Putin’s People. Catherine Belton

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СКАЧАТЬ on the Yeltsin Family from Primakov, so too perhaps was Boris Berezovsky, the wily, fast-talking oligarch who’d become the epitome of the insider dealing of the Yeltsin years, when a small coterie of businessmen bargained behind the scenes for prime assets and government posts. The former mathematician had earned his fortune running trading schemes for AvtoVAZ, the producer of the boxy Zhiguli car that symbolised the Soviet era, at a time when the car industry was steeped in organised crime. He’d survived an assassination attempt that decapitated his driver. Yet somehow he’d still found his way into the Kremlin. He’d hung out drinking tea in the office of Yeltsin’s chief bodyguard, Alexander Korzhakov, and then found his way into the graces of the president himself and his Family. All the while he cultivated ties among the leaders of Chechen separatists. Berezovsky’s LogoVAZ club, in a restored mansion in downtown Moscow, became an informal centre for government decision-making. At the height of his powers in 1996, the Yeltsin government’s ‘young reformers’ and oligarchs would gather there through the night to plot counter-coups against the hard-liners.

      By 1999, however, Berezovsky was politically toxic. His relations with members of the Yeltsin Family had come under target. Not only had the raid on his Sibneft oil major threatened to expose dealings with the oil-trading company of Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana’s then husband, Leonid Dyachenko, there was also a criminal investigation into his business operations through Aeroflot, the state’s national airline, in which he held a significant stake, and where the husband of Yeltsin’s second daughter, Elena, was president. The Family were seeking to jettison their relations with him. Rumours surfaced that his security company had been bugging the Family’s offices, and he’d been ousted in April from his Kremlin post as executive secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States, as the loose alliance of former Soviet republics was then known. Yumashev, for one, had tired of dealing with him. ‘There was only so many times he could hear Berezovsky telling him he didn’t understand,’ said one close Berezovsky associate.[101] ‘He began to get on his nerves.’ Berezovsky seemed to have been abandoned by all. And so when Vladimir Putin turned up at the birthday party of his wife Lena early in 1999, he was deeply touched by the show of solidarity when everyone else had their knives out for him.

      Putin’s gesture helped Berezovsky set aside qualms about his KGB past.[102] Initially, he’d chiefly supported Aksyonenko, the railways minister, as Yeltsin’s successor – his relations with Putin had chilled distinctly that year after Putin, as FSB chief, ordered the arrest and March 1999 jailing of the FSB officer closest to him, Alexander Litvinenko. But, faced with the constant threat of arrest, Berezovsky eventually fell in line behind Putin’s candidacy. Later, always a mythmaker about the extent of his influence in Yeltsin’s Kremlin, Berezovsky liked to claim that it was he who had helped bring Putin to power, by proposing him to Yumashev as FSB chief in the summer of 1998. He said he’d then held secret meetings with Putin in the lift of the FSB’s imposing Lubyanka headquarters, where they’d discussed Putin possibly running for the presidency.[103] The two men had met only fleetingly prior to that, when Berezovsky visited St Petersburg in the early nineties and Putin assisted him in opening his LogoVAZ car dealership there. That was a business riven with the mafia, and Berezovsky must have known about Putin’s links with organised crime there, said one Berezovsky associate: ‘Putin helped him in all questions connected to the sale of LogoVAZ cars in St Petersburg. This business was a mafia business, a bandit business, and in Moscow Berezovsky organised this with the help of Chechens and the corrupt bureaucracy. In St Petersburg he organised this with Putin’s help. Therefore he understood everything about his connections and his situation. He wasn’t a child.’[104]

      But although Berezovsky was undoubtedly to play an enormous role in helping secure the defeat of Primakov later that year, he had never known or worked as closely with Putin as Pugachev had. And according to one of his closest associates, Alex Goldfarb, he never claimed to have been the one to introduce Putin to Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, or to suggest him as a replacement for Stepashin, or as Yeltsin’s successor.[105]

      *

      The moment everything changed came in the middle of July, in the dog days of the Moscow summer, when the Kremlin was emptying and many, including Yeltsin, were away on vacation. It was then that the Swiss prosecutors presented the Yeltsin Family with another shock. They’d thought the Mabetex case had been dealt with – Skuratov had been suspended from his position for several months by then, as a result of the criminal case Pugachev had helped open. But the Swiss were still active – and so were Skuratov’s deputies. On July 14, the Swiss prosecutors announced that they’d opened a criminal case into money laundering through Swiss bank accounts by twenty-four Russians, including Pavel Borodin and other senior Kremlin officials, and alleged that the funds may have been obtained through ‘corruption or abuse of power’. When asked whether the list included Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, one of the Swiss investigating magistrates answered, ‘Not yet.’[106] It was clear that they were circling, and according to Pugachev, a fresh sense of panic set in.

      The Geneva prosecutors said their Russian partners were still conducting a parallel inquiry. It was then, Pugachev said, that he decided to act: ‘We needed someone who would be able to deal with it all. Stepashin wasn’t going to do it. But there was Putin with the FSB, the Security Council, Patrushev. There was an entire team.’[107] Pugachev remembered Putin’s coolness when he handled the Skuratov tape, and said he decided to introduce him to Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, who in those days was still the main channel to the president. As if on cue, a day later Putin’s FSB had taken action, opening a criminal investigation into the construction business owned by the wife of the Yeltsins’ political opponent, the Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov.[108] Pugachev had first sought to undermine Tatyana’s view of Stepashin, demonstrating to her how, unlike Putin, he had failed to vigorously defend the tape of Skuratov and the prostitutes after it had been aired on TV. ‘I told her, “Tanya, look. You need a person who will save you. Stepashin will make compromises with the Communists. He will compromise us in front of our eyes. Look at how he is now.”’[109] Then he said he’d taken Putin from his office in the Kremlin’s Security Council to her. ‘I told her Putin was a much clearer person. He is young and listens attentively. Stepashin doesn’t listen any more.’ Pugachev claimed that Yumashev later persuaded her to go to her father and convince him to make the switch.

      Yumashev insisted, however, that Pugachev played no role in Putin’s rise, while the criminal case in Switzerland and the investigation in the US had never posed a threat at all: ‘Of course, it was total rubbish that this was dangerous,’ Yumashev said. ‘The only thought I had – and Voloshin shared this view, and Yeltsin too – was that power was being given to a person who mentally, ideologically and politically was exactly the same as us. We’d worked together in the Kremlin as one team. There was an absolutely common understanding with Putin on how the world should work and how Russia should work.’[110]

      But these were the days when everything was decided. Stepashin’s world – and the chances for a more liberal administration – were to be swept away. There was no pressing reason to risk replacing Stepashin with Putin, a relatively unknown official, unless the Yeltsin Family needed someone they considered more loyal – and more ruthless – because of the risk presented by the escalating Mabetex probe. Yumashev tried to explain the switch with lame-sounding reasons, for instance that Stepashin was under the thumb of his wife. He liked to tell long, contorted tales of the many arguments he’d made in those days for why they had to act quickly, before it was too late to replace Stepashin, who just was not the right fit. But no explanation other than the rising panic over the Swiss probe made any sense. This was the motive the Yeltsin Family never wanted told, for it revealed how the Family’s rush to save itself was the inadvertent cause of Putin’s rise and its world’s demise. They needed a tough guy to protect their interests, and got more than they bargained for. In his authorised narrative, Yumashev didn’t want to give credence to any of this. Pugachev was the narrator who strayed from the Kremlin’s official version, and appears to have told the truth.[111]

      At first Yeltsin had hesitated. But in the last week of July, Chechen rebels began to mount armed attacks on the СКАЧАТЬ