Once Upon a Time in Russia by Ben Mezrich

Author:Ben Mezrich
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Atria Books

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I. Used with permission of The Associated Press Copyright © 2014. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER TWENTY

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June 15, 2000,

Alexandrovka Dacha

BEREZOVSKY’S WORLD HAD FLIPPED upside down many times over the past decade, so he shouldn’t have been surprised when once again it spun out from beneath his feet. This time, though, it happened in the course of a mere six months—a lifetime in modern Russia, where it took no longer than a five-minute speech for an unknown man to become president.

Still, Berezovsky had found himself floundering when this new existential challenge blindsided him. Maybe it was fitting that this new threat came from the same nowhere man they had just installed as president. It wasn’t just those in the outside world who had little information about Putin’s past, before his days at the Kremlin. Berezovsky and the Family had been impressed by his service in the mayor’s office of St. Petersburg, but much of his work at the KGB before that was barely documented. How well did any of them really know the man?

Even after the imprisonment of Litvinenko, Berezovsky had believed they had chosen someone who could be controlled from behind the scenes. But a few weeks before the official election, with Putin already ahead in the polls, the acting president suddenly revealed a side he hadn’t shown before.

On March 26, he had called a television press conference and had spoken about the chaotic business environment gripping the country, and the role of businessmen going forward. Berezovsky had been sitting exactly where he was now, at his breakfast table in his dacha, watching the conference before he headed to the Logovaz Club. Putin had looked impressive on the television screen—exactly as he had been designed to appear, young, handsome, brimming with confidence and strength, exactly the man depicted in all the feature stories they had played on ORT over the months of the campaign—often showing Putting in judo gear, riding horses, or swimming. A very different leader from the aging, sick Yeltsin, Putin was a symbol of the new generation, of youth. And then he began to speak.

“Those who combine power and capital—in the future, these Oligarchs will cease to exist as a class.”

Berezovsky had been shocked by the sweep and ferocity of the statement. As different news programs analyzed the conference, the consensus was that Putin was calling for the elimination of Berezovsky and his colleagues as a power bloc. These were frightening words—and to Berezovsky, who had been funding Putin’s rise in the polls, they’d come out of nowhere.

As he’d watched the fallout on TV, he’d realized that Putin’s statement only made the president more popular. The public, most of whom lived at or near poverty, had grown increasingly frustrated watching men like Berezovsky living like royalty, right in their midst. The people didn’t know, or care, that Berezovsky and his colleagues believed they had saved capitalism and democracy from the communists. In Berezovsky’s view, the Oligarchs had benefited only because they had been smart enough and quick enough to do so.

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