Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [108]
Glushkov would eventually get his day in court. In March 2004 he was cleared of charges of fraud and money laundering but found guilty of attempted escape from custody and a minor, face-saving charge of “abuse of authority.” He was released from Lefortovo. When I asked him whether his stubbornness was worth three years in jail, he said, “Of course, I proved my innocence.”
Lugovoy was convicted in the prison escape case, serving a prison term of fourteen months. After his release, he started his own security business.
In 2006 he would become a prime suspect in Sasha’s murder.
On April 14, three days after Glushkov’s alleged escape attempt, the new Kremlin-friendly management of NTV, backed by armed police, arrived at the network’s studios and took control. Goose’s journalists were run through a re-interview process, which included a pledge of allegiance to the Kremlin-appointed editors. Some caved in; most did not. Boris immediately invited the unemployed NTV team to join his one remaining media holding, TV-6. Until then, TV6 had featured sports, music, movies, and comedy shows. Suddenly it became a news channel, the last independent voice in Russian TV broadcasting. Nobody expected it to remain independent for long.
Chechnya and Moscow, May 2001: In one week, Chechen guerrillas carry out more than 140 hit-and-run attacks and Russian sappers defuse 160 explosive devices. Russian defense minister Sergei Ivanov tells reporters that 2,682 Russian soldiers have been killed in Chechnya since the beginning of hostilities in September 1999. His statement is immediately challenged by a prominent nongovernmental organization, the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers, who say that the real losses are nearing ten thousand.
Boris’s new role as a sponsor of Russian democracy was announced to the world by Elena Bonner on November 30, 2000, at a press conference in Moscow. Bonner, the seventy-seven-year-old widow of the Nobel Laureate who defied the Soviet system, said that she had accepted a $3 million grant from the New York–based Berezovsky Foundation (which would later become known as the International Foundation for Civil Liberties, or IFCL) as an endowment for the Sakharov Museum and Civic Center in Moscow.
For Boris and me, awarding the first grant to Sakharov was a gesture ripe with symbolism. Elena Bonner had been the first among Russia’s human rights activists to say that Putin represented “modernized Stalinism” at the time when Boris was still Putin’s “brother.” Three decades earlier Sakharov had become an emblematic figure, symbolizing moral resistance to tyranny. The grant to the Sakharov Center was meant to underscore the continuity of Soviet oppression under Putin and the permanence of dissidents’ resistance. From the outset it defined the colors of the new foundation.
By May 2001, the IFCL had awarded 160 more grants to NGOs across Russia, which collectively represented, Boris hoped, “crystallization centers” for protest movements: antiwar groups like Soldiers’ Mothers, supporters of prisoners’ rights, the greens, defenders of ethnic minorities, and local human rights watchdogs. We also announced the Berezovsky legal aid program: we would provide free legal counsel to troubled juveniles and conscripts in litigation with the army, amounting to thousands of cases nationally.
Western pundits took the IFCL with a grain of salt, as a campaign by a cunning oligarch to improve his reputation. But not so the Kremlin. Within days after our wire transfers from New York hit the accounts