Putin’s People. Catherine Belton

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СКАЧАТЬ that Primakov was brought in,’ said Yumashev. ‘Now he was behaving in violation of all our agreements.’[59] There was also a suggestion that Yumashev’s replacement as chief of staff with a security man, Nikolai Bordyuzha, an officer from the border guards, was part of an effort to remove the taint of the Family from Yeltsin’s rule.

      Sergei Pugachev claimed that he took it upon himself to try to reach a deal behind the scenes with the Federation Council, to make sure Skuratov was eliminated from view.[60] But the politically powerful regional governors on the Council were consolidating around Primakov and Luzhkov against the Kremlin. In the meantime, the ever-rising tension over Skuratov’s investigation was starting to reach the top layers of Yeltsin’s Kremlin. Horrified at where it might lead, they began to drop away one by one. First, Yeltsin was hospitalised again, for a bleeding ulcer. Then Nikolai Bordyuzha wound up in the Central Clinical Hospital after apparently suffering a heart attack shortly to be joined there by Pavel Borodin, the earthy head of the Kremlin property department and the focus of the Mabetex probe.[61] The Kremlin was rapidly emptying, and in the apparent vacuum Skuratov slipped back to work.[62]

      On March 9, more than a month after Skuratov was supposed to have departed, the Federation Council finally scheduled the vote on his resignation.[63] Yet still Pugachev’s efforts to secure the governors’ votes for his removal failed. On the day of the vote, March 17, Skuratov arrived unexpectedly to address the Council, and gave a blistering speech claiming he was under attack from powerful enemies close to the Russian president, and calling on the senators to reject his resignation.[64] They voted down his resignation almost unanimously.

      Rumours of a tape compromising Skuratov had already wafted through the media. But, stung by the collapse of the vote, Yumashev and the still little-known Vladimir Putin, who the summer before had been appointed head of the FSB, took matters into their own hands, claimed Pugachev. They handed the copy of the tape to a federal TV channel, which then aired it to millions of viewers across the country, with little regard for the modesty of Skuratov or the feelings of his family. They just wanted him out. ‘Skuratov is an idiot,’ said Pugachev. ‘We wanted to deal with it decently, but he dug in his heels.’[65]

      It was then, Pugachev said, that he first began to really notice Putin. The day after the video was aired, Putin gave a press conference together with Sergei Stepashin, the country’s interior minister, at which he vowed that the tape was authentic. In comparison to Putin’s clear, insistent manner, Stepashin kept his eyes glued to the floor, as if embarrassed to be part of the show. Pugachev said it was then that he began to see Putin as someone he could rely on:[66] ‘He spoke very coolly. He looked like a hero on TV. This was the first time I noticed. No one else was thinking of him then. But I thought, he looks good on TV. We’ll make him president.’[67]

      Despite everything, Skuratov was still in position, and was increasing the pressure over the Mabetex affair. On March 23, while Swiss prosecutor Carla del Ponte was visiting Moscow again, matters reached boiling point. Skuratov sent a team of prosecutors to seize documents from Borodin’s property department, as well as to the Moscow offices of Mabetex.[68] The raid by a prosecutor on a Kremlin office was unprecedented. The Family – and Borodin and Pugachev – were in shock. The theatrics were already ominous, but the old guard had a further point to make. That same day, a leading Communist lawmaker, Viktor Ilyukhin, stepped up the pressure another notch, holding a press conference at which he claimed he’d received evidence that part of the $4.8 billion bailout loan granted to Russia by the International Monetary Fund at the height of the 1998 financial crisis had been siphoned off to companies linked to the Yeltsin Family, including $235 million through what looked to be an Australian bank, Bank of Sydney, to a company 25 per cent owned by Leonid Dyachenko.[69] The media furore reached fever pitch, with political analysts saying they were no longer sure whether Yeltsin could secure the support of the army.

      Pugachev said he returned to the Federation Council to press for another vote on Skuratov’s resignation.[70] But the former Communist senator who led it once again indicated that he had more powerful backers elsewhere. Pugachev then went to see Luzhkov, the Moscow mayor, whose voice was carrying ever greater weight with the senators of the upper chamber. But Luzhkov had been trying to stack the parliamentary vote against the Kremlin ever since the August financial crisis hit. He’d developed his own ambitions for power, said Yumashev: ‘Luzhkov was working actively in the Federation Council. He was telling the heads of the regions, “I will be president and I will give you this and do this for you. We are fighting the president, and the prosecutor general for us is a powerful resource.” In essence, there was a fight for the future of the presidency.’[71] ‘Luzhkov was boasting he had 40,000 guys from the Moscow interior ministry behind him, as well as the local FSB,’ said Pugachev.[72] ‘Primakov and Luzhkov had been working to get the support of tens of thousands across the mid-level of the army. This was starting to look like a real state coup.’ One Russian tycoon close to Luzhkov said the Moscow mayor’s political weight had indeed risen rapidly: ‘Against the background of the flailing Yeltsin, it was clear he was the new centre of power. Marshals and generals began coming to him. They came to bow to the new tsar. They were asking for orders from him.’[73]

      What happened next, Pugachev insists, was motivated by the best intentions. He said that he could not allow Primakov and his crew to come to power and endanger the freedoms of the Yeltsin years, and that he’d felt the stench of Soviet stagnation and corruption as soon as Primakov and his team had entered the White House: ‘The first thing they did was ask for bribes. I’d spent so much effort making sure the democrats remained in power and the Communists were kept out,’ he said, referring to his efforts in Yeltsin’s 1996 re-election campaign. ‘You need to understand that the Yeltsin Family were normal people. This was nothing compared to the corruption you see today. My idea was not to let it all collapse.’[74] But fears over the money trail Skuratov was pursuing and where it could lead undoubtedly weighed heavier still.

      Skuratov had spent the morning of April 1 handing over a report to Yeltsin on what he said were the illegal Swiss bank accounts of twenty-four Russians.[75] By the evening, Yeltsin’s Kremlin had launched another attempt to oust Skuratov from his post. Skuratov’s deputy, Yury Chaika, and the chief military prosecutor Yury Demin were called in to the office of the Kremlin chief of staff, by then a Berezovsky associate named Alexander Voloshin, a slight, bearded economist.[76] There, Voloshin, together with Putin, Nikolai Patrushev, who’d risen with Putin through the St Petersburg KGB and had served for the past four years in senior positions in the FSB, and Pugachev leaned on them to launch a criminal case against Skuratov, claimed Pugachev. They wanted him suspended for cavorting with the prostitutes.

      Chaika and Demin were scared. ‘They didn’t understand why they were there. It was like a meeting of deaf and blind,’ said Pugachev. ‘They were both frightened. “How can we open a criminal case against the prosecutor general?” they said. They were looking at who was there at the meeting. Putin was no one then, Patrushev was no one. They looked at us and thought, “We’ll end up outsiders, and then we’ll be accused of organising a state coup.” I could see this going through their heads. I understood this in five minutes. So I called them away individually.’

      Pugachev said he went to a meeting room opposite Voloshin’s office. First, he called in Chaika. ‘I asked him, “What do you want to open a criminal case?” But I saw there was no chance. Then I called in Demin, and asked him, “Are you ready to be prosecutor general?”’ Seeing that his offers of rich rewards and promotions in return for cooperation were having little effect, Pugachev asked them to at least explain in detail what would be needed to open a criminal case. ‘We talked for six hours, going over it all. They said only a prosecutor general could launch a case against a prosecutor general. I said, “Look,” to Chaika, “you are the first deputy and you will become the acting prosecutor general. You can open a case against the former prosecutor general.” But he said, “No, the Federation Council has to sign off on it.” I said that if there was no criminal case, the Federation Council wasn’t going to sign off on it. And we went round and round in circles for hours. I understood that it was not possible СКАЧАТЬ