Читать книгу From Russia with Blood - Heidi Blake - Страница 10
ОглавлениеMoscow and St. Petersburg—1994
The Moscow sky was choked with snow as a small, stout tycoon climbed out of his limousine, his black eyes glittering with restless energy. Boris Berezovsky hastened toward the grand prerevolutionary mansion that served as his command center, followed by a phalanx of bodyguards. The godfather of the oligarchs was rarely unhurried, and today was no exception. Berezovsky was expanding his empire.
The building, a restored nineteenth-century merchant’s residence, was set in an exclusive enclave of central Moscow close to the Bolshoy Ustinsky Bridge, over the frozen Moskva River, from which the Kremlin’s domes could be seen blooming brightly against the iron sky. Berezovsky had shut off the road leading to his headquarters by blocking it at both ends, turning it into a private club for Moscow’s emerging business and political elite. Inside, it was smoky and sumptuous, with stuccoed ceilings, grand chandeliers, and ornate Italian furniture arrayed around a bar stocked with the finest wines rubles could buy.
The renowned Soviet mathematician, engineer, and chess obsessive had transformed his fortunes since the fall of the USSR, and now, in his midforties, he could call himself rich for the first time. As soon as the Iron Curtain came down, he seized the moment to start importing German cars and the enterprise exploded as Russia opened up for business. Berezovsky soon became the biggest distributor for the state-owned car manufacturer, Avtovaz, profiting massively by acquiring its Ladas in bulk on consignment and paying for them later, once the money had been devalued by rampant hyperinflation sparked by the sudden removal of Soviet price controls. His company, Logovaz, had made hundreds of millions that way, and it had become the official Russian dealer for Mercedes-Benz, Chrysler, Chevrolet, and several other prestigious Western marques. Logovaz was among the first big success stories of the new capitalist Russia. But Berezovsky always wanted more.
As he strode through the grand entrance of the Logovaz Club on this biting January morning, the businessman’s prized possession—his hulking mobile telephone—began trilling insistently. The caller was Logovaz’s general director, Yuli Dubov. He was overseeing the company’s latest grand expansion, and he had hit upon a major problem.
The city government of St. Petersburg was refusing to issue the papers confirming that Logovaz owned the site of the new flagship service center it was building for Mercedes in Russia’s second city. Opening without the right documentation would make the center a sitting duck for extortion by the city’s notoriously corrupt officials and marauding criminal gangs, and the date when the German car giant was expecting it to be up and running was fast approaching.
“Our people can’t do anything,” Dubov said, sounding desperate. “And this could really damage our relationship with Stuttgart.”
Berezovsky knew exactly what needed to be done. “You’ll have to go and see Putin,” he said.
Dubov was mystified. “Who the hell is Putin?”
As the limousine swept through the snow-cloaked St. Petersburg streets, past the golden domes of the Kazan Cathedral and the gleaming columns of the Winter Palace, Dubov reflected on what little he knew about the man he was getting ready to meet for lunch. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Berezovsky had explained, was the city’s deputy mayor—an unfailingly loyal but ever more powerful lieutenant to the aging Anatoly Sobchak—and these days he was the one who ran the show.
“He’s a really good person,” Berezovsky had told him. “And he’s really in charge of what’s going on in the city.” Dubov had entertained many politicians in Moscow as Logovaz built its business, and he was in little doubt about how the meeting with Putin would go. He would have to spend hours plying the deputy mayor with delicious food, fabulous wine, and plenty of vodka before they turned to the problem at hand and what it would cost to solve it.
As he strode into the restaurant, brushing the snow from his coat sleeves, Dubov saw two men in gray suits seated in the lounge. They rose as he entered. The smaller man, who introduced himself as Vladimir Vladimirovich, was slight and mousy with a cautious manner to match his sober tie. If you put him next to the wall, Dubov thought, you wouldn’t see the difference. The other man, who was introduced as Putin’s secretary, Igor Sechin, stood to attention at his side with an attaché case in one hand and a large mobile telephone in the other. Dubov thought them an oddly austere pair.
The two men declined a drink and stayed standing. With ten minutes to go until the table was ready, Dubov ventured a few comments about the weather in St. Petersburg, which, he felt it fair to say, was dirty. When those efforts at conversation met with stony silence, and no other topics appeared to be forthcoming, he decided to be done with it and plunge ahead with his request.
Logovaz had already paid for the plot of land where its new Mercedes center would be situated, and the building works were almost complete, he explained. But the city government was withholding the documentation granting the company the formal rights to the site. Could the deputy mayor do anything to help?
“Give me one minute,” said Putin, taking the telephone from Sechin, extending the antenna, and walking smartly to the window.
When he returned, he handed the phone back to Sechin and turned to Dubov. “The documents will be finalized and given to you as soon as you come to the office,” he said, reaching for his coat. “Goodbye.”
“What about lunch?” asked Dubov, taken aback.
“I thought I was coming here for lunch,” said Putin. “But it turned out I came here to resolve some of your business problems. Since I have done that, there is no need to spend time eating and talking.” With that, he and Sechin spun on their heels and stalked out, leaving Dubov staring after them in blank astonishment.
“This is a very strange guy you introduced me to,” he told Berezovsky back at the Logovaz Club in Moscow. What sort of politician declines a free lunch in exchange for a favor?
Berezovsky smiled. “Yes,” he said. “He is very special.”
A few years earlier, when he first began importing cars into St. Petersburg, Berezovsky had approached Putin, then a young functionary in Sobchak’s administration, and offered him a small inducement to help smooth over a few administrative matters. To his astonishment, Putin declined. He was, to Berezovsky’s knowledge, the first Russian official who didn’t take bribes. The experience had made a huge impression, and since then he had made a point of swinging by Putin’s office for a chat whenever he was in St. Petersburg. It was a useful alliance for Berezovsky when he needed to pull strings in Russia’s second city. And the reach of Putin’s influence didn’t seem to stop at city hall.
The punctilious young deputy mayor appeared to hold significant sway over the powerful organized crime groups that terrorized St. Petersburg. The Russian mafia had mushroomed into the vacuum created by the implosion of the Soviet security state, and the car industry was a particularly gangster-infested line of business, with hoodlums using brute force to steal whole consignments of new cars and seize control of lucrative dealerships. That made opening a shiny new Mercedes service center in the heart of St. Petersburg a perilous game. But Putin had sufficient status with the city’s most powerful mafia group—the Tambovskaya Bratva, known as the Tambov gang—to guarantee the security of Berezovsky’s operations as well as help smooth over bureaucratic glitches with the city government.
Berezovsky was sure Putin was special. How else could he have risen up through the corrupt ranks of St. Petersburg officialdom and acquired such standing with the mob without tarnishing his seemingly spotless morals? Why else would he be so helpful without wanting anything in return?
But the fact was that Putin did want something very much indeed, and Berezovsky was uniquely well placed to give it him. It just wasn’t a free lunch or a car or a bundle of money. It was the keys to the Kremlin.
Boris Yeltsin had seen off the Communists and come to power in 1991 promising to propel the Russian people out of the darkness of their totalitarian past into the dawn of a free and prosperous future. His strategy, under the tutelage of the World Bank and other bastions of Western capitalism, was to submit the country’s creaking socialist economy to a radical regimen of capitalist shock therapy involving the sudden withdrawal of price controls and the mass privatization of state assets. That, coupled with a decision to plug the state’s budget deficit by printing reams of rubles, prompted a prolonged period of hyperinflation that wiped out savings and plunged ordinary Russians into abject poverty. But for a fortunate few, the shock to the Soviet system shook loose a windfall of unimaginable riches.
Berezovsky had won favor with the first freely elected president of Russia by bankrolling the publication of his memoir. Notes of a President was a dismal commercial flop when it hit the market, in 1993, but Berezovsky made sure the author was handsomely paid, pleasing the vainglorious Yeltsin sufficiently to gain admittance to his private circle. From there, Berezovsky made a beeline for the president’s influential daughter, Tatiana, lavishing her with gifts and largesse until the pair became fast friends. So it was that he became a central member of what came to be known as the Kremlin Family, the intimate group who counseled Yeltsin as he dismantled the Soviet state apparatus and carved up its assets. The businessman could hardly have profited more abundantly from his coveted place in the president’s court.
Berezovsky had made a fortune out of hyperinflation at Logovaz, and now he planned to use it to buy up as many state assets as he could lay his hands on. The Soviet ban on private business had given rise to some forty-five thousand state-owned enterprises, including the country’s vast oil, gas, and mineral concerns, and they were all coming up for grabs at rock-bottom prices in Yeltsin’s fire sale. Berezovsky had the money and the Kremlin connections required to clean up in the auctions, but there was one more thing he needed to do. There was no way to prosper in the smash-and-grab chaos of post-Soviet Russia without getting into bed with the mob.
Gangsterism in Russia had exploded—left unchecked by the collapse of the Soviet security state, which had the multiplier effect of driving thousands of disbanded KGB officers into a life of organized crime. As the rest of the country emerged blinking from the suffocation of the Soviet system, its mafia groups were way ahead of the game. They boasted many of Russia’s brightest and best businessmen (the Soviets having allowed enterprising citizens no other path to prosperity), decades of commercial experience running the country’s de facto private sector—the black market—and deep political connections from years of supplying luxury goods to the Communist elite. So they swooped as soon as the auctions began, buying up swaths of Russia’s energy, mineral, telecom, and transport sectors. And capitalism opened up another major revenue stream: anyone who dared to do private business in Russia without paying the mob for krysha—protection, or, literally, “roof”—was intimidated, run out of town, or murdered. Not for nothing did Yeltsin call his country “the biggest mafia state in the world” in 1994, warning of “the superpower of crime that is devouring the state from top to bottom.” The mob had taken over—and if Berezovsky intended to survive in the hurly-burly new world of Russian business, he needed to find his way into the fold.
That was where Badri Patarkatsishvili came into the picture. The mustachioed Georgian businessman was a well-connected figure in the post-Soviet underworld, with powerful allies in the Moscow mafia and deep ties to criminal elements within the state security apparatus. He held a senior position with the state car maker in the Georgian capital until Berezovsky recognized the value of his criminal pedigree and poached him to become deputy director of Logovaz in Moscow. Patarkatsishvili’s most prized connection was with the Georgian mafia boss and champion wrestler Otari Kvantrishvili, among the most powerful organized crime kingpins operating out of Moscow in the 1990s. Kvantrishvili had become something of a figurehead for the mob in the early days of mass privatization, befriending key politicians and settling disputes between rival criminal factions vying for the most sought-after assets coming up for sale. Patarkatsishvili arrived in the capital at the end of 1993, just in time to get intimately connected in the Moscow underworld before Kvantrishvili was shot dead by a sniper while walking through a parking lot.
With Patarkatsishvili on board, Berezovsky had the unholy trinity of key connections required to get rich and stay alive in post-Soviet Russia: the mafia, the Kremlin, and the security service. He had also, it turned out, met his soul mate. Boris and Badri, as the soon-to-be inseparable pair were always known, made instant sense as a partnership. Berezovsky was a man of extreme tastes and tempers—irresistibly magnetic, fantastically persuasive, and hopelessly impractical. Patarkatsishvili was the polar opposite, with his twirling white mustache and fondness for fur hats. His avuncular outward appearance concealed a ruthless inner steel, and he always got the job done. It was like two halves of a whole had come together: Berezovsky brought the ideas; Patarkatsishvili put them into practice. An extraordinary business partnership had been born.
Boris and Badri went on to acquire an astonishing array of state assets at a fraction of their true value in Yeltsin’s privatization auctions, making them multibillionaires almost instantaneously. They began by parlaying Logovaz’s lucrative dealership contract with Avtovaz into a controlling stake in the state-owned car manufacturer before acquiring major interests in the national airline, Aeroflot, several big banks, and much of the country’s aluminum industry. The jewel in the crown came when they teamed up to help another budding oligarch, Roman Abramovich, buy the country’s largest oil company, Sibneft, for $100 million—a drop in the bucket of the billions it was really worth.
Having thus enriched themselves, Boris and Badri saw another opportunity to expand their power—by buying up the mass-media companies that were flourishing in the sudden absence of state censorship. Their media interests—including the national newspaper Kommersant and Russia’s leading television station, Channel One—gave them a portal into 98 percent of Russian households and proved an invaluable political bargaining chip.
By the mid-1990s, the old Soviet mathematician was the undisputed kingpin of a new kleptocracy emerging from the ashes of the Soviet state. But with that kind of power, inexorably, came great peril.
The early evening sun slanted under the overhanging eaves of the Logovaz Club, where Berezovsky’s silver Mercedes 600 limousine was purring in readiness for his departure. The oligarch strode briskly from the rear entrance and into the armored vehicle, giving a nod to the bodyguard holding the door open as he slid into the back seat. It was a mild summer evening in 1994, and the streets were still and quiet. But as the chauffeur cleared Berezovsky’s private drive and pulled onto the public road, the serenity was splintered by a massive explosion that blew the Mercedes skyward, ripping through the bulletproof door and pelting Berezovsky’s face with shards of metal and glass. When the smoke cleared, he saw the headless body in front: his chauffeur had been decapitated. Clambering out of the smoldering wreckage, Berezovsky found the street strewn with the bodies of half a dozen badly wounded pedestrians and the blackened remnants of a blue Opel that had been parked by the curb. The car had been packed with half a kilo of explosives, ready to detonate by remote control as soon as he drove by.
Berezovsky spent several weeks recovering from his burns and facial lacerations at a clinic in Switzerland—a home away from home, since this was where he stashed much of the cash he was siphoning off from the companies he’d bought from the state. When he returned to Moscow, he was called to a meeting with the young state security officer who had been put in charge of investigating the blast. His name was Alexander Litvinenko.
The meticulous young official had visited the site of the explosion, spoken to witnesses, and delved through countless intelligence files tracking the activities of Russia’s organized crime networks, but he had been unable to identify who had ordered the hit on Berezovsky. The only real lead was that Logovaz had recently become embroiled in a loan dispute with a bank controlled by a Moscow mobster named Sergei Timofeev—known across the city as Sylvester, thanks to a passing resemblance to Sylvester Stallone—though Berezovsky was tight-lipped on that subject. Litvinenko was coming up against a brick wall, but there was one thing he could be sure of: the attack on Berezovsky would be considered a shot across the bows of the oligarch’s protectors in the Moscow mafia. If they identified the culprit, retaliation was sure to follow.
Four months after the car bomb outside the Logovaz Club, police found another burned-out vehicle in central Moscow. The smart sedan had been decimated by a bomb attached to the underside of the chassis, and inside was a badly mangled body. It belonged to Sylvester.
Litvinenko never established for sure who was behind the attack on Berezovsky. Nor was Sylvester’s murder ever solved, although rumors swirled in the Moscow underworld that he had faked his own death and skipped the country. But Berezovsky was taken with the conscientious young officer, with his keen blue eyes, boyishly short-cropped sandy hair, and exact manner. The pair exchanged telephone numbers and agreed to stay in touch.
Litvinenko was an anomaly among Russia’s state security officials. He was an idealist, a teetotaler, and a stickler for law and order—all rare qualities in post-Soviet Moscow. He’d cut his teeth in the chaotic final days of the KGB in his early twenties, and after the old state security apparatus was dismantled, in 1991, he’d won his dream job as a major in the organized crime unit of the FSB.
Underneath his orderly exterior Litvinenko was a live wire, prone to fits of great excitement and passion, but his training at the KGB’s academy had taught him to direct that energy with pinpoint precision. He was fanatical about record keeping, maintaining an immaculate notebook that he loved to show off to fellow detectives, and neatly filing every document he gathered as he investigated the messy business of the Russian mob.
Work had always been Litvinenko’s first love, but recently he’d found another grand passion worthy of his high-octane energy. His new fiancée, Marina, was a hypnotically elegant ballroom dancer with smoky blue eyes and high Slavic cheekbones, and he’d pursued her with all his boyish vigor after they met at a friend’s apartment, turning up unannounced with gifts of flowers and bunches of bananas, her favorite fruit. After a dizzying romance, she had just given birth to their son, Anatoly, and now the couple were getting ready to marry. But just as life at home was settling perfectly into place, all his security in the job he loved started suddenly to unravel.
Litvinenko was gathering mountains of explosive dirt on the activities of Russia’s biggest mobsters as he eavesdropped on their phone calls, recruited informants from within their closest circles, and studied their connections with politicians and officials. And as he delved into the activities of one particularly powerful criminal network, he made a series of disturbing discoveries that shook his faith in the new Russia.
Litvinenko had unearthed evidence that the Tambov gang was working in cahoots with state security officials to smuggle heroin into the St. Petersburg seaport and onward to western Europe, operating under the protection of powerful figures within the city administration. As he dug deeper, one name kept coming up: Vladimir Putin.
Putin was a KGB man in his blood and bones. He had dreamed of joining the Committee for State Security since he was a little boy hooked on the Soviet spy series The Shield and the Sword, and he got a place at the KGB academy in his hometown of Leningrad (the Communist name for St. Petersburg) as soon as he could, in 1975. After graduating, his first job was to spy on foreign diplomats in the city before he was posted to Dresden, East Germany, to work undercover as a translator. It wasn’t a particularly glittering start to the career of a lifelong KGB groupie. Dresden was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain: the real cloak-and-dagger adventure was happening over the wall, in the West, where agents could move invisibly among the enemy. Putin had hoped his spell in the East was just a precursor to greater things—but then disaster struck. When the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, he was sent packing back to Leningrad, to a dull post grooming new recruits at the state university. From there, he watched with horror as the entire Soviet state disintegrated around him and his beloved KGB was destroyed.
As the ramparts crumbled and Russia lurched toward its capitalist destiny, KGB officers were encouraged by their superiors to forge links with the mafia. The mob understood global market forces better than anyone, and it was clear that the criminal kingpins would rank among the real rulers of the reformed Russia, so the KGB moved to align itself with the new seat of power. The evidence Litvinenko was unearthing* suggested that Putin and a Leningrad KGB colleague called Viktor Ivanov had obeyed that diktat—by going into business with the Tambov gang.
Ivanov was a dashing young officer with an insouciant eye who boasted a more swashbuckling KGB career than Putin did, having served two years in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War. Litvinenko’s information suggested that in the dying days of the KGB, Ivanov had forged close ties with the leader of the Tambov gang—Vladimir Kumarin—and he had brought Putin into the action. The Tambovs were locked in a bloody turf war for control of the St. Petersburg seaport with the rival Malyshev gang, and it seemed Ivanov had sided with Kumarin, marshaling the resources of the KGB to help him drive out the enemy and consolidate the Tambovs’ control of the city. From then on, according to Litvinenko’s evidence, Ivanov became a key lieutenant of Kumarin, assisting him with his operations smuggling heroin into the port as well as bolstering the gang’s other lucrative lines of business: arms smuggling, human trafficking, racketeering, extortion, and contract killings. Putin, meanwhile, appeared to have been enlisted to help whitewash the profits: he was on the advisory board of a sham real estate company called SPAG, which seemed to have been set up by Kumarin to launder Colombian drug money.
When the KGB fell, in 1991, Putin and Ivanov appeared to have taken their Tambov connections with them. Ivanov went to work for its immediate successor, the FSK, and the evidence suggested he had continued to use the state’s resources to help Kumarin flood St. Petersburg with narcotics. Putin, meanwhile, had won himself a place in the mayor’s administration and it looked like he was using his new role in the city government to protect Ivanov and Kumarin from official scrutiny. Litvinenko was sure he had hit on something big, and he intended to keep digging. The young officer had no idea how deadly his discovery would one day prove to be.
Mayor Sobchak had warmed instantly to the sober, diligent new functionary at city hall, who kept his head down and let his boss shine. Putin’s fluency in German was a boon as St. Petersburg opened up to the world along with the rest of the country, and he was soon made the head of the mayor’s committee for external relations in charge of attracting foreign investment.
St. Petersburg was by then in the grip of a crippling food shortage caused by hyperinflation—and Putin soon found that out of every crisis comes opportunity. The local government had been granted federal permits to export oil, timber, and metals to be bartered abroad in exchange for meat, fruit, and sugar for the hungry population, and it was his job to distribute export licenses to local companies. Raw materials worth $100 million were shipped out of the city under his watch—but, oddly enough, the companies to which he awarded the permits all shut down right after the cargo set sail. That left no one to hold accountable when the goods disappeared and no food ever arrived in return.
The export imbroglio caught the attention of Marina Salye, a redoubtable city council deputy who had made it her business to root out corruption in St. Petersburg. When the food failed to arrive, she opened an investigation. Salye suspected that Putin and his cronies had pocketed the goods for themselves while the people of the city starved, and her inquiry led to a city council vote recommending that prosecutors investigate him for embezzlement. But Putin angrily denied any wrongdoing, blaming the failure on the now-defunct companies, and he would never be prosecuted, because Sobchak stood in the way.
The mayor had shot to power on the back of stinging attacks on the authoritarianism of the old Communist regime, but he had quickly come to curse the new democratic mechanisms that replaced the Soviet system. There were four hundred freshly elected representatives in city hall following St. Petersburg’s first free elections, and Sobchak found himself hog-tied as the rookie legislators pulled all the levers of their new powers at once. They went to war over even the most basic decisions and reveled in their new right to challenge Sobchak’s every move in court.
Putin had seen his boss buffeted by the turbulent city council, and now he felt the sting of parliamentary scrutiny himself. Democracy, he learned, just gets in the way. But capitalism was an entirely different story. The market made anything possible. By the time he became deputy mayor, Putin had become a neat fusion of old Russia and new: hybridizing the authoritarian tendencies of his Soviet security training with an appreciation for the market and a kleptocrat’s taste for a criminal scheme. And as his influence in St. Petersburg expanded, his ambitions grew. So when Boris Berezovsky came knocking, Putin saw the path to real power opening up before him.
*Much of the evidence Litvinenko gathered about the Tambovskaya Bratva was later disclosed to the Litvinenko Inquiry and published at litvinenkoinquiry.org. Both Putin and Ivanov have always denied any connection to organized crime.
