Londongrad: From Russia with Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs. Mark Hollingsworth
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Название: Londongrad: From Russia with Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs
Автор: Mark Hollingsworth
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007287147
isbn:
Whether they were buying property, jewellery, or cars, payment was often by cash. Mikhail Ignatief, who arrived in London in 1991 at the age of twenty-one with his English fiancée, set up a successful travel business and used to help and advise Russians on shopping or business trips. He remembered one client asking his help to buy a Range Rover and arranged for one of his team to take him to the nearest showrooms. The client was shown around and said he wanted three cars, all to be shipped back to Russia. He then opened up a large leather bag stuffed with banknotes. A somewhat concerned manager called the police and the matter was only settled when the man was persuaded to go to a bank, deposit the money, and then pay by cheque.
The privatization process of the 1990s that led to London being awash with Russian money had no shortage of critics in and outside of Russia. Chrystia Freeland, the former Moscow bureau chief of the Financial Times, described the events as ‘a cynical manipulation of a weakened state…Yet as I watched them plot and profit, I couldn’t help asking myself how different the Russians really were from our own hero-entrepreneurs…our society so fawningly lauds for producing an era of unprecedented prosperity…The future oligarchs did what any red-blooded businessman would do. The real problem was that the state allowed them to get away with it.’39 In his influential book, Failed Crusade, Stephen F. Cohen, Professor of Russian Studies at New York University, called US policy towards Russia in the 1990s ‘the worst American foreign policy disaster since Vietnam’.40
One of the architects of privatization, Vladimir Potanin, later accepted its flawed nature: ‘Although I do not deny I was the author, I would like to point out that the concept was changed to a great extent as a result of political pressure on government from the red directors…The government allowed no access to foreign investors and other measures. This was later criticised and rightly so.’41 In October 1993 a reflective Khodorkovsky told Frontline, the American news programme: ‘Russian law allowed us to do things that were unthinkable in the Western business world.’
Even at the time advocates of privatization accepted that huge mistakes were made. In 1998 Boris Nemtsov, one of the young reformers who was once seen as a potential successor to Yeltsin, said, ‘The country is built as a freakish, oligarchic capitalist state. Its characteristics are the concentration of property in the hands of a narrow group of financiers, the oligarchs. Many of them operate inefficiently, having a parasitic relationship to the industries they control.’42
By 1999, the oligarchs’ priority was to protect their power and wealth and to ensure a successor to Yeltsin who would be as compliant as he had been. ‘The problem was that a lot of the people who had the potential to lead Russia were themselves up to their necks in relationships with these people,’ observed William Wechsler, a US National Security Council and Treasury official. ‘The fear was that Russia would become like a nuclear-armed Colombia. That prospect was terrifying but to me it was real…Then along comes Putin from the KGB, which was obviously not clean. In the subsequent fight between Putin and the oligarchs, everyone was saying it was a good-guy-bad-guy situation. To me, this was a bad-guy-bad-guy situation.’
‘Boris, if you go down this road, I predict in a year’s time you will be in exile…or worse, sitting in jail’
- ALEX GOLDFARB to Boris Berezovsky1
IN 1722, IN ORDER to transform the country from a disparate medieval society into a centralized autocratic state, Peter the Great set about purging the corruption that was endemic in Russian society. This included the elimination of everyone who took bribes. One of those targeted was Aleksandr Menshikov, his most successful general and the most powerful man after the Tsar himself. Menshikov was horrified. ‘If you do, Your Majesty, you risk not having a single subject left’, he told his monarch.2
When Vladimir Putin became President in 2000, he had less latitude than Peter the Great, who simply executed his more recalcitrant subjects. Even modern Russia’s arbitrary judicial system would not sanction summary executions of avaricious businessmen. Putin, who knew his history, would therefore have to come up with a different strategy to deal with a group he viewed as a major obstacle to his ambitions for the reshaping of Russia.
While there were whispers of a clampdown, the oligarchs believed they would retain their power and luxurious lifestyles and remain a protected species. After all, theirs was a cabal of the business elite who had engineered the new President’s ascendancy. Just as the oligarchs had connived and conspired to re-elect Yeltsin in 1996, so a group of them manipulated Putin into the Kremlin. In return for their backing, they expected Putin to be as malleable as his predecessor, allowing them to continue to exert influence, accumulate wealth, and be immune from prosecution. They badly misjudged him.
While Putin was Acting President and Prime Minister in 1999, there were signs of trouble to come, when the Prosecutor-General reviewed the way in which Vladimir Potanin, one of the architects of privatization, had acquired Norilsk Nickel, the giant state-owned mining group. ‘They were certainly feeling uncomfortable,’ said one government official. And with good reason. Within two months of becoming President, on the baking hot day of 28 July 2000, Putin summoned twenty-one oligarchs to the Kremlin. ‘It was more like a gathering ordered by Don Corleone than a meeting summoned by a leader of the Western world,’ noted one who was present.3 Khodorkovsky and Deripaska were both at the gathering but Berezovsky, now himself under investigation by the prosecutors, was not invited.
Before those assembled in the cabinet room, Putin effectively read Russia’s richest and most powerful business clique the riot act. He would not review the privatizations but they would no longer enjoy special privileges inside the Kremlin. During the meeting, Putin insisted that Potanin pay the $140 million he was alleged to owe on the purchase of Norilsk Nickel. At times the meeting became heated and at one stage the President pointed at a well-known tycoon and accused him of being guilty of ‘oligophrenia’ (which means ‘mental retardation’). The plutocrats were stunned. It was not the script they had been expecting.
The new confrontational President concluded the meeting - which lasted two hours and forty minutes - by setting up a permanent mechanism for consultations between businessmen and the state. The days of cliques and coteries were gone, he warned. Now the relationship was to be institutionalized. Access to Putin would be restricted through quarterly meetings with the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs - in effect, the oligarchs’ trade union.
Putin’s message to the shocked gathering was simple: they could keep their ill-gotten gains provided they kept out of politics and paid their taxes. The details of the meeting were promptly leaked so that in a poll a week later 57 per cent of Russians said they already knew about it. Berezovsky, omitted СКАЧАТЬ