Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [75]
Notwithstanding the electoral advantage of the president’s endorsement, the candidate should have one essential quality: he should be able to beat the Communist-backed candidate, possibly Primus himself, who had gained popularity in recent weeks. But as Boris and Putin reviewed the list of possible candidates, the landscape was deserted. After the previous year’s scandals and crises, reformers of Chubais’s school, such as Nemtsov and Kiriyenko, were unelectable. The same was true for Chernomyrdin, with his loser image. Lebed was electable, but he would become something of a military dictator. There were only two people of national standing who seemed minimally acceptable: Sergei Stepashin, minister of the interior, and Nikolai Aksionenko, minister of transportation. Each had his strengths and his weaknesses. Neither was a shoo-in.
“Volodya, what about you?” Boris suddenly asked.
“What about me?” Putin did not understand.
“Could you be president?”
“Me? No, I am not the type. This is not what I want in life.”
“Well, then, what? Do you want to stay here forever?”
“I want …,” he hesitated. “I want to be Berezovsky.”
“No, you don’t really.” Boris laughed.
They dropped the subject.
Boris’s next question was about Sasha.
“Look,” Putin said, “I will be straight with you. You know what I think of Litvinenko. He used you. And he is a traitor. But if you ask, I will try to help. The problem is, it’s not under my control at all. It is all in the hands of Skuratov’s military prosecutors division. Let us first get rid of Skuratov, then we will see what we can do about Litvinenko.”
All of this made sense to Boris. But there was something in Putin’s expression that he did not like.
“And, Boris,” Putin continued, “whatever you think of him, he is not clean. He did some pretty bad things.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Boris. “I know the man.”
“I have seen the evidence.”
There was an awkward pause. How strange, thought Boris. Putin and Sasha are two men in the FSB who do not take bribes, and they hate each other so much.
“He is a traitor,” repeated Putin. “But I will do what I can.”
It was getting late. Putin grabbed the door handle. It turned freely without catching the lock mechanism. “Fuck,” said Putin. “They can’t make locks work, and you want me to run the country. To call the elevator, you need a key. We’re trapped.
“Hey, someone!” he yelled, banging on the wall that separated the anteroom from the main corridor. “This is Putin here! We are locked out!”
They banged for about ten minutes before someone heard and came to their rescue.
In the meantime, in solitary confinement at Lefortovo prison, Sasha was trying to come to grips with his situation.
“Initially, I was in shock,” he later wrote in The Gang from Lubyanka. “The first night I did not sleep; I stared at the ceiling. On the day I was arrested, the weather was lousy, snow mixed with rain, sludge all over. I don’t like this time of the year and by the end of March I live in expectation of the sun. The next day they took me out into a small recreation box, five to six steps across. I looked up—and the sky was blue, with the sun somewhere out there. I was pacing like a beast between those walls. Over me—the iron grid with barbed wire and blue-blue skies. I was in a terrible state: spring had arrived, and I can’t see it. I am here, in this damp, cold box. I got so upset that I asked them to bring me back to my cell.”
Some years later, on a walk through London, Sasha stopped at the inscription on the statue of Oscar Wilde: “We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.”
It instantly brought back his memories of prison. “How very right. That was how I felt. In the gutter looking at the stars.”
On his third day in solitary, he went on a hunger strike. He demanded to see a human rights representative. He was close to hysterical. They gave him a shot to cool him down. Then the warden, an old man who knew him well from the times when Sasha visited these premises as an oper, came to see him.
“Look, son,” he said, “don’t destroy