Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [31]
Korzhakov flew into a white rage when he learned about the Shadow HQ. The triumvirate of Chubais-Boris-Goose, backed by cash from the loans-for-shares oligarchs, was as much a challenge to him as were the Communists. He wanted Yeltsin to be the president, but on his terms, whereby the dominance of the secret services would be guaranteed. When he learned Berezovsky had made an impression on Yeltsin with his frank depiction of the president’s bleak prospects in the polls, he changed tactics: his entire team began to whisper to the president that the situation was so bad that no smart campaigning could save him from a humiliating defeat. He even brought over a team of American consultants and tasked them with producing an independent assessment that the elections were not winnable.
The only solution, he argued—and no doubt believed—was to postpone the elections and impose a state of emergency.
By mid-March, two irreconcilable political centers had formed around the president: one strove to solve the Communist problem by throwing money at it, the other, by crushing it with tanks.
March 6, 1996: Hundreds of Chechen fighters infiltrate Grozny, override Russian units, and hold the city for three days before escaping back to the mountains with large amounts of captured weapons and ammunition. The surprise assault is the first rebel effort to retake Grozny since it fell to Russian forces in February 1995.
George Soros arrived in Moscow on March 15, 1996, to meet with Prime Minister Chernomyrdin and get his blessing for a new project: connecting Russia to the Internet. At that time, few people in Russia had even heard of the Net, but to George it was clear: if there was something that could drag this country out of its eternal provincial swamp, it was integration into the worldwide information network. The plan called for thirty hubs at main university campuses throughout the country, with links to the surrounding urban communities. It would connect broad progressive circles across the country: journalists, nongovernmental organizations, liberal local politicians, and the educated class at large.
When I first came to George with the idea, I didn’t particularly expect that he would fund it. After all, he was still predicting that Russia was about to undergo a “catastrophe of cosmic dimensions.” But to my surprise he agreed, saying, “Even so, there is life after death.” He allocated $100 million over five years, with the caveat that the Russian government match the funds with contributions in the form of free telecommunication channels to link the hubs with each other and the rest of the World Wide Web. For that, we needed to see the prime minister.
The problem, however, was that Chernomyrdin didn’t want to see George. Someone had told him that Soros had fraternized in Davos with Zyuganov and was helping Zyuganov reconstruct himself as a moderate social democrat. I had to use all my personal chits with Berezovsky, and he, in turn, with the prime minister, to secure an appointment.
On the day of the meeting, the Communists sponsored a resolution in the Duma denouncing the Belovezh Agreement. This was the famous pact that Yeltsin had signed in 1991 with the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus, officially terminating the USSR. The news of the Duma’s maneuver exploded across the entire former empire, from the Baltics to Central Asia, provoking panic in the former republics of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin denounced it as election-year posturing. Even the former head of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had lost his job as a result of the Belovezh Agreement, told Reuters news service, “I am the one who is expected to applaud this because my presidential post would now become real again. But to talk about the revival of the Soviet Union now … means to ignore the new realities.”
Chernomyrdin received us at the White House, the seat of the government on the banks of the Moscow