Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [14]
I remembered the attack on Berezovsky very well; it was the first time I had heard his name. A photo of a bombed car had appeared on the front page of The New York Times.
A remote-controlled bomb placed in a parked blue Opel exploded at 5:20 p.m. on June 7, 1994, as Berezovsky’s gray Mercedes pulled out of the gates of The Club, his company’s reception house in downtown Moscow. His driver was killed instantly, but somehow, miraculously, Berezovsky and his bodyguard suffered only minor burns. The blast blew out windows in an eight-story house across the street and wounded six pedestrians. It was one of the first big contract hits in the era of privatization. In those days commercial disputes and business conflicts were usually settled with the help of gangsters rather than in the courts. Law enforcement, like the other branches of government, stood helpless, shell-shocked by Russia’s economic reforms.
“We never found out who was behind that attack,” Sasha said, “but it definitely had to do with the auto business, since Boris wasn’t doing much else in 1994—he sold Zhiguli and Mercedes automobiles.” Boris was running the country’s first capitalist car dealership, LogoVAZ (a name derived from logic in honor of his former life as a mathematician and the acronym VAZ for the Volga Automobile Factory). He founded LogoVAZ in 1989 and had not yet begun to branch out into the media, airlines, and oil industries. Sasha’s original theory was that the hit was related to a turf war; at the time, LogoVAZ was buying up showrooms all over the city, which had been controlled by racketeers from a gang known as Solntsevo. But Sasha later came to believe that it was someone from VAZ, the producers of Zhigulis, one of the colossal state enterprises under the Soviets that produced about half of all cars driven in Russia. It was terribly bloated and inefficient, and Boris was trying to take that company private.
“He had a financial person, Nikolai Glushkov, who was doing due diligence on VAZ,” Sasha explained. “Glushkov was poking into the management’s ties with intermediary firms. So someone at VAZ put out a contract on Boris.”
Sasha described the classic conflict of Russian privatization. Investors would invariably discover that profits were skimmed by third-party sales companies and that the core enterprise had been running at a loss, kept afloat by government subsidies. As a rule, the sales companies were owned by the enterprise director or his family or friends, usually all Soviet holdovers. In effect, they were bilking the state they represented. Privatization meant the end of this shell game, and their prosperity, as it broke up the sales structures.
“The VAZ contract on Boris was to be carried out by the Kurgans, not the Solntsevo guys,” Sasha explained. These were two of the most famous organized crime groups in those days. “The Kurgans did not have their own business and specialized in contract killings. They’d knock off anyone. They had their own people in the Moscow police and even in the Agency.”
When Sasha went to see Boris to talk through all this, they exchanged telephone numbers and agreed to stay in touch. In the ensuing months, they saw each other a few times, but the investigation did not go far: the Chechen War began in December, and it became a priority for the FSB. Ordinary crimes, including mob hits, took a backseat.
December 10, 1994: Three Russian divisions invade Chechnya, a mountainous, predominantly Muslim province in southern Russia. Grozny, the Chechen capital, is surrounded. Separatist president Dzhokhar Dudayev’s regime is under siege. The Russian divisions are met with massive resistance and suffer severe losses—nearly two thousand dead—during a botched attempt to take Grozny on New Year’s Eve.
By late 1994, Boris Berezovsky all but abandoned his automobile business—which did extremely well without his attention—and turned to a new endeavor, the mass media, which was intimately