The Invention of Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News by Ostrovsky Arkady

Author:Ostrovsky, Arkady [Ostrovsky, Arkady]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-06-06T21:00:00+00:00

Fighting for the President

In 1996 Yeltsin faced presidential elections, challenged by the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. The war in Chechnya, the growing gap between rich and poor and the continuing economic slump had brought his rating close to zero. Yeltsin was suffering from serious heart problems, and to many, including Gaidar, he did not seem fit to fight either physically or spiritually. Gaidar wrote him a letter, arguing that he should not run at all. The problem, as Gaidar soon realized, was that nobody else could step in to fill his shoes. The Communists were riding high, exploiting the economic hardship, accusing Yeltsin of acting against the interests of the Russian people, promising to restore Russia’s status as a superpower and to kick out (Jewish) tycoons. In practice, a victory by Zyuganov would mean the end of all the economic reforms and freedoms that Yeltsin had fought for so fiercely since 1991. He decided to run.

One of the biggest threats, however, was not that the Communists would come to power, for it was highly unlikely that Yeltsin would have ceded power to them, but that the party of war, led by Korzhakov, would persuade him to postpone or cancel the elections altogether and use force instead, as he had done in October 1993. At the very least this would have deprived Yeltsin of legitimacy, isolating him from the West and making him completely reliant on the security men, who would quickly put an end to all reforms.

In charge of Yeltsin’s official election campaign was Oleg Soskovets, the first deputy prime minister and a friend of Korzhakov, who presented Yeltsin with his low rating as proof positive that the only way to defeat the Communists was to ban them. The reformers needed Yeltsin to win openly and fairly. Once again the two were at odds.

The Russian business tycoons who observed Zyuganov schmoozing and hobnobbing with the Western elite in Davos, trying to present himself as a social democrat rather than as the Stalinist anti-Semite that he was at home, agreed to throw their energy and media resources behind Yeltsin. A fight against the Communists was a proxy fight against a war party inside the Kremlin. Yet far from paying for Yeltsin’s victory, the oligarchs saw it as a way of making money.

The idea of forming a coalition of the seven largest business tycoons belonged to Boris Berezovsky, in many ways the archetypal Russian oligarch, who epitomized the 1990s with his opportunism, ruthlessness, colorful individualism and utter lack of morals. A mathematician by training, he specialized in the theory of decision-making optimization, using applied mathematics to model how choices are made. He applied these models to his life and to the country, as though life itself were a giant chessboard on which he could move the pieces.

Berezovsky thrived on crisis and uncertainty, surviving several assassination attempts and expanding his influence. Unlike other oligarchs, who wished to own their assets so they could pass them on, Berezovsky did not formally own much of what he controlled.

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