Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [63]
Before his appointment with Putin Sasha went to see Gen. Anatoly Trofimov, his old mentor, who was by then retired. They walked through the narrow side streets of Moscow, chatting. Sasha told him all about the URPO scandal: the prosecutors, the Dorenko tape, and Boris’s great expectations for the new director.
Trofimov looked doubtful. “I am afraid you’ve lost, Sasha.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you see? They killed Rokhlin; surely that was a Kontora job. Now, the guy who came in will have to cover that up. He cannot afford to solve the case. It is like an insurance policy.”
Trofimov liked Sasha. He continued meeting him secretly and giving him advice up until he left Russia. On April 10, 2005, Trofimov, who worked as a security consultant, was gunned down, together with his young wife, on a Moscow street in front of their four-year-old daughter.
There is no corroborating evidence for Trofimov’s theory of Rokhlin’s murder. Tamara Rokhlina was sentenced to eight years imprisonment in November 2000 for murdering her husband, but in the summer of 2001 the Russian Supreme Court overturned her guilty verdict and sent her case for retrial. Later, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled that the Russian government owed her 8,000 euros in damages for unjust imprisonment. On retrial in Moscow she was again found guilty, but given a suspended sentence. She decided not to appeal. To this day she maintains her innocence and claims that three masked strangers killed her husband.
Whether or not Trofimov was correct, there was no doubt in Sasha’s mind that the FSB gained a kindred spirit in its new director.
“Putin is Kontora’s man, body and soul, and to him I am a traitor,” he put it to me, years later. “Never mind that he got there because of me. He had to show them that he had no obligation to me, that’s why he had me arrested in the end. He did the same thing to Boris, after Boris made him president.”
July 28, 1998: Russian officials collectively known as the Party of Peace, including Chernomyrdin, Lebed, and Berezovsky, call for reconciliation with Chechnya, saying that “recent mistakes and silence have already cost us all much too dearly, and Russia does not need to return to [the violence of] the mid-1990s.” Sergei Kiriyenko, Russia’s new prime minister, announces that he will meet Chechen President Maskhadov to discuss economic agreements.
By August 1998 clouds were gathering over Russia’s economic horizon. Few people predicted a storm more accurately than George Soros. The slide toward financial crisis started with turmoil in Asia. Global investors began pulling out of many emerging markets, including Russia’s. This coincided with a major drop in the price of oil—the principal source of Russia’s revenue. In January 1998, it dropped to $15 per barrel, the lowest level since early 1994. By August, it was below $13. The Russian government collected little tax revenue; most of the economy operated off the books. In May, the Communist-dominated Duma dealt a blow to investor confidence by restricting foreign ownership of shares in the major electric utility, UES. Then came another blow: no one bid at the auction for Rosneft, the last big oil company still in state hands. Unpaid wages plagued the government, and coal miners protested by blocking major railways.
To boost revenue, the government relied on short-term ruble-denominated treasury bonds. But as the perceived risk increased, buyers demanded higher and higher interest, which at times reached 150 percent. To pay the interest, the government had to issue more and more bonds, tightening the noose around its neck.
Russia’s economic managers were convinced that if bad came to worse, the West would bail them out, as it had Mexico in 1994. Russia was “too nuclear to be allowed to fail,” they assumed.
So they kept issuing bonds and nagged the International Monetary Fund for more loans. As Anatoly Chubais, who remained the behind-the-scenes brains of Yeltsin’s economic team, put it: we “conned” the international community out