this idea, but I was pressing on him to make the decision. The idea was to create a professional paper. At that time, bankers had a great deal of very cheap money. It didn't cost anything. It was impossible to find a liquid use for it. At that time, everybody began to support different papers.”

Sergei Zverev, a bearded, sandy-haired, hardened political operative who worked for Gusinsky through much of the 1990s, recalled that Gusinsky had been upset by newspapers criticizing his business activities in the city.
¹³
Gusinsky soon grasped that he could protect and defend himself and his public image. Leontiev agreed. “Volodya cared
about this image very much,” and it would be enhanced as the publisher of a reputable paper.

Gusinsky told me he listened to Leontiev's proposal from a different perspective. The truth was that he hardly understood the ideals and romantic notions of journalists like Leontiev and Dobrodeyev, people who saw their mission as leading society. “I did not perceive mass media as mass media. I could not even understand what it was,” Gusinsky told me. Rather, Gusinsky was searching for a tool for influence and power. He had played the game, like all the businessmen of his generation, by paying bribes when necessary, deploying his security service when called for, and flattering top politicians with his plans and ambitions. But Gusinsky said the pettiness of the influencepeddling game sometimes left him feeling empty; bribery was a dead end because ultimately anyone with enough money could pay a larger bribe. The increasingly costly and intense competition to buy influence seemed to be outrunning itself.

Bribery “is humiliating for me,” Gusinsky told me. “It means that either I am doing something that I cannot spell out in public—that I'm a rascal—or that money is being extorted from me by force. In which case, it means I am afraid, that's why I buy him.”

“I gave bribes, no secret. To live in Russia, to live in the Soviet Union, and not to give bribes is absurd. But I was trying to do it as seldom as possible.” Gusinsky wondered, instead of endlessly competing to buy influence, was there a way to exert greater, more systematic power? And then it dawned on him. “A newspaper!”

“When I started the newspaper, I will say it directly as it was: it was nothing but an instrument of influence,” Gusinsky said. “One hundred percent—influence over officials and over society. I was creating the newspaper exactly for this aim.” He added, “If an official turned bad, I would attack him with a newspaper and tell the truth that he demanded money, extorted it, or accepted conditions dishonestly.”

Leontiev had no illusions. Gusinsky, he realized, was “trying to develop a system of promoting himself, of self-defense through the press.” Gusinsky hired professional lobbyists such as Zverev. “The main aim for Russian public relations was not about creating an opinion about a firm in society,” said Leontiev. “The society plays a secondary role here. The main thing is those who make decisions: the power structures, the Kremlin, and the cabinet. The aim was to get this or that signature.”

When Gusinsky's newspaper
Sevodnya
appeared in February 1993, it was a respected liberal organ that soon attracted many of Moscow's most talented journalists. It was born out of an inchoate and incompatible mix of the journalists' ideals and Gusinsky's desire for power and influence. “If anybody tells you that we clearly understood what we were doing, it was not so,” recalled Zverev. Originally, Gusinsky and two partners, one of whom was Smolensky, invested $6 million. But the partners dropped out; they could not take the heat when the newspaper came under fire or went on the offensive. Gusinsky acknowledged that it was often a difficult choice for him too, because there were so many people who could be wounded by a newspaper article. Despite the torrent of complaints and competing pressures, “I stayed on, deciding: let me try.”

Sevodnya
had a small circulation, forty thousand copies, was entirely in Moscow, and ran little advertising, but it earned a niche among Moscow's elite. Gusinsky ran the newspaper as a hobby. One day, Leontiev asked him to appoint a manager, since no one seemed to be running the paper. Gusinsky didn't want to bother wasting a good manager on the newspaper. In other businesses, Gusinsky explained, a good manager could earn $100 million a year. “If I ask him to work with the paper, he will only be able to cover its losses, which are $6 million. For me, it is better if he earns the $100 million and I give $6 million to you, and keep $94 million!”

Despite Gusinsky's ambivalence about the newspaper, it was the seed of what would become his grandest project. When
Sevodnya
began publishing, a group of disgruntled journalists at the state-run Ostankino television station took notice. Until then, no one had associated Gusinsky with the news media. But his new paper was smart, progressive, and privately owned. It was a signpost. They followed it.

 

On television, Yevgeny Kiselyov was a voice of authority. He spoke slowly, thoughtfully, and deliberately, with resonant, deep tones. His handsome, rugged, square-jawed face was almost always set in an expression of sobriety. He had a healthy shock of brown hair and a prominent mustache. But what made Kiselyov so powerful as a television personality was a voice that never hurried and often paused for effect.

Kiselyov had once been a Persian translator with the Soviet Army
in Afghanistan and later taught Persian at the KGB academy. He was unhappy there and jumped at a chance to start a journalism career at Radio Moscow's Persian-language service. Later he moved to television, and in the first days after the collapse of the Soviet Union in January 1992, he went on the air at the state-run Ostankino channel with a new weekly analytical program,
Itogi,
or summing up, which quickly became a success, driven by Kiselyov's authoritative personal style.
¹⁴

But as 1992 wore on and Yeltsin came under increasing fire from parliament, Kiselyov noticed that the Kremlin was hankering to impose more control on Ostankino to bolster Yeltsin's position. Igor Malashenko, who had once worked for Gorbachev's press service and later became director of Ostankino, abruptly resigned, complaining about growing political pressures. Through a series of ominous personnel shifts, Kiselyov felt a chill through the hallways—and feared that soon he would be asked to take direct orders from Yeltsin's henchmen. “I sensed that the clouds were becoming darker and darker,” he recalled.
¹⁵

Kiselyov knew that Gusinsky had invested big money in a daily newspaper and wondered whether he would consider bankrolling a television show. Kiselyov talked over the situation with Dobrodeyev, who was producer of
Itogi,
and suggested they approach Gusinsky together. Kiselyov telephoned an old friend, Zverev, who had begun working for Gusinsky's companies.

Zverev was immediately enthusiastic. The call from Kiselyov came in the morning, and a meeting was arranged to take place later in the day. Kiselyov and Dobrodeyev took the elevator to the offices of Gusinsky's companies, the Most Group, on the twenty-first floor of the high-rise building where Luzhkov's offices were also located. Dobrodeyev recalled that the offices of the Most Group looked “extremely serious.”

In Zverev's office, Kiselyov presented his idea. He wanted to find an independent financier for his program
Itogi.
They would leave state-run Ostankino. They wanted journalistic freedom and they wanted to make more money as well. “Journalists were living almost in poverty, including myself,” Kiselyov recalled. “We wanted to go independent because we wanted to produce what we really wanted to produce. We wanted to attract new, young, talented people, offer them good money for the job, and earn something for ourselves.”

Surprisingly, Zverev jumped out of his chair and hustled down to
Gusinsky's office. He returned a few minutes later and invited the astonished Kiselyov and Dobrodeyev to see Gusinsky—
immediately.

They walked down the hallway to Gusinsky's office, which, although it had a fabulous view, was furnished rather darkly. Gusinsky was no longer the skinny boy who slipped his friends into the Lenkom theater. He had put on some weight, and he wore aviatorstyle glasses and a rumpled white shirt and tie. But his face retained an extraordinary ability to reflect his boundless, ever-changing emotions. His eyebrows rose and fell, and his sentences burst out as soon as a thought occurred to him. When Kiselyov walked in, Gusinsky was enormously excited. He had never met Kiselyov before but admired the newsman greatly. Gusinsky was little known in public, but Kiselyov was a household name, the Russian Walter Cronkite.

“Imagine!” Gusinsky recalled. “Kiselyov in the flesh, at my office. How can this be? This is Kiselyov himself. As if we were sitting here and Margaret Thatcher walked through the door. God Almighty! It's like this!”

Kiselyov and Dobrodeyev laid out their plan, asking Gusinsky if he could finance the production of
Itogi.
But Gusinsky's brain was already in overdrive. Yes, he said immediately, he would finance their show, but why stop there? “This is a small project,” he said. “I think the big project is to start an independent television company, broadcasting twenty-four hours a day; that's what I am really thinking of.”

The guests were speechless. No such independent television existed in the new Russia, only state television inherited from the Soviet Union. Kiselyov reminded Gusinsky that a channel would require a frequency to broadcast on—and they had none. But Gusinsky was way ahead of them. He quickly pointed out the sorry state of Channel 4, a government station that was a dumping ground for unwanted programming by the two main state channels, Ostankino and Russian Television, which had Channel 1 and Channel 2, respectively. Channel 4 was a disaster; no one watched it or cared about it, and Gusinsky was already plotting to lobby the Kremlin for a decree signed by President Boris Yeltsin giving him Channel 4.

Within a few hours, Kiselyov, Dobrodeyev, and Gusinsky were surrounded by lawyers and financial experts, and they were deep into planning their new project. Such were the times that dreams were unlimited and enthusiasm contagious. “Gusinsky was a very dynamic person; he moved very rapidly across his huge office,” Dobrodeyev
recalled. “The whole situation was in keeping with the times in Russia, when things appeared out of nothing, and it happened very, very rapidly. Grandiose projects appeared. Banks appeared. A television company appeared. The negotiations weren't long. We are going to create television. Money wasn't a problem. Other resources, connections—not a problem! Back then, the will, the desire, the drive solved absolutely everything.”

Dobrodeyev recalled that he had no idea whether the new television channel could succeed commercially. “I think most people had great doubts about the commercial side of the matter,” he said. “It was a matter of status. The best years of very many newspapers, really good newspapers, of various television programs, were precisely those years when the owners treated them as if they were standing next to a masterpiece. It was like, ‘And I have a newspaper. I have a
good
newspaper.'”

Gusinsky approached Malashenko about being manager of the new channel. Malashenko recalled that Gusinsky treated his newspaper as just a hobby. “It was a status symbol.... So very quickly I realized that for him a TV company would be another—how to say it—architectural detail, an ornament on his façade.” Nonetheless, Malashenko agreed to become the new boss of the Gusinsky channel. Malashenko had his own reasons: he was humiliated when he resigned from Ostankino. He wanted to get back at his tormentors by starting a rival independent channel. “I wanted revenge,” he remembered.
¹⁶

Gusinsky also had a score to settle. He had an ongoing personal feud with Mikhail Poltoranin, the press minister in Yeltsin's government, whom Gusinsky regarded as an anti-Semite. Poltoranin had insulted Gusinsky at some point in recent years, and “I had a strong desire to have a fight with him,” Gusinsky recalled. “I even drove to his office twice especially to run into him and punch him in the nose.” Starting a television station outside the control of the state was sweet revenge, Gusinsky felt, but that was not all. “I just wanted to be number one,” he recalled of his early enthusiasm for television. “I think I started it because I had to be the first, because no one else had his own television channel, and I would have one.”