Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [79]
On May 12, Primakov was sacked. Sergei Stepashin sailed smoothly through Duma confirmation as the new Russian prime minister. Boris’s friend Vladimir Rushailo took over the Interior Ministry. Primus departed for a well-deserved vacation, carrying with him the informal title of the most popular politician in Russia. His approval rating was at 60 percent, compared to Yeltsin’s 2.
For the summer months, Russia’s political metabolism shifts to the green belt of dachas surrounding the capital. On one steamy night in early June, Igor Malashenko, the president of NTV, greeted a pair of guests at his dacha: the Tanya-Valya team. They came with a mission: to sound out Malashenko regarding Putin. Would NTV support him should he become the heir apparent?
“I was horrified,” recalled Malashenko years later. “He was KGB. How can one even think of picking a KGB man? That’s a criminal organization.”
“But you have not even met him,” Tanya-Valya protested. “He is different. He is truly liberal. And loyal. He did not betray Sobchak, and he would not betray us. Papa likes him a lot.”
Igor agreed to meet Putin before coming to a final judgment. On Sunday, June 6, a dinner was arranged at the dacha of Peter Aven, one of the original Davos Pact oligarchs, the founder of Alfa Bank. Putin came with his two daughters.
Aven’s house, with its over-the-top opulence, must have been a shocker for the teenage daughters of an uncorrupted civil servant.
The dinner was dull. The conversation listlessly eddied around the topic of water shortages in downtown Moscow. Putin kept his silence, acting “like a hero captured by the enemy.” Finally Malashenko’s wife arrived and livened up the night. She came straight from the airport, seeing their daughter off to her boarding school in England.
That gave them a new subject to discuss: private schools in the United Kingdom. Putin still kept silent, as did his daughters.
A while later, Malashenko’s daughter called from Heathrow: nobody was there to meet her. Could Mama contact the school, please? Children were not allowed to travel by themselves.
“Come on, it’s Sunday evening, there’s no one at school,” said Malashenko’s wife. “You’re a big girl: get a cab, give the address to the driver, and he will take you there.”
She hung up. Suddenly Putin spoke for the first time.
“It’s a mistake what you just did, you know. You can never tell who could be out there, posing as a cab driver.”
Igor’s jaw dropped. Was he joking?
But Putin was deadly serious. Igor was an important opinion-maker in Russia, a target for Western intelligence services, he explained. For a man like him it is advisable to be more cautious about the security of his family.
There was not a hint of irony or malice in the remark. Putin was genuinely concerned about the girl’s safety.
“That was it, the KGB mind-set,” Malashenko explained to me. “The moment I heard it, it was crystal clear. How could we possibly support a man like that to be our president?”
Later on, there were many instances that widened the great divide between Putin and Malashenko’s NTV. But the casual remark at that dinner was the start of a chain of events that ended in the storming of NTV studios by Putin’s police just one year later.
On July 11, Yeltsin and his family went to Zavidovo, the rural retreat seventy-five miles northwest of Moscow. Four days later Yumashev came back to town and sought out Boris.
“Boris Nikolaevich made up his mind,” he said. “It’s Putin. Will he accept? What do you think?”
Boris replied that he had already asked and Putin was not interested.
“Well, you are the only one who can make him change his mind,” said Valya.
On July 16 Boris’s Gulfstream landed in the French resort town of Biarritz on the Bay of Biscay. He found Putin, his wife, and the girls in an inexpensive hotel overlooking the water. The two men went out for lunch.
“Boris Nikolaevich sent me. He wants you to become the prime minister.”
There was no need to explain. In all likelihood, it meant Putin would