Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [19]
But the meetings did not go well. As Korzhakov recalled in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda on December 14, 2006, he did not like Sasha and what he had to say: “This major came, thin, unshaven, shaggy-haired, with worn, unpolished shoes, wearing a pair of Chinese work trousers, his sweater hanging down to his knees. His eyes darted around.” Korzhakov heard him out for an hour and a half, and then he “asked around. It turned out that one of my friends worked in the ‘bad’ department that Litvinenko had ‘ratted out.’ I had served with him back in Afghanistan. I trusted him, he was a perfectly normal guy, a fighter. I asked him to come see me and I told him about Litvinenko’s visit. He said, ‘You know me, don’t you? You can’t believe Litvinenko, the creep makes up denunciations.’”
Ovchinsky was another reluctant listener to whom Sasha made his case. “He was strange, hard to understand,” Ovchinsky told the Latvian newspaper Chas in an interview on December 30, 2006. “He would come and report to me about our people who were working on organized crime. He tried to expose corruption in the leadership of the Ministry. At first I thought Litvinenko was kind of a Boy Scout, who cared so much about the work … He did accuse a lot of people, he mentioned the names of famous professionals. But you see, nothing of what he said was confirmed.”
“I was so naÏve,” Sasha said about those meetings. “I thought that since they were the big bosses, they would take care of it and stop the mayhem in the services. Not in the least. Every time the threads led high enough, it turned out that the person involved was somebody’s buddy or relative or comrade in arms. The only thing I achieved is a certain reputation: as the village idiot. And then I discovered that the higher-ups were even more involved with criminals than was middle management. And not surprisingly, they bought up all these mansions and Mercedes cars even though they had measly salaries. The whole system was rotten to the core. I collected a lot of material on the topic.”
On our drive to Istanbul, Sasha gave me a three-hour lecture on the life and mores of Kontora circa 1995. How corruption was systematic. How, with the old Marxist ideology dried up, the mission had vanished. How the vacuum was filled by money.
“The FSB continued gathering information,” he explained. “And information is a commodity. Information is power. It can be used to solve problems in the marketplace, to put pressure on the competition. The FSB found its market.”
The courts did not work, nor did the laws. “If your partner bilked you, or a creditor did not pay, or a supplier did not deliver—where did you turn to complain? I’m not even talking about the primitive rackets from which you need protection. When force became a commodity, there was a demand for it. Roofs appeared, people who sheltered and protected your business.
“First it was provided by the mob, then the police, and soon enough our own guys realized what was what, and then the rivalry began among gangsters, cops, and the Agency for market share. As the police and the FSB became more competitive, they squeezed the gangs out of the market. But in many cases competition gave way to cooperation, and the services became gangsters themselves.”
One thing on which his friends and enemies all agreed is that Sasha had a phenomenal memory. He kept hundreds of episodes, addresses, telephone numbers, and names in his head. Altogether they formed a horrifying picture of a criminal wave gradually engulfing the agencies of law and order in the new Russia.
By the time we reached Istanbul on that Halloween