Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [78]
In his seven months in Lefortovo, Sasha changed cellmates five or six times. He saw through them all. Each had been sentenced to a long term and instead of rotting in one of the truly hellish places of the gulag, earned his stay in Lefortovo by reporting on fellow inmates. The method was more or less the same: establishing trust by talking about family and common interests, sharing life stories, and then, gradually, infusing into the “object” the mood of hopelessness, the futility of resisting the system. Or, depending on the need, making the object talk about specific things that the investigator wanted to hear. Sasha knew the routine well enough; “In-Cell Development” had been one of his favorite subjects in counterintelligence school.
He amused himself by playing games with the invisible oper who was running his cellmates. On one occasion he cracked his interlocutor by telling him bluntly that he knew that he was an informer. Once Sasha got out, he threatened, he would check the man’s FSB file; there was someone in the Agency who would let him have a peek for a few hundred bucks.
The next day, the Lefortovo oper called him in: “Why are you doing this? Why are you bullshitting my agent?”
“I don’t like the man,” said Sasha. “He snores. Send me somebody else.”
Sasha was perplexed by the direction of the questioning by his investigators and his spy-cellmates: they were all interested in “the Kremlin family”: Yumashev, Voloshin, Tatyana, Roma, and Pavel Borodin, the Kremlin’s property manager. What were their habits, their relationships with each other, their third-party contacts, spending routines? It was clear that the investigators totally misunderstood Sasha’s standing in Boris’s circle. Of course he had met all these people, except Borodin, but he was not nearly close enough to provide any answers of that sort, even if he wanted to.
At the time Sasha did not know the politics behind it; he had never heard of “the family” before. But later on, in London, we analyzed his prison experiences. Was he Skuratov’s prisoner after all? Or Putin’s?
We argued about that for hours. Neither theory made any sense.
Putin would not need to poke into things like the Tatyana-Yumashev relationship; he knew it first-hand. He could not be after Borodin’s secrets; he had worked for him for two years. And yet, Sasha was sitting in Putin’s prison, under the charge trumped up by Putin’s Internal Affairs. So why was he questioned in an essentially anti-Putin investigation?
And then we realized that perhaps both theories were true. Putin, who wanted to see him in jail for his own reasons, was doing it with Skuratov’s hands; he knew that Sasha could not tell much of substance, so he threw him to Skuratov like a bone. The prosecutor was after him because he was Boris’s friend; Putin, because he was Kontora’s traitor.
While Boris and Putin were talking in the elevator anteroom at Lubyanka, the president in the Kremlin was tormented by the same problem: Who should inherit his throne? As he wrote in Midnight Diaries, by the end of April, Primakov’s fate was sealed. He “regretted it deeply,” but Evgeny Maksimovich used “too much of the color red” in his political palette.
Although he did not discuss it with anyone, not even with the man himself, by then Yeltsin had already chosen his crown prince. It was Putin, dependable and uncorrupted. The problem was, it was too early to announce him. He did not want “the society to get used to Putin during the lazy months of the summer. The mystery, the surprise part must not be wasted. It would be so important in the elections.”
But Primakov had to go now, so Yeltsin needed an interim replacement. He chose Stepashin, the softie, who had the best chance of approval by the Duma. The Communists would love to have him in their sights as the opponent to beat in the election. This was Yeltsin’s strategy: he would install Stepashin for just a few months and then bring in Putin