Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [71]
Nevertheless, there was no chemistry between Boris and Putin until the day he showed up at Lena Berezovskaya’s birthday. His security guard gave Boris twenty minutes’ warning that the FSB director was on his way to the dacha. At first, everyone thought there was some kind of emergency, but when Boris went out to meet the guest he saw a huge bouquet of roses emerging from the automobile door ahead of the diminutive spymaster, as his security detail stood in a semicircle.
Boris was surprised.
“Volodya, I am very touched, but why do you need to complicate your relationship with Primakov?”
“I don’t care,” said Putin. “I am your friend and I want to show it. To third parties, in particular. They want to make you a pariah, but I know that you are clean.”
Many years later in London, Boris still believed that Putin was sincere in his birthday gesture. “He did not have any ulterior motive in coming. At the time, I was not among Yeltsin’s favorites. Primus was. The last thing Putin needed was to give Primus grounds to say that we were conspiring together.”
Our conversation took place after Sasha’s death. I found Boris’s statement about Putin’s sincerity incredible. Boris’s views did not match: How could Putin, a selfless friend showing solidarity with Boris in his time of need, also be the instigator of Sasha’s murder? One of the two must be false.
“That’s the whole point!” Boris exclaimed, with his mathematician’s joy of solving a puzzle. “I thought about it a lot. Has anyone betrayed you in your life?”
“Some,” I responded.
“Have you wished them dead? Wanted them killed, literally?”
“Why, no!”
“That’s the difference! Putin is an exemplary team player, totally dependable. How could he possibly be a murderer? And then I understood. These KGB people, they do have a moral code, but it is different. They are trained to be loyal to the death, and, at the same time, they believe that disloyalty is punishable by death. To him, Sasha was a traitor. Sasha tried to explain this to me, but I did not pay attention before it was too late.”
And so from the day of Lena’s birthday, Putin became a full-fledged member of “the family,” and his skills proved indispensable with the urgent problems at hand: parrying Skuratov’s assault and convincing the president that his prime minister was plotting to grab power and steer the country back into the Soviet past.
Nobody knows for sure how the fateful video originated. Boris said that he learned about it when it was already an open secret in the Kremlin. In Midnight Diaries Yeltsin says that a “pornographic tape” appearing to feature his prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov, “got into the hands” of Chief of Staff General Bordyuzha at the end of January. Yeltsin wrote that Skuratov’s “friends … among bankers and businessmen” were the ones who “made use of the prosecutor’s soft spot.”
The Moscow tabloid Argumenty i Fakti hypothesized in an editorial that the poor quality of the black-and-white video suggested that it was the work of the secret services, because “they were the only ones who would not have a budget for new equipment.”
The insightful journalist-parliamentarian Yuri Schekochihin, in a story in Novaya Gazeta, said that the man who made the film was one of the prosecuter’s own staff who later surfaced in the Kremlin.
Whoever got the tape to the Kremlin unleashed a chain of events that became Russia’s Monicagate.
On February 1, 1999, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, General Bordyuzha, confronted Skuratov with the tape and extracted a letter of resignation from him. Late at night on March 16, the tape was shown on Channel 2, with a warning that it was not recommended to viewers under eighteen. The next morning, the Federation Council, the upper chamber of Russia’s parliament, gathered to endorse Skuratov’s resignation, as required by the