Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [92]
Sasha discovered that in February 1998, three days after his surprise arrival at Lena Berezovskaya’s birthday party with a flower bouquet, Putin had appeared with a similar bouquet at the door of Vladimir Kryuchkov, the last Soviet KGB chief, on his birthday.
According to Sasha, the change that Boris observed in Putin in April 2000 was no change at all. Boris was merely discovering the man’s essence.
Whichever theory is correct, “Putin’s reversal” came as a total surprise to Boris.
In mid-April 2000, shortly after Putin’s victory, I stopped in Paris on my way to Moscow. Boris was in town on a long vacation. We had dinner together.
I had not seen much of him during the previous year. He had been busy with his political battles and I had spent much of my time traveling throughout the Siberian Gulag, running my TB project. But I had followed his spectacular successes in the press. He was widely credited with masterminding Putin’s victory. He was ranked the richest man in Russia and labeled the most influential among Putin’s advisers, outranking even Chief of Staff Voloshin. Little did I know that he would soon be in exile, a dissident, and that Sasha Litvinenko would follow in his wake. The postelection calm was deceptive: the year 2000 would prove to be a turning point for all of us, and for Russia itself.
Boris invited me to visit his electoral district of Karachayevo-Cherkessia, where he was planning to develop a huge ski resort on the slopes of Dombai, in the southern section of the Main Caucasus Range.
“We are planning to build a highway from the Sochi Airport and make it the best winter spot in Europe,” he declared.
“I don’t see how people will go there with a war raging a hundred miles away,” I said.
“That’s true,” he agreed. “Volodya has to stop that. Chechnya is the one thing that we disagree about.”
“Volodya can’t stop it,” I said. “He is a war criminal. As soon as the war ends, there will be crowds of human rights monitors all over Chechnya, digging out dead bodies, and he will be in big trouble. He has probably outdone Milosevic by now.”
“You dissidents, you don’t understand politics,” Boris retorted. “Russia is not Serbia. I’ve heard Tony Blair is taking Volodya to tea with the queen this week, isn’t he? And if bad comes to worse, he will find some generals to take the blame.”
“You oligarchs, you don’t understand history,” I replied. “When Volodya goes after you, you will run to the dissidents for help.”
“Volodya will not go after me,” he replied. “He is a team person. And I am part of the same team and we share a mission. For him, going after me would be like going after himself.”
While Boris was taking a long vacation, the power configuration in the Kremlin was undergoing momentous change. With Yeltsin gone, the Tanya-Valya team rapidly lost influence. Alexander Voloshin, who had distanced himself from Boris long before, now controlled the Kremlin. Voloshin was even more of a recluse than Putin. The Kremlin became a castle of introverts. A clique of mysterious KGB types appeared on the scene, brought by Putin from St. Petersburg. Boris was already effectively pushed out from the center of power, although he didn’t realize it.
One afternoon in mid-May I went for a jog in a birch tree forest surrounding the Holiday Inn in a leafy Moscow suburb. My cell phone, strapped to my belt, suddenly rang; Boris was on the phone from France.
“Tell me, in America, can the president fire a governor?”
“No,” I said, “no way. That’s the whole point of the federal system.”
“Have you heard what they are doing? They want to assume the right to fire governors!”
He was referring to the regional reform package proposed by Putin. It was his first major legislation. He called it strengthening “the vertical axis of power.” This was a major reversal of the Yeltsin revolution,