Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [20]
For him, 1995 was a watershed year. He grew ever more convinced that there was no easy victory in sight in the war he was waging, but he thought that Boris Berezovsky and the people in the Kremlin would help him. For me, 1995 was the beginning of my entrée into the tumultuous world of Kremlin oligarchs and its inner-circle power struggle.
PART II THE STRUGGLE FOR THE KREMLIN
CHAPTER 3 THE ROBBER BARON
Moscow, spring 1995
We drove through the exclusive Rublyovka neighborhood, an enclave of summer homes of Kremlin inhabitants since the days of Stalin. I had been here before my emigration from Russia, in the 1970s. Outwardly, everything looked as in the old Soviet days: the same ochre-colored walls with barbed wire on top, the same heavy gates with peepholes for guards, the same No Stopping signs along the highway.
We pulled into a driveway. My driver honked, and a security guard in paramilitary fatigues came out of a booth. He stared impassively, then waved us on. An iron gate screeched open, and we drove into a huge pine grove. Beyond the trees stood a brick home in classic government-dacha style: dull blocks of red brick and concrete. The location was impressive, with a spectacular view of the Moscow River. My companion, Arkady Evstafiev, press secretary to First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais, explained that it was once the dacha of Nikolai Rhyzhkov, the last prime minister of the USSR.
Earlier that day, when Arkady had telephoned me to say “I’d like you to meet somebody,” he wouldn’t tell me who it was.
“You will see. I can’t talk over the telephone.”
Now we were ushered through the house by a butler who looked like a security guard and out onto the back lawn, to a tea table covered with a white tablecloth, set in a pool of sunlight. My host introduced himself with a quip.
“Say, is this like Soros’s home, or do we still have some work to do?” It was Boris Berezovsky.
We were waited on by four young, poker-faced fellows in dinner jackets and white gloves, who seemed completely out of place amid the spring greenery or, for that matter, at the harsh, Party-style building. There were several other people at the table, but Berezovsky dominated. He gave an inspiring speech about the future of Russian television, delivered at machine-gun speed, obviously unable to keep up with his train of thought.
Dressed in jeans and a sweater, Berezovsky looked even more out of place, neither an apparatchik nor, seemingly, a capitalist. He was more of a mad mathematician, breathlessly explaining a theorem of profound elegance, while his listeners were preoccupied with petty, mundane concerns. In the flesh, he seemed much nicer than on television; his bald head gleamed in the sun but somehow didn’t age his youthful, expressive face. His fierce dark eyes and constant gesticulations conveyed much more energy in person than on the screen.
Berezovsky’s opening quip was more than just a nouveau riche icebreaker. He had summoned me because I worked for George Soros, hoping to lure that legendary billionaire into becoming his backer in major privatization deals that were on the horizon. I had more or less guessed why I had been invited to Berezovsky’s tea table. What I did not realize was that I was about to enter a new planet of the solar system—BorisWorld—which I would be navigating for the next decade.
I tried to respond politely to Berezovsky’s quip. El Mirador, Soros’s summer home, is a lovely Mexican-style hacienda in Southampton on Long Island. The best I could manage was, “There is some resemblance, although the building is in a different style.”
“Well, as soon as we are done with the elections, we’ll deal with real estate,” Berezovsky replied. “I’d like to invite Mr. Soros to my dacha when he is next in Moscow. We need to learn from him. The way