Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [104]
“Your friend is an evil genius,” George said. “He destroyed Russia single-handedly.”
“Soros lost money because the ‘young reformers’ fooled him,” said Boris. “And then he tried to convince the West—out of spite—that the oligarchs were evil and should not be allowed to control the beast.”
I listened and said nothing. Both were wrong, but it was useless to argue. George took my contact with Boris personally. He had already stopped inviting me to his summer house in Southampton. The Litvinenko affair would be the last straw, I thought, as I entered his office.
Soros’s office is on the thirty-third floor of a building at the corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. From the moment you enter, you know you are in a rarefied world. You are immediately treated to a knockout panorama of Central Park to the north and the majestic Hudson sparkling behind the jagged skyline to the west. George’s desk sits in the northwest corner. With his back to the Hudson, he can shift his glance from the park to his computer monitor, which is filled with stock index crawlers. The screen’s images are a bird’s-eye view of global finance.
In the six months since I had last been there, nothing had changed. The same official photographs lined the walls: George with two different presidents in the White House, George with the pope, George with Yeltsin at the Kremlin. My gift, a candle bust of Lenin that I bought at an outdoor market in Moscow, was still on the desk next to the monitor.
“Well, tell me, what happened in Turkey,” George demanded as I entered the office. He always has a half smile playing on his lips and a glimmer of curiosity in his eyes. You can never guess his attitude from the expression on his face. After ten years with him, I had learned to guess his mood from the timbre of his voice. This time it reflected absolute calm. His decision had already been made.
He was interested to learn how high up in the U.S. administration my role in Sasha’s defection was known. I told him about my contacts in the U.S. administration. The whole thing was extremely unpleasant for him. For the past two years he had been telling anyone who would listen that Russia’s reforms collapsed because of the oligarchs and that the worst villain among them was Boris. And now one of his own people had helped Berezovsky’s man.
“I understand why your friend needs this.” George never used Boris’s name when talking about him with me. “That guy in Turkey was a trial balloon. Your friend will soon need to ask for asylum himself, and he has to create a precedent. But why you needed to do this, I cannot understand!”
It was pointless to argue with him about Boris.
“To tell the truth, I didn’t expect it to turn out this way. I just planned to bring them to the embassy,” I said. “But in the situation I couldn’t have acted any differently. I’m sorry about the publicity.”
“There,” George said animatedly. “Unintended consequences! I’ve warned you many times not to get involved with your friend. And now you’ve done it publicly, and that means that you can no longer be associated with me. Not to mention that you’ll probably become persona non grata in Moscow. What are your plans?”
“I’m thinking of going back to science.”
“That’s excellent. There’s a hidden plus in all this for me. I’m looking for a way to reduce our presence in Russia. You’re giving me a wonderful excuse to shut down the project.”
What irony, I thought to myself. Soros is leaving Russia and blames Berezovsky, while Berezovsky is leaving Russia and blames Soros. And neither one of them gets it. Most Russians see no difference between them. Russia rejected them both, and basically for the same reasons: they’re both rich, both Jews, both independent characters, confident in their mission to reorder the world. For the gray mediocrity that Putin embodies, each is a threat and a challenge.
As I left the office and merged into the crowd, I pondered an offer Boris had made,