Boris Berezovsky died in London last week. A postmortem examination conducted by the British authorities found that his death was “consistent with hanging,” with press reports suggesting that he appeared to have killed himself (the investigation is not complete). In Russia of the nineteen-nineties, Berezovsky was the one-man powerhouse of national politics, one of the country’s richest tycoons, and the kingmaker behind Vladimir Putin’s ascent to the Presidency in 2001.Almost as soon as Putin became President, Berezovsky was forced out of the country; he spent the following decade in Britain as a political exile. He and the Kremlin engaged in a fierce standoff, in which Berezovsky was condemned as the number-one enemy of Russia. The Russian government blamed Berezovsky for crimes ranging from money laundering and financial fraud to plans to seize power by force—and sought his extradition. Berezovsky waged his own campaign against Putin and his government. He blamed them for hideous crimes: for one, he claimed that the government was behind the 1999 bombings of apartment buildings that took over three hundred lives.
The British authorities refused to extradite Berezovsky and granted him political asylum. But his war against the Kremlin was lost almost from the start. He spared no effort to produce reports, books, and documentaries filled with allegations of the Putin government’s criminal acts, but all through the 2000s Putin steadily consolidated his power and stood unchallenged and uncontested. Meanwhile, even the Western media began losing interest in Putin’s exiled enemy.
Berezovsky’s amazing rise from a Soviet academic to billionaire and master political operator was a phenomenon of the nineteen-nineties. Following the 1991 meltdown of the Soviet Union, the government of the Russian Federation was dysfunctional, its constitution not yet written, rules virtually nonexistent, and vast state properties were up for grabs. It was a time when the adventurous, the entrepreneurial, and the unscrupulous hurriedly seized factories, plants, banks, oil, and metal enterprises. It was a tough struggle in which business disputes were commonly resolved by violence and murder. In 1994, Berezovsky survived an assassination attempt: his car exploded and his driver was decapitated; his bodyguard lost an eye. Berezovsky was injured but undeterred. He seemed to revel in risk, speed, and raw rivalry.
In the wild atmosphere of Russia’s early capitalism, Berezovsky emerged among the harshest, most arrogant, stubborn, and successful fighters. In a matter of a few years he got hold of a national car dealership, an oil company, Russia’s largest national TV network, and its passenger carrier Aeroflot.
In 1996, when an utterly unpopular President Boris Yeltsin was to run for a second term, a group of Russian business tycoons joined forces to get him reëlected. All of them clearly assumed that they’d reap the benefits of their investment during Yeltsin’s second term, but Berezovsky went furthest of all. He all but invaded the Kremlin and actively interfered with high-ranking appointments and the distribution of property. He came close to appointing himself the head of the giant gas monopoly Gazprom, a major source of Russian budget revenues.
Berezovsky held a number of high offices at various times, but he was empowered more by his own personality than he was by formal authority as a lawmaker, deputy secretary of the Kremlin Security Council, or executive secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States (positions that he held at various times in nineties).
“A compressed ball of energy,” was how David Hoffman described Berezovsky in his book “The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia.” Berezovsky was a man of giant ambition, to whom no challenge was too big and no deal was impossible—a man who never stopped. He was full of life and passions, and a legendary womanizer. He made countless connections; in the words of a person who knew him in his younger years, he “artfully wove people into his yarn.” Those who knew him remember that he liked to quote Andrey Sakharov’s words, “expansion is the meaning of life.” “He could never think of himself at rest,” a former cabinet member wrote.
Politicians and political parties, the legislature, a major television network, business leaders—he had them all on strings. Expansion was about catching and holding ever more strings. His ambition was to run Russia, no less.
By the late nineties, a grave economic crisis, Yeltsin’s ill health, and lack of public support put Russia on the verge of instability. Berezovsky undertook to replace Yeltsin with a new leader. His choice was Vladimir Putin. Apparently Berezovsky expected to have him, too, in his grip.
For all his energy, his immense ego, and his mastery of political manipulation, Berezovsky turned out to be an oddly naïve man. As he expanded his power far and wide, he was driven by the fever of the moment, the passion of the game. Consequences were of secondary concern. It wasn’t just that he was heedless of his own compatriots and their lives, though he was; even his own prospects were strangely irrelevant.
Boris Nemtsov, Russia’s deputy prime minister during Yeltsin’s second Presidency, warned Berezovsky that Putin would not accept a kingmaker by his side. “He will never forgive you for supporting him,” he remembers telling Berezovsky who, he said, “laughed and told me I don’t understand anything.”
As soon as he took office, Putin started to weaken each and every possible challenger to his authority: local governors, national television, business tycoons—he took them under control one by one. His core belief was that nobody could defy the power of the state, and that power was embodied by the man at the top—himself. Those who enriched themselves in Russia should remember that they owed their wealth to Putin, not to their own personality or entrepreneurial talents. As the supreme arbiter, he decides who gets punished and who acts with impunity.
Putin’s moves ran fully counter to Berezovsky’s interests, but when he tried to talk to him, the man whom Berezovsky considered his protégé made it clear that he wanted Berezovsky out of his way. Or else. He added that Berezovsky must give up control over Russia’s major television network; Putin wanted this resource to himself. Berezovsky sold his share and left Russia soon thereafter.
About a year into his Presidency, as Hoffman recounts in his book, Putin was asked about Berezovsky at a press conference. “Boris Berezovsky?” he responded. “Who’s that?”
The last time that Berezovsky’s name attracted major attention was when he sued another Russian tycoon, Roman Abramovich, in a London court. Abramovich was once Berezovsky’s young disciple whom he introduced to Kremlin politics and to ways of enrichment. But over the years Abramovich proved to be more shrewd politically and more successful in business. Berezovsky argued that Abramovich had earlier intimidated him into selling his assets at too low a price, and sought about five and a half billion dollars in damages—but failed to prove his claim in court. Arguably, as in the case of the informal clout that promptly faded away in the face of Putin’s power, he was too carried away by the process of acquiring assets to bother securing his gains.
Berezovsky lost his lawsuit (referred to by the British media as the biggest private litigation battle in British legal history). He had spent an estimated hundred and fifty million dollars for experts and lawyers and had to pay another fifty-six million dollars for Abramovich’s legal fees, which reportedly left both his finances and his morale broken.
After he died, the British press wrote that he had suffered from grave depression. A Russian reporter who spoke with Berezovsky the day before his death wrote that he looked despondent and kept talking about his yearning to return to Russia.
It is hard to imagine a figure as unloved by his compatriots as Berezovsky was. But there’s still one thing he should be given credit for: he was a man of grand, Shakespearean scope. And Putin’s Russia is no country for grand personalities.
His gradual decline, his eventual surrender, and his death leave a sense of deep sadness. It’s a final reminder that the nineties are irrevocably gone—for all the confusion, hardship, and utter unfairness of that time, one could discern a glimpse of hope that Russia would break free from the perennial curse of the dominant state and powerless man.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Masha Lipman
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