Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [74]
He rang the bell. Chernomyrdin walked into the room.
Boris reached into his pocket and produced a copy of a letter from Skuratov to Primakov detailing the Aeroflot allegations. (Boris would not tell me where he obtained it. “I had my sources,” he said.) Across the page was an inscription in the prime minister’s hand: “Initiate criminal proceedings and bring up charges. Primakov.”
“I don’t believe that I wrote it. Did I really?” Primus was stunned.
“May I go now, Evgeny Maksimovich?” asked Chernomyrdin.
When they were alone, Primakov said, “Boris Abramovich, tell me, what do you want? I have heard that you were interested in the Sber Bank.”
“I have not been involved in business for years now, Evgeny Maksimovich. But I would like to be your assistant,” said Boris impishly.
The prime minister did not get his sense of humor. He was at a loss. “And what would the Communists say?”
“Just kidding, Evgeny Maksimovich,” said Berezovsky, and he left the room.
The next day Boris went to see Putin at his FSB office. He shivered involuntarily as the heavy iron gates closed behind his Mercedes. The car edged into the inner courtyard of the tetragonal Lubyanka building. In the old days, many thousands had passed through this gate and never returned.
A nondescript fellow—a Putin look-alike—ushered him into the elevator and to the brand new director’s study on the third floor. Putin’s office was renovated to fit his ascetic taste: light wood, strictly functional, apparently influenced by his East German years. The old executive office, where such past masters of the KGB as Beria and Andropov had plotted the cold war, had been converted into an Agency shrine, by the new director’s orders.
Putin’s small frame looked even smaller behind his huge desk, on which stood a bronze statuette of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police. He put his finger to his lips to signal silence and gestured to Boris to follow him through the back door. They passed through a private dining room and exited through another tiny passageway.
Boris looked around. They were in a small windowless anteroom in front of an elevator door, apparently a back exit from the office to the executive elevator.
“This is the safest place to talk,” Putin said.
There were two items on Boris’s agenda: Primakov and Litvinenko.
It is a peculiar quality of Russian politics that the principal of the Kremlin, be it a tsar, a general secretary, or a president, is endowed with a mystical quality of vlast, or “right of power,” which instills in the populace a measure of instinctive humility and respect. This regal ingredient of supreme authority links all historical rulers in Russia into a single virtual dynasty from the House of Romanoff through Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, down to Gorbachev and Yeltsin. From it flows the concept of heir apparent. In a practical sense, as Putin and Boris—and everyone else—well understood, whomever Yeltsin endorsed as his heir would have an automatic electoral advantage, anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the vote. It made no difference that Yeltsin himself had negligible approval ratings; the mystique of being the heir to vlast worked quite independently from the personality of the incumbent.
The country was just eight months away from the election year of 2000. Obviously, Primus, a seventy-year-old Soviet relic backed by a cabal of Communists, former apparatchiks, and spies, was not what the country needed as it entered the twenty-first century. He had to go; it had been agreed between him and the president from day one. The question was, who would be his replacement, the heir apparent, the next president of Russia?
As they stood in the elevator anteroom in the old KGB building, Boris and Putin understood the responsibility bestowed on them by history. Their joint opinion would probably carry “the family,” which in turn would weigh