Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [16]
After reviewing the situation, Boris Berezovsky came up with a fresh idea: use the senescent Soviet television—Channel One, broadcasting to 200 million people across ten time zones—to work for Yeltsin’s reelection campaign. Thus was born ORT; the initials in Russian stand for Russian Public Television, a.k.a. Berezovsky’s channel.
Before Boris, Channel One used to be Ostankino TV, a mosaic of studios and programs that the Duma Communists were trying to get their hands on, insisting that state TV should be subordinate to the legislative branch. At the time, the only private—and the best managed—network in the country was NTV, owned by Vladimir Gusinsky, which held roughly 15 percent of market share. But it was clear that whoever controlled Channel One would have access to the majority of Russia’s viewers. Berezovsky convinced Ilyushin and Korzhakov that he was the man who could control the airwaves for the benefit of the reforms and the president.
But it was easier said than done. Ostankino was a colossal, clumsy structure, overgrown with innumerable useless auxiliary services and subdivisions, with a swollen staff and an astronomical deficit of $170 million a year. Advertising revenues were less than a fifth of that.
Ostankino was a black hole in the government’s budget, a structure that simply could not be salvaged. It would be easier to shut it down and start from scratch. This was just what Berezovsky proposed to Yeltsin’s advisers: to grant the license for Channel One to a new joint-stock company, in which 51 percent would belong to the state and 49 percent to private funders, controlled by Berezovsky, who would build a management structure that would run the network at a profit, or at least reduce losses to a manageable level.
The presidential decree dismantling Ostankino and creating ORT in its place in early December 1994 went almost unnoticed, as all eyes were then on the nascent conflict with the Chechen separatists. But three months later ORT dramatically announced its presence by calling a moratorium on advertising.
Berezovsky’s goal was to cut all ties between the Ostankino studios and the shadow structures that sold advertising time. Sasha’s description of the dilemma of privatization held true: the network lost hundreds of millions, while major graft was outsourced to third-party organizations that did its selling. Even by modest estimates advertisers paid five times as much as the network actually received from them. Most of the money was handed over in envelopes full of cash, and it remained in the pockets of producers, middlemen, and gangsters. The intention of Boris’s new management was to use a hiatus of a few months to build an in-house sales department, cutting out all the middlemen.
The moratorium was announced on February 20, 1995. On March 1, Vlad Listyev, ORT’s new director general, was gunned down by an assassin at the door of his Moscow home. Listyev was Russia’s Larry King, its most popular TV host, the darling of the country. In mourning, every television station in the nation went off the air for twenty-four hours. The entire country was in shock.
The morning after the murder, an emergency meeting was convened in the office of the deputy director of the FSB. Sasha, a major, was the lowest-ranking officer in the room. He told the assembled generals that he believed Listyev’s murder and the attempt on Berezovsky eight months earlier were the work of the same group, the Kurgan gang, which had penetrated Moscow’s police department.
“Suddenly, I got a message on my pager from Berezovsky,” Sasha told me, staring into the foggy Turkish night. “‘Call immediately.’ I notified Trofimov and he said, ‘Go call him.’”
“Who is Trofimov?”
Sasha looked at me as if I were a schoolboy. “Gen. Anatoly Trofimov, chief of the Moscow regional FSB. He was close to Korzhakov and was thought to have a direct line to the Kremlin. Well, I called Boris and he said that they’d come to arrest him. ‘Who?’ I asked. He said, ‘Moscow police,’ and he named