Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [96]
Then he suddenly stopped, looked up with his watery eyes, and said, “Tell me, Boris, I don’t understand. Why are you doing this? Why are you attacking me? Have I done anything to hurt you? Believe me, I was more than tolerant with your escapades.”
“Volodya, you made a mistake when you stayed in Sochi. Every station in the world …“
“I don’t give a fuck about every station in the world,” interrupted Putin. “Why did you do this? You are supposed to be my friend. It was you who talked me into taking this job. And now you are stabbing me in the back. What did I do to deserve it?”
“Deserve what?”
“I have a report here, that your people were hiring some whores to pose as sailors’ wives and sisters to bash me.”
“They are not whores, they are real wives and sisters. Your KGB idiots are feeding you baloney, and if you believe it, you are not any different.”
Voloshin froze stiff as a wax doll; his eyes expressed horror.
“You forgot our conversation after the election, Volodya,” Boris went on. “I told you that I never swore allegiance to you personally. You promised to continue the Yeltsin way. He would never even think of shutting up a journalist who attacked him. You are destroying Russia.”
“Come on, you can’t be serious about Russia,” interrupted Putin. “Well, I guess that’s the end of it.”
“Tell me one thing, Volodya. Sending me the way of Goose, was this your idea or Voloshin’s?”
“It makes no difference now.” Putin was again his cold closed-up self. “Goodbye, Boris Abramovich.”
“Goodbye, Volodya.”
They both knew it was their last meeting.
Later that day Boris announced a donation of $1 million for the bereaved Kursk families, while ORT and NTV continued to broadcasted interviews with the sailors’ mothers and widows, who complained about government inaction. The Kremlin frantically tried to control the coverage, but the two defiant channels used round-theclock special reports to expose chaos in the navy, indifference in the Kremlin, and human tragedy at the submarine’s home base, with aloof, ice-cold Putin presiding over the mess.
When Putin finally arrived at Severomorsk, ten days after the catastrophe, he faced an angry crowd of sailors’ families. About five hundred people waited for hours in the rain for the president’s arrival, before they were allowed into the hall of an officers’ club. They asked sharp questions, wanting to know who was responsible for what everyone believed was a botched government response.
In an attempt to turn the tables, Putin lashed out at the media, without quite naming the two oligarchs, Boris and Goose. “They are liars. The television industry has people who have been destroying the state for ten years. They have been stealing money and buying up absolutely everything,” he said. “Now they’re trying to discredit the country so that the army gets even worse.” In a clear reference to Boris, he said, “There are some who have even given a million dollars…. They would have done better to sell their villas on the Mediterranean coast of France and in Spain. Only then could they explain why the property was registered under false names and behind firms. And we would probably ask the question, Where did the money come from?”
We watched the news at Boris’s dacha at Rublyovka. Boris pointed at the screen. “This expression,” he said. “Note this expression. This is how he is when he loses control. He is like a cornered animal, barking, snapping. This does not happen to him often.”
Yuri Felshtinsky, a journalist and historian specializing in the Russian secret services, comes from my cohort of Russian American expatriates. He has lived in Boston since the late 1970s, visiting his old homeland only after the fall of Communism. Like me, in the late 1990s he became a peripheral planet in Boris’s solar system, orbiting once every few months, advising him on various matters.
Felshtinsky befriended Sasha Litvinenko