Londongrad: From Russia with Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs. Mark Hollingsworth

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СКАЧАТЬ seven parties privy to the ‘Davos Pact’ were mainly bankers - Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Potanin, Alexander Smolensky, and Petr Aven, as well as media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky, industrialist Mikhail Fridman, and, of course, Berezovsky himself.

      Television was the key to the election campaign. The campaign was bankrolled through a secret fund known as the Black Treasury. Money was spent cultivating journalists and local political bosses. But most was used to pay for flattering documentaries of Yeltsin shown on private TV stations, billboards put up by local mayors, and even on pro-Yeltsin rock concerts. And Berezovsky brazenly used his ownership of Channel One, Russia’s most powerful television network, to lionize Yeltsin and attack his communist opponent.

      Central to the campaign were Western spin doctors. Tim (now Lord) Bell, the media guru who had helped Margaret Thatcher win three elections in Great Britain between 1979 and 1990, was hired. Bell had also worked closely with the campaign team responsible for California Governor Pete Wilson’s remarkable comeback election victory in 1994, just two years earlier. In conditions of secrecy likened to protecting nuclear secrets, the American image consultants Dresner-Wickers moved into Suite 120 of the President Hotel in Moscow. ‘Secrecy was paramount,’ recalled Felix Braynin, a Yeltsin aide. ‘Everyone realized that if the Communists knew about this before the election, they would attack Yeltsin as an American tool. We badly needed the team, but having them was a big risk.’¹⁷

      Working closely with Yeltsin’s influential daughter Tatyana (Tanya) Dyachenko, who was based next door in Room 119, the Americans were treated like royalty. They were paid $250,000 plus expenses and enjoyed an unlimited budget for polling, focus groups, and research. They were told that their rooms and phones were bugged and that they should leave the hotel as infrequently as possible.

      The Americans suggested employing dirty tricks such as trailing Zyuganov with ‘truth squads’, which would heckle him and provoke him into losing his temper, but mostly they campaigned in a politically orthodox style. Photo opportunities and TV appearances were organized so as to appear spontaneous. Focus groups, direct mailing, and opinion polls were also widely employed, and the election message was hammered home repeatedly: ‘Whatever it is that we are going to say and do, we have to repeat it between eight and twelve times,’ said one of the American political consultants.¹⁸

      Yeltsin proved to be an adept, populist campaigner. He smiled more and was even inspired to get on stage at a rock concert and do a few moves. From facing the political abyss, Yeltsin was re-elected with a 13 per cent lead. It was a staggering result and with it the newly enriched oligarchs had protected their fortunes and their power base. ‘It was a battle for our blood interests,’ acknowledged Berezovsky.¹⁹

      The now all-powerful Berezovsky had proved a master manipulator. When asked about his influences, he rejected Machiavelli in preference to Lenin. ‘Not as an ideologue,’ he remarked, ‘but as a tactician in political struggle. Nobody had better perception of what was possible…Lenin understood the psychology of society.’²⁰

      It was now payback time and Yeltsin kept his part of the deal: some oligarchs received huge new government accounts, bought more state assets on the cheap, and paid only minimal taxes. In his memoirs, Strobe Talbott described the deal in the run-up to the presidential elections as a ‘Faustian bargain in which Yeltsin sold the soul of reform’. But the Russians replied that the favour they were doing the oligarchs was nowhere near as bad as the communist victory it helped to avert. As they saw it, unlike Dr Faustus who made a pact with the Devil that guaranteed his damnation, Yeltsin had made an accommodation with what he was convinced was the lesser of two evils - a deal that would help Russia avoid the real damnation of a return to power by the communists.’²¹

      Some of the oligarchs, notably Abramovich and Berezovsky, formed a coterie around Yeltsin that became known as the ‘family’. The leading member of the ‘family’ - and the gatekeeper to the President - was Yeltsin’s youngest and much loved daughter, Tatyana. Despite having no knowledge of business or political affairs, she was his most influential adviser, could secure special favours from the state, and became very rich in her own right. The friendship between the two oligarchs and the President’s daughter blossomed. According to Aleksandr Korzhakov, Berezovsky lavished Tatyana with presents of jewellery and cars, notably a Niva (a Russian version of a Jeep). ‘The vehicle was customized to include a special stereo system, air-conditioning and alarm system, and luxury interior. When the Niva broke down, Berezovsky immediately gave her a Chevrolet Blazer [a sports utility vehicle then worth $50,000].’²²

      According to Strobe Talbott, ‘Berezovsky’s close ties to Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana earned him a reputation as a modern-day Rasputin…At the height of Berezovsky’s influence, when his name came up in people’s offices in Moscow - including near the Kremlin - my hosts would sometimes point to the walls and start whispering or even, in a couple of cases, scribble notes to me. This was a practice I had not seen since the Brezhnev era in furtive encounters with dissident intellectuals.’²³

      If Berezovsky was the dominant uncle of the ‘family’, Abramovich was the quiet but precocious nephew who had a talent for charming the most important member - Tatyana. One TV executive, Igor Malashenko, was stunned by the young oil trader’s access: ‘I arrived one night at Tanya’s dacha and here was this young guy, unshaven and in jeans, unloading French wine, very good wine, from his car, stocking the fridge, making shashlik. I thought to myself, “They’ve got a new cook”. But when I asked Yumashev [Tanya’s husband], he laughed and said, “Oh no, that’s Roman”. He’s living with us while his dacha is being renovated.’²⁴

      In October 1996 Berezovsky was at the height of his power and was made Deputy Secretary of the country’s National Security Council - with responsibility for resolving the Chechnya conflict. (The first Chechen war began in 1994 when Chechnya tried to break away from the Russian Federation. Yeltsin’s government argued forcibly that Chechnya had never been an independent entity within the Soviet Union. The ensuing bitter struggle was disastrous for both sides.) A whirlwind of energy, Berezovsky was a frequent visitor to the cabinet offices of the Kremlin, clutching a worn leather briefcase in one hand and a new huge grey Motorola mobile phone in the other. While he waited to see Yeltsin, his phone would constantly ring. ‘Cannot talk. In Kremlin’, he would respond in his rapid-fire speech. Berezovsky wore officials down with his ceaseless networking and lobbying. When government ATS hotlines were installed in the guesthouse of his office at LogoVaz and his dacha at Alexandrovka, the telephone calls became even more frenzied.

      In many ways such crony capitalism had much in common with the worst features of the Soviet era. For a while Berezovsky and his colleagues functioned like a politburo: conducting backroom deals behind the scenes, secretly conspiring with and against each other, just as the senior apparatchiks had done under communism. As one prime minister was replaced with another, Berezovsky would hand the incoming leader pieces of paper bearing the names of the ministers he wanted in the new government. The oligarchs now viewed the world through the prism of their personal interests. ‘It is my fundamental belief that, leaving aside the abstract concept of the interests of the people, government should represent the interests of business,’ he admitted.²⁵

      Nevertheless, Yeltsin’s circle was not immune from outside pressure. At one point the independent prosecutor-general, Yuri Skuratov, started an investigation within the Kremlin itself. Yeltsin promptly sacked him, but Skuratov refused to quit and the Russian СКАЧАТЬ