Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [97]
Like me, Felshtinsky was highly skeptical of Boris’s relationship with Putin and was happy to learn that there was a disagreement brewing between them. In May 2000, Felshtinsky flew to Moscow to take part in the group that was helping Boris write the federalist memorandum. As he later told me, on one day of that trip he took a break from our labors and went to see Sasha.
He found him in a bad mood.
It was still two weeks before Boris’s conflict with Putin would splash across the front pages, but the raid of masked thugs on Media-MOST had already been featured on prime-time television. Sasha was convinced that Kontora had taken over the Kremlin in the person of Putin and would start cracking down on everyone on its hate list. In general terms, this meant journalists, Chechen lovers, Jews, and oligarchs; more specifically, it meant Berezovsky and Goose, who epitomized all of the above.
As for Sasha, the Kafkaesque investigation of him continued without any end in sight. He was now fighting a third set of charges, after the two previous ones had been thrown out by the courts.
After he had been conditionally released from Butyrka in December, the accusation that he had beaten a suspect and extorted some vegetables at a Moscow market on May 30, 1996, fell apart. As it turned out, on that day in that market, the FSB did indeed beat some people, but Sasha was a thousand miles away in Armenia. He was busy intercepting five truckloads of arms being sent to Chechnya via Georgia. The Armenian Security Ministry provided evidence of his whereabouts. The charges were dropped and two “eyewitnesses” dismissed.
On the day he was cleared, however, he was slapped with new charges. Allegedly, some years earlier, while pursuing a case in the town of Kostroma, five hundred miles northeast of Moscow, Sasha had stolen some explosives from an FSB depot and planted them on a suspect, a local gangster, to frame him. A new criminal case was opened, and Sasha’s restraining order not to leave Moscow was extended. This time, however, the charge had an ominous twist: should the case be tried, it would not be in Moscow. It was unlikely that a provincial judge would have the guts to stand up to FSB pressure, as two Moscow judges had managed to do.
After spending an evening with melancholy Sasha and loyal Marina, Felshtinsky came up with an idea: approach the source of the trouble, the Kontora itself, to see what it would take for them to leave Sasha alone. Boris and Putin had not yet publicly split. Felshtinsky figured that he might be able to get access by exploiting Boris’s reputation, while it was still worth something.
A couple of days later he sat down for dinner with none other than Gen. Evgeny Khokholkov (Retired) in a classy restaurant on Kutuzovsky Prospect that Khokholkov owned.
Khokholkov not only accepted Felshtinsky’s suggestion to meet and talk; he even closed his place to other customers for the night. He clearly viewed his guest as Berezovsky’s emissary, and thus two steps removed from Putin.
Years later, Felshtinsky, as meticulous as a historian can be, gave me an account of that conversation. It was on May 22, 2000, from 7:30 to 12:30. Khokholkov was friendly and self-confident. He made no secret that he maintained a close relationship with Kontora. Moreover, it appeared that he had cleared the conversation with his contacts; he kept using “we” to articulate his positions.
Yes, “we” understand that Boris is an important and resourceful man, and agree that there is no reason to continue hostilities between him and the FSB. There is nothing wrong with letting bygones be bygones, although some past injustices could still be reversed. For example, perhaps Boris could help reinstate a certain group of three hundred officers who had been placed on unpaid leave in the aftermath of the URPO scandal.
But as