Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [28]
Korzhakov’s group included Sasha’s top boss, FSB director Mikhail Barsukov, and First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets, a man whom Korzhakov hoped one day to install in the president’s office. The liberals who supported Chubais included Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, Chief of Staff Sergei Filatov, and the journalist Valentin Yumashev, whose friendship with Yeltsin’s daughter would eventually deepen into marriage and who would become a major Kremlin power broker in his own right. Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, the former Soviet gas and oil chief, maintained strict neutrality, as did Boris Berezovsky. An important trump card for Chubais was his favor with the West, from the Clinton administration, to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to the flock of Harvard University advisers who were helping him build such capitalist institutions as a stock market and a tax service. But that card was, if anything, a liability in the public’s mind.
On January 17, 1996, Yeltsin opened his election campaign with a bombshell. He fired Chubais and several liberal members of his Cabinet, claiming, “Chubais is to blame for everything.” The phrase thundered throughout Russia. It was a total defeat for the reformers. To manage the economic portfolio in place of Chubais, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Kadannikov, the director of the Volga Automobile Factory, the plant that Boris had been trying to privatize at the time of his attempted assassination. Pro-Western Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev was replaced with an arch-hawk, the foreign intelligence chief Evgeny Primakov. The liberal Chief of Staff Filatov resigned, and another hardliner, Nikolai Yegorov, was put in his place.
In one fell swoop, Yeltsin appointed Chubais’s nemesis, First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets, to chair his reelection committee, with the two generals as his deputies: the FSO’s Korzhakov and the FSB’s Barsukov. At the time, according to opinion polls, the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, was in the lead, with 24 percent of likely voters; Grigory Yavlinsky, the socialist democrat friend of Soros, stood at 11 percent; the fascist Vladimir Zhirinovsky had 7 percent; the maverick paratrooper Gen. Alexander Lebed had 6 percent; and Yeltsin had a meager 5 percent, just above the margin of error. Half of those surveyed remained undecided.
When Berezovsky arrived in Davos on February 1 he discovered that Gennady Zyuganov, the potential future Communist president of Russia, was one of its main attractions. Western CEOs “flew to him like flies to honey,” in his words. Meanwhile, Chubais, unemployed, roamed the Swiss ski resort “like a lonely ghost.” He was old news.
Zyuganov, a husky, balding apparatchik of fifty-one, did his best to portray himself as a Western-style social democrat.
“We want a mixed economy,” he said in William Safire’s column in The New York Times. “Communism means collegiality, sustainable development, spiritual values, major investment in the human being.”
“I was shocked to see all these Westerners, including Soros, snowed by Zyuganov,” Boris recalled. “They didn’t get that Zyuganov was nothing but a front for the old Central Committee! They would start jailing people immediately. How could the West not understand this?”
But the West, by all accounts, had already written Yeltsin off. According to a CIA analysis leaked to the press, the Russian president was an alcoholic who had suffered four heart attacks and would lose the ballot if he managed to live that long. The choice in Russia was between the Communists and a coalition of the military and secret services.
“Your game is over,” Soros told Boris when they met in Davos for breakfast. “My advice to you is to take your family, sell what you still can, and get out of the country before it is too late.”
But Boris was stubborn and adventurous. The conversation with George had the opposite of its intended effect: it only added to his urgent desire to win at all costs.