Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [13]
In a panic, Marina ran to the school. The instructor, shaking his head sadly, said, “You’re not in the group anymore, so it will be $300 now.”
Sasha was infuriated. “Do you really think that I fight corruption day and night for you to pay bribes to those cops?”
He went with her to the next test, called the traffic patrolman aside, said a few quiet words to him, flashed his FSB card, and gave him a look that Marina had never seen before. The cop blanched and couldn’t think of anything better than to offer to pass her without even bothering with the test. Sasha grew even angrier, snapping, “I’ll stay in the car and we’ll test her together. If she passes, she passes, if she doesn’t, she’ll be back.”
After the test, Sasha instantly switched back to his normal, easy-going, boyish self, smiling and slapping the patrolman on the back. Marina never forgot that look. She was not afraid of it; she was glad to have it at her disposal, “just in case.”
They were married in October 1994 at a registrar’s office, when their son Tolik was already four months old. They had not wanted to make a big deal about it; after all, it was a second marriage for both. Besides, they thought, marriages are made in heaven and certainly not in gloomy bureaucratic settings. But when they went inside wearing their usual blue jeans, the registrar said, “You have a son, and when he grows up he’ll want to see a photograph of your wedding. Think about how you want to look in it.”
“Sasha had only one suit—light-colored. He went home to get it and he gave me some money to buy a dress, but of course I couldn’t find a thing for that money. So even in our wedding we traded roles: the groom wore white and the bride was in black, the only formal suit I had.”
Shortly afterward she met his colleagues. At first they seemed like nice guys, but she noticed that Sasha stood out somehow.
“It was three things. First, he didn’t drink, while they couldn’t relax any other way. Second, it was money. Sasha did not know how to handle money. I mean, we always had enough, but we did not live luxuriously. We finally did buy an apartment, but it was small, just a one-bedroom. Our car was an ordinary Zhiguli. When his friends began driving foreign cars and buying fancy apartments, it became obvious that Sasha did not know how to do what they were doing: make money.”
Sasha explained to her that the money came from taking outside jobs, “selling enforcement services on the market,” as he called it. At the time, the police and the FSB were permitted to take outside “consulting” contracts to compensate for the government’s inability to pay decent salaries. “I’m no good at that,” he explained.
Third, he was hesitant to use the power that came with the FSB badge. That little red card could open any door, in stores, at the theater, wherever, because people were still terrified of the KGB. But except for her driving test, he never used it. His pals mocked him. Yet “he didn’t disapprove of them, at least not then. They were a good band. He was a team player.”
At least, at first.
To hear him tell it, Sasha was a team player who didn’t always pass the ball. He began to wonder about some of his teammates within the first years of his new life with Marina. And he met the man who would eventually win his loyalty away from his team and his entire agency.
“When I first met Berezovsky, our service was no longer the KGB but not yet called the FSB. It was the FSK, the Federal Counterintelligence Service. This was the most decent period in our history: the repressions were over and corruption was only beginning. I was a major in the service, assigned to our antiterrorism and organized crime division. On that day there was an assassination attempt on Boris. He was already a big shot. The director sent a memo to all divisions: anyone