Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [17]
It’s a stone’s throw from the Lubyanka HQ to The LogoVAZ Club. There Sasha discovered eight armed policemen who told him that they were ordered to deliver Berezovsky to the station to be questioned in the murder of Listyev. A camera crew from NTV was setting up in front of the entrance; someone had tipped them off that Berezovsky was going to be arrested.
“I knew that he could not be allowed to be taken away by these cops, because by morning there would be a report that he’d had a heart attack or was killed trying to escape, and you wouldn’t be able to prove anything,” Sasha continued. “I pulled out my service gun and FSB ID and yelled, ‘Move along! This is our investigation and we’ll question him ourselves.’ ‘We have our orders,’ they snapped back. After some arguing they called their bosses, and I called mine. Trofimov said, ‘Don’t give him up under any circumstances. I’m sending reinforcements. How many are there?’”
Fifteen minutes later twenty of Trofimov’s men arrived with their guns. The incident ended when an official police investigator showed up and took a statement from Berezovsky, with Sasha standing guard by his side.
At the time, I had heard that the standoff at LogoVAZ was part of ongoing hostilities between the Moscow city government and the Kremlin. Tensions were running high, almost to the point of violence. Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, a powerful city boss, fought with First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais over the privatization of city property. The city police naturally worked on behalf of City Hall, and the FSB for the Kremlin.
“I heard that the confrontation at LogoVAZ was part of politics—City Hall versus the Kremlin—and that the mayor tried to use the murder of Listyev as an excuse to get rid of Boris. Isn’t that so? What did the Kurgan gang have to do with it?” I asked.
“It might be,” Sasha replied. “I didn’t understand politics at all then. I’m an oper, and I followed the evidence, not the politics. But Listyev was not murdered by the mayor. And the mayor was not the one who tried to blow up Boris in ’94. So you can’t get away from the mob. And the cops are much closer to the mob than they are to their own higher-ups, believe me. I knew for sure that the cops who had come for Boris in ’95 were up to no good. But you are right: many thought at the time that it was the mayor versus the Kremlin.”
He paused for a bit, glanced over at me, and added, “You and Boris, you’re always thinking politics, but you don’t see the people—that’s your big mistake. In our work the individual is the most important thing. I trusted Boris right away, and Trofimov. I didn’t trust Luzhkov, and I never trusted Korzhakov, even though he and Trofimov were friends. That time in LogoVAZ, I was protecting Boris and I felt Trofimov backing me up, the two people I trusted. I couldn’t have cared in the least about the Kremlin or the mayor.”
Listyev’s killers were never found. The case became just another of a dozen legendary contract killings of the 1990s, from the shooting of the liberal Duma member Galina Starovoitova, to the bombing of the investigative journalist Dmitry Kholodov, to the poisoning of the prominent banker Ivan Kivelidi.
Nevertheless, ORT went on the air as planned and kept its three-month moratorium on advertising. As for Sasha and Boris, they developed a bond shared only by people who have faced mortal danger together—not friendship or attachment, but a special kind of loyalty that no other can surpass.
Boris’s first instinct was to repay Sasha for saving his life by simply giving him money—completely typical for Moscow in those days. But he had already learned enough about Sasha to know he wouldn’t take it and might be offended. So he decided to give him something that most former Soviet citizens could only dream about: he would take him on a trip abroad, combining the pleasant with the useful. After