Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [72]
Enraged, Yeltsin fired his chief of staff. He called Skuratov, Primakov, and Putin to see him in the hospital, where he was receiving treatment for a bleeding ulcer. He had not been informed about the tape, he said, but under the circumstances he asked Skuratov to go.
Skuratov said that the tape was a fabrication. Yeltsin directed Putin to have the FSB perform forensic analysis to establish its authenticity.
And here Skuratov made a fatal blunder. He told Yeltsin that one of his corruption investigations, involving Yeltsin’s daughter, would be taken care of if the president allowed him to stay. Yeltsin says in his memoirs that initially he did not understand what Skuratov was talking about.
A new prosecutor would find it difficult “to dispose of this complex issue,” insisted Skuratov. And then, seeking support, he turned to Primakov: “Tell him, Evgeny Maksimovich.”
According to Yeltsin, Primakov fell into a long silence, and then said, “If Boris Nikolaevich asked me, I would go instantly. You should go, Yuri Ilyich.”
“You betrayed me, Evgeny Maksimovich,” retorted Skuratov angrily.
It appeared that the two had a prior agreement of some sort. That was the beginning of the end of Primakov—though, oddly, not of Skuratov, who refused to resign.
For eight months, the Kremlin battled Parliament over Skuratov’s resignation. To manage the hostilities, Yeltsin appointed a new chief of staff, Boris’s protégé, Alexander Voloshin. In the meantime, Skuratov dug in his heels, continuing his highly publicized probes, which completely destroyed what remained of Yeltsin’s credibility. The president’s approval ratings fell back into single digits. Russia was slipping into political chaos.
The outside world barely paid attention to the Kremlin soap opera. In the wake of Monica Lewinsky, a sex scandal surrounding a mere state prosecutor was not big news. The only Russian official who made headlines in the West, on March 23, was Primakov, who made a midair turnaround en route to Washington to protest the onset of America’s bombing of Serbia. He became an instant hero among nationalists and Communists.
On March 25 military prosecutors arrested Sasha Litvinenko on a street in central Moscow. He was charged with exceeding his official powers, and causing bodily harm to a suspect, back in late 1997.
Grozny: On March 21, President Aslan Maskhadov survives another assassination attempt. The attack comes two days after a devastating bombing at the crowded market in Vladikavkaz, thirty miles from Chechnya, that killed fifty people. In Moscow, FSB chief Vladimir Putin rejects Maskhadov’s allegation that the attacks are the result of a conspiracy of “certain forces” in Moscow. On March 29, Putin is named head of Russia’s National Security Council, making him responsible for overall Chechnya policy. He retains the FSB directorship. By April 15, Russia deploys thousands of extra police and troops along the Chechen border. Speaking on Russian TV, the commander of interior troops says that the aim of Chechen separatists is “to create a single Muslim state out of Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan. This will give [Chechnya] direct access to Turkey, a NATO member.”
Even now it cannot be said with certainty who was behind Sasha’s arrest. At the time, the two agencies that handled his case were on the opposite sides of a great political divide: Skuratov’s Prosecution Service versus Putin’s FSB.
Sasha was adamant that it was Putin who delivered him to Skuratov’s dogs. He said that the military prosecutor Yuri Bagraev, who was Skuratov’s right-hand man, was genuinely surprised to see him in custody. Initially after the arrest, low-level investigators handled him. Then at some point, Bagraev appeared in his general’s uniform, walking into the interrogation room. He looked through Sasha’s telephone numbers and could not hide his astonishment.