Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [105]
It was a complicated choice for me. I still ran a research lab at the Public Health Institute in New York. At fifty-four I had a pretty successful scientific career, which was already suffering because of my Soros work. If I continued spending a large part of my energy on Russia, I would have to wind that up. But Boris’s proposal—an opportunity to get out of my “seat in the front row” and become a player just as the drama was nearing culmination—was too exciting to pass up.
There was also the problem of Boris’s reputation. I knew the inside story well enough to discount the horrific allegations made against him, but the fact remained: rightly or wrongly, in the public eye Boris Berezovsky was the embodiment of the dark side of Russian capitalism. Yet, with all his errors and transgressions, he was the only one (except, perhaps, Goose) of the major Russian players who opposed the antihero Putin, and the fact that he did it against his immediate self-interest was also to his credit. Ultimately, I knew that if I wanted to join the fray, there were only two sides to choose from. The choice was obvious. So, in the end, I called Boris at Cap d’Antibes and said, “If you are really serious about the foundation, I am with you.”
“Okay, hop on a plane and come over. We’ll discuss the details,” said Boris.
I landed in Nice on November 12, 2000, eleven days after I’d brought Sasha to London. A driver in a Land Rover was waiting to take me to Château de la Garoupe, Boris’s Italianate villa dominating the Cap, with a magnificent view of the Bay of Nice. Although he had owned it for more than three years, he hadn’t had the time to renovate it. Much of the decor in the two-story, turn-of-the-century house remained from its previous owners, giving the place an Edwardian flavor.
We spent the evening discussing the would-be foundation over a candlelight dinner in a hall decked with dark, archaic mirrors. The next morning, as I ate breakfast with him and his wife, Lena, Boris shocked us with the news that he was about to leave for Moscow “for a few hours” to answer his summons “as a witness” in the newly reopened Aeroflot case.
It was clear to me that if Boris went, he would be arrested. The summons had been issued ten days earlier, along with one to Goose, who was accused of defrauding Gazprom of $300 million via a loan to NTV. A few days prior to that, Putin had told Le Figaro that he had a “cudgel” he planned to use on the two media magnates, “just once, but on the head.” Goose announced that he would ignore his summons and remain in Spain. But Boris, in a bout of apparent madness, wanted to go. His plane was waiting at the airport. I literally pulled him out of his car.
“Boris, are you insane? Didn’t they tell you that they would put you in jail if you did not give up ORT? Why are you going there? You have nothing to prove!”
“They won’t dare. It would be too blatant. If I don’t go, it would look like an admission of guilt on Aeroflot.”
It didn’t make any sense to me. Just a week earlier Sasha had fled, in fear of his life.
“Boris, did not you yourself tell Marina a month ago that they would kill Sasha?”
“With Sasha it is different. Putin considers Sasha one of their own, a traitor.”
“You are worse than a traitor to him. You are his ex-brother. He is out to destroy you, Boris, seriously. Putin is your creature, and you have some strange bond to him. If you don’t break this bond, you will perish. Lena, will you tell him, please?” I turned to his wife, who was standing helplessly on the steps of the château. “If he goes, you will spend the rest of your life in Tobolsk, Siberia, visiting him once a month in a dungeon.”
Lena shook her head. “I don’t want to go to Tobolsk.”
I got Elena Bonner, the widow of the dissident guru Andrei Sakharov, on the phone.
“Boris,” she told him, “Andrei Dmitrievich always said that if you have the choice of leaving the country instead of going