Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [26]
“Let me introduce you,” said Boris one day at The Club when I returned with Soros’s rejection. “This is Roma, my new partner. He is very interested in philanthropy, and I think we need to put him on the board of the new foundation.”
Boris was talking about my latest project, the Russian Society for Science and Education, which I was trying to organize with donations from various budding oligarchs.
I started my spiel about the Gilded Age and the pillars of American philanthropy. Roma listened politely, lowering his gaze and smiling shyly in response to Boris’s cooing that he was one of those young people Russia needed “to make it into a normal country.”
“Well, what do you think? A wonderful guy, we need more like him!” Boris enthused after Roma left without ever having said a word.
Boris would come to regret bitterly the day that he brought Roma into his circle: five years later, taken control of Sibneft and ORT, the shy young man would become the next gray eminence of the Kremlin and the richest man in Russia.
CHAPTER 4 THE DAVOS PACT
January 9-18, 1996: Chechen rebels led by the warlord Salman Raduyev attack the town of Kizlyar, Dagestan, inside the Russian border. They take with them 160 hostages but are encircled by Russian troops in the border village of Pervomaiskoye. Sasha Litvinenko, among other FSB men, is there, in the trenches with the regular army. After a weeklong siege, and several futile attempts to take the village, Russian commanders insist that there are “no hostages left” and launch an intensive bombardment, killing many hostages and some rebels. The next morning, Raduyev and the bulk of the rebels escape through Russian lines, taking twenty hostages back to Chechnya. Litvinenko is stunned by the army’s brutality.
Davos, Switzerland, February 3, 1996
Vladimir Gusinsky, nicknamed “Goose,” answered the phone at his hotel room in Davos. When he heard the voice of his caller, he was speechless. It was his archenemy, Boris Berezovsky.
They were both attending the World Economic Forum of 1996.
“Volodya, don’t you think that we should let bygones be bygones, and sit down and talk?” Boris said.
A former theater director and a leader of Moscow’s Jewish community, Gusinsky, forty-three, was at one point considered the wealthiest man in Russia—that is, before the loans-for-shares scheme created a new, richer breed of oligarchs. He owed his fortune to his friendship with Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. Goose’s Most-Bank was the principal depository of municipal funds. His real estate company snapped up the best properties made available in city-controlled privatizations. He also owned a newspaper, a weekly news magazine, a radio station, and NTV. The network loved to give the Kremlin headaches, attacking its policies day and night and mocking its officials on Kukly (The Puppets), the popular political satire program. In his political outlook, Goose, a bespectacled intellectual, was close to Grigory Yavlinsky, the left-of-center democratic politician and a friend of George Soros. Gusinsky did not like Yeltsin and he feared the cabal of military and state security types in the president’s circle.
The twists and turns of Goose’s rivalry with Berezovsky had been the talk of Moscow for months. At one point, Goose even had to flee the city for London for five months, after Boris’s Kremlin pal, General Korzhakov, sent some goons to harass him in what became known as the Most-Bank raid.
On that memorable day in December 1994, Goose’s motorcade left his country dacha as usual. In the lead was a fast car with watchers scanning both sides of the road. Then came Goose’s armored Mercedes, followed by an SUV swaying from side to side to make sure that no one attempted to pass, and finally a windowless van carrying a team of former paratroopers led by a fierce, egg-headed gorilla nicknamed Cyclops.
Suddenly, word came through the guards’ earphones: “We have company.” Someone was tailing the convoy. Gusinsky’s driver floored the gas pedal and they