Death of a Dissident (8 page)

For Sasha, the war in Chechnya was at first essentially a sideshow, a distraction, which diverted the Agency’s attention and resources from what he saw as the core problem: corruption and crime among the police and the services. He was sure that the war would end quickly, as the president and the generals had promised. For nearly a year he had spent long nights at home at the kitchen table, drawing colored charts of mob connections with the top brass of the FSB and the Ministry of the Interior. He even wrote a memorandum about it, addressed to Yeltsin, which Marina retyped at least a dozen times.

But after meeting Berezovsky, he never sent it. Boris seemed to offer a better way to advance his mission: a direct connection to the Kremlin. He pestered Boris with stories about the ties certain generals had with either the Solntsevo or Kurgan or Podolsk gangs, the world he knew so well. Finally, Boris arranged meetings for him not just with Korzhakov, but also with Mikhail Barsukov, the director of the FSB, and Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Vladimir Ovchinsky, so that they could hear directly from Sasha what was going on in their agencies.

But the meetings did not go well. As Korzhakov recalled in an interview with
Komsomolskaya Pravda
on December 14, 2006, he did not like Sasha and what he had to say: “This major came, thin, unshaven, shaggy-haired, with worn, unpolished shoes, wearing a pair of Chinese work trousers, his sweater hanging down to his knees. His eyes darted around.” Korzhakov heard him out for an hour and a half, and then he “asked around. It turned out that one of my friends worked in the ‘bad’ department that Litvinenko had ‘ratted out.’ I had served with him back in Afghanistan. I trusted him, he was a perfectly
normal guy, a fighter. I asked him to come see me and I told him about Litvinenko’s visit. He said, ‘You know me, don’t you? You can’t believe Litvinenko, the creep makes up denunciations.’”

Ovchinsky was another reluctant listener to whom Sasha made his case. “He was strange, hard to understand,” Ovchinsky told the Latvian newspaper
Chas
in an interview on December 30, 2006. “He would come and report to me about our people who were working on organized crime. He tried to expose corruption in the leadership of the Ministry. At first I thought Litvinenko was kind of a Boy Scout, who cared so much about the work … He did accuse a lot of people, he mentioned the names of famous professionals. But you see, nothing of what he said was confirmed.”

“I was so naÏve,” Sasha said about those meetings. “I thought that since they were the big bosses, they would take care of it and stop the mayhem in the services. Not in the least. Every time the threads led high enough, it turned out that the person involved was somebody’s buddy or relative or comrade in arms. The only thing I achieved is a certain reputation: as the village idiot. And then I discovered that the higher-ups were even more involved with criminals than was middle management. And not surprisingly, they bought up all these mansions and Mercedes cars even though they had measly salaries. The whole system was rotten to the core. I collected a lot of material on the topic.”

On our drive to Istanbul, Sasha gave me a three-hour lecture on the life and mores of Kontora circa 1995. How corruption was systematic. How, with the old Marxist ideology dried up, the mission had vanished. How the vacuum was filled by money.

“The FSB continued gathering information,” he explained. “And information is a commodity. Information is power. It can be used to solve problems in the marketplace, to put pressure on the competition. The FSB found its market.”

The courts did not work, nor did the laws. “If your partner bilked you, or a creditor did not pay, or a supplier did not deliver—where did you turn to complain? I’m not even talking about the
primitive rackets from which you need protection. When force became a commodity, there was a demand for it. Roofs appeared, people who sheltered and protected your business.

“First it was provided by the mob, then the police, and soon enough our own guys realized what was what, and then the rivalry began among gangsters, cops, and the Agency for market share. As the police and the FSB became more competitive, they squeezed the gangs out of the market. But in many cases competition gave way to cooperation, and the services became gangsters themselves.”

One thing on which his friends and enemies all agreed is that Sasha had a phenomenal memory. He kept hundreds of episodes, addresses, telephone numbers, and names in his head. Altogether they formed a horrifying picture of a criminal wave gradually engulfing the agencies of law and order in the new Russia.

By the time we reached Istanbul on that Halloween night in 2000 we had bonded, and not just as friends and partners in Sasha’s flight to freedom. We had discovered parallel tracks in each other’s lives, connected by Boris Berezovsky and by two very different approaches to the same goal: keeping Russia open and free.

For him, 1995 was a watershed year. He grew ever more convinced that there was no easy victory in sight in the war he was waging, but he thought that Boris Berezovsky and the people in the Kremlin would help him. For me, 1995 was the beginning of my entrée into the tumultuous world of Kremlin oligarchs and its inner-circle power struggle.

Moscow, spring 1995

We drove through the exclusive Rublyovka neighborhood, an enclave of summer homes of Kremlin inhabitants since the days of Stalin. I had been here before my emigration from Russia, in the 1970s. Outwardly, everything looked as in the old Soviet days: the same ochre-colored walls with barbed wire on top, the same heavy gates with peepholes for guards, the same No Stopping signs along the highway.

We pulled into a driveway. My driver honked, and a security guard in paramilitary fatigues came out of a booth. He stared impassively, then waved us on. An iron gate screeched open, and we drove into a huge pine grove. Beyond the trees stood a brick home in classic government-dacha style: dull blocks of red brick and concrete. The location was impressive, with a spectacular view of the Moscow River. My companion, Arkady Evstafiev, press secretary to First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais, explained that it was once the dacha of Nikolai Rhyzhkov, the last prime minister of the USSR.

Earlier that day, when Arkady had telephoned me to say “I’d like you to meet somebody,” he wouldn’t tell me who it was.

“You will see. I can’t talk over the telephone.”

Now we were ushered through the house by a butler who looked
like a security guard and out onto the back lawn, to a tea table covered with a white tablecloth, set in a pool of sunlight. My host introduced himself with a quip.

“Say, is this like Soros’s home, or do we still have some work to do?” It was Boris Berezovsky.

We were waited on by four young, poker-faced fellows in dinner jackets and white gloves, who seemed completely out of place amid the spring greenery or, for that matter, at the harsh, Party-style building. There were several other people at the table, but Berezovsky dominated. He gave an inspiring speech about the future of Russian television, delivered at machine-gun speed, obviously unable to keep up with his train of thought.

Dressed in jeans and a sweater, Berezovsky looked even more out of place, neither an apparatchik nor, seemingly, a capitalist. He was more of a mad mathematician, breathlessly explaining a theorem of profound elegance, while his listeners were preoccupied with petty, mundane concerns. In the flesh, he seemed much nicer than on television; his bald head gleamed in the sun but somehow didn’t age his youthful, expressive face. His fierce dark eyes and constant gesticulations conveyed much more energy in person than on the screen.

Berezovsky’s opening quip was more than just a nouveau riche icebreaker. He had summoned me because I worked for George Soros, hoping to lure that legendary billionaire into becoming his backer in major privatization deals that were on the horizon. I had more or less guessed why I had been invited to Berezovsky’s tea table. What I did not realize was that I was about to enter a new planet of the solar system—BorisWorld—which I would be navigating for the next decade.

I tried to respond politely to Berezovsky’s quip. El Mirador, Soros’s summer home, is a lovely Mexican-style hacienda in Southampton on Long Island. The best I could manage was, “There is some resemblance, although the building is in a different style.”

“Well, as soon as we are done with the elections, we’ll deal with real estate,” Berezovsky replied. “I’d like to invite Mr. Soros to my
dacha when he is next in Moscow. We need to learn from him. The way he shorted the pound, what an outrageous guy, top-notch!”

Berezovsky was referring to September 16, 1992, a.k.a. Black Wednesday, when Soros played against the British government on currency markets around the world, forced the British to devalue the pound, and made a billion dollars in a day. This earned him the sobriquet “the man who broke the Bank of England.”

Soros’s Black Wednesday fame made him a role model for the new breed of Russian capitalists, but George himself was of two minds about the goings-on in Russia. His principal interlocutor there was Anatoly Chubais, and he reacted to Chubais’s privatization explosion with a mixture of amazement and disapproval. On the one hand, he could not help but admire Chubais’s grandiose feats: in a little over three years, the youthful first deputy prime minister had essentially reversed the revolution of the Bolsheviks, who seventy years previously had shed rivers of blood expropriating private property. Chubais transferred much of that state property back into private hands, almost without bloodshed—that is, not counting the storming of the Supreme Soviet in 1993, or the several hundred victims of “business disputes” across the country.

Yet to Soros, Chubais wasn’t doing things quite the way he would. The arrogant, abrasive first deputy prime minister was not just an archenemy of the Communists. He was a radical free-marketeer who assumed the rule of law would somehow automatically follow in the wake of economic freedom. If the economy was opened up, social relations would work themselves out. Soros, on the other hand, was horrified at the ugly consequences of the no-holds-barred brand of capitalism. Their dispute broke into the open in January 1995, at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, where Chubais announced to the world that privatization in Russia had bred a new class of property owners, people who would make up the backbone of the new free Russia.