World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [49]
36 Nevertheless, the fact remains that Russian capitalism was made and is still dominated by a tiny handful of immensely successful entrepreneurs, most of them Jewish.
Retaliation, Reform, and Mass Resentment
For at least two of the oligarchs, life has gone downhill since former KGB official Vladimir Putin came to power. A week before being elected president on March 26, 2000, Putin warned Russia’s billionaires that their days of running the country were over: “[T]hose people who fuse . . . power and capital—there will be no oligarchs of this kind as a class.”
37 So far, Putin’s main targets have been Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, both media moguls who dared to cover the president unfavorably. Indeed, many Russia watchers are concerned that free speech in Russia is under serious threat. According to The Economist, for example, “Gusinsky, owner of NTV, the only independent national television station, was jailed on June 13th on a spurious-sounding allegation of fraud. Before that, the press minister had called him a ‘bacterium,’ anti-Semitic remarks were broadcast about him on state-controlled television and masked police had raided his headquarters.”
38 Gusinsky, widely detested in Russia, is now in exile.
Also in exile is Gusinsky’s former rival Boris Berezovsky, who is lashing back at Putin from his new home in London. According to one source, Berezovsky is planning to release a documentary “proving” that Russian security forces were behind a series of bombings that in 1999 killed over three hundred people in Moscow and other major Russian cities. Berezovsky claims that the bombings were conducted to incite hatred against Chechens in a calculated effort to rally public support for Putin.
39
The consensus in Moscow, however, is that the popular Putin has nothing to worry about. “People hate Berezovsky here,” explains one Moscow journalist. “The rating of [Russia’s security police] is way higher than Berezovsky’s own rating, not to mention the president.” Stanislav Kucher, another Moscow journalist, is even less sympathetic. In his view Berezovsky is simply rankled “that he no longer can influence the development of this country.” “He was absolutely sure that had he not been Jewish he would make president. And of course, he would say that with bitter regret.”
40
Meanwhile, the oligarchs remaining in Russia have, at least in appearance, shaped up under the Putin presidency. In a recent interview with Matthew Brzezinski, Vladimir Potanin waxes eloquent: “We are coming to the end of the first phase of Russia’s capitalist transition: the accumulation of capital.” Now, in the “second stage,” we must make our holdings “profitable, restructure them into viable concerns, change the system.” “What was okay two years ago is no longer acceptable.”
41 Similarly, Mikhail Friedman “applauds” the government’s recent economic and rule-of-law reforms, “but wishes they could be pushed through more quickly.” And Mikhail Khodorkovsky in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times: “We used to think that all that mattered was to have good production figures. We considered other matters less important: the environment, investor relations, public affairs, corporate governance as a whole. And suddenly it hit us over the head, hard, and we realized we were wrong.”
42
The Jewish oligarchs in particular are keenly aware that they are increasingly at President Putin’s mercy. According to the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews, Putin “is gaining popularity by what is seen as a crackdown on widely hated, mostly Jewish, tycoons.”
43 The most recent shakeup occurred in January 2002, when Roman Abramovich, an oligarch formerly favored by Putin, was replaced by Viktor Geraschenko