Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [45]
As Yeltsin wrote in his memoir, he had had enough of generals. From now on, he wanted to work with civilians. Within a week a new national security team was in place, with Ivan Rybkin, a former speaker of the Duma and Yeltsin loyalist, as the NSC secretary and Boris Berezovsky as his deputy in charge of Chechnya.
“Why do you need this, Boris?” I asked, when I heard the news. “Don’t you have better things to do than dealing with the Chechens? All of this looks like a comic opera.”
“Well, it is a comic opera, but unfortunately they use live ammunition. You see, the Party of War helped us get rid of Lebed, but we cannot let them run away with Chechnya. If the war starts again, this country is doomed. And there is simply no one else to do the job. Believe it or not.”
On November 5, 1996, President Yeltsin, now sixty-five years old, underwent open-heart surgery at the Moscow Cardiological Center. After seven and a half hours and five bypasses, the surgery was pronounced a success. Surgeons predicted a full recovery.
Akhmed Zakayev sighed with relief when he learned that Rybkin had replaced Lebed. The former Duma speaker had a solid reputation as a dove. But Berezovsky was a complete enigma to Zakayev. A few days later, when a Russian government plane carrying both men landed at a military airfield near Grozny, Zakayev was pleasantly surprised. Boris was cool-headed, goal-oriented to the point of cynicism, and, most important, not possessed by the usual demon of injured national pride that afflicted all of the Russians who had dealt with Zakayev until now. Their nostalgia for the lost empire had been a slow-acting poison: the Russians all seemed, to Zakayev, to hold the Chechens responsible for their historic misfortunes, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the emergence of America as the sole superpower, to the declining price of oil. This irrational ressentiment was the main obstacle to Zakayev’s immediate goals: getting the two remaining Russian brigades out of Chechnya and signing a permanent treaty that would resolve the issue of sovereignty.
“Do you think that Boris’s lack of ressentiment had anything to do with his being Jewish?” I asked Zakayev years later.
“Perhaps,” Zakayev replied. “But when that became an issue, it did not come from our side.”
From the very first day of Boris’s appointment to the NSC, the Communists started a fierce campaign against him, claiming that he had obtained Israeli citizenship and so could not be entrusted with a national security job.
“We had nothing against Jews,” explained Zakayev. “They did not kill us, the Russians did. Both our peoples have been victims of genocide. And the Israeli connection, if there was any, wouldn’t hurt. You know, at one point Dudayev told me about his vision of an alliance between Chechnya, Georgia, Turkey, and Israel, backed by the United States.”
“Against whom?” I inquired.
“Russia, of course. And Islamic radicals. But the Americans chose to betray us to the Russians. Anyway, it is all water under the bridge.
“The first thing Boris said to me,” he continued, “was, ‘You think you are an independent state. We—the Russian government—believe you are part of the Russian Federation. Having said that, let us put aside the issues on which we cannot agree, and then deal with what we can, step by step.’ And it was obvious to