VLADIMIR PUTIN’S extraordinary journey to the Kremlin began as far back as November 1992, when the Constitutional Court repealed Boris Yeltsin’s ban on the Communist Party, enabling Party members to mobilise their forces in the Supreme Soviet and contest future elections. Yeltsin’s problem was that only about 300 of the thousand parliamentary deputies could be described as democrats. The majority were dyed-inthe-wool Communists or ultra-Nationalists who rallied behind Vice President Rutskoy and the Speaker of the House, Ruslan Khasbulatov. Rutskoy fixed a large map of the USSR to the wall of his office and provocatively told visitors: ‘That’s the past, but it’s also the future’.
Yeltsin’s confrontation with his parliamentary enemies was playing havoc with his health. He was drinking heavily, which brought on bouts of depression, high blood pressure and a recurrence of heart trouble. The situation reached flashpoint in October 1993, after Yeltsin dissolved parliament and called new elections. Two hundred of his political opponents, supported by several hundred heavily armed men, barricaded themselves in the White House. Alexander Rutskoy and his confederate Ruslan Khasbulatov sent armed gangs into the street to attack police trying to restore order among hundreds of demonstrators chanting: ‘All power to the Soviets’.
The rebels looted the office of the Moscow mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, in a skyscraper opposite the White House and stormed the state-owned Ostankino television tower in a fierce, bloody battle that was televised live on the Channel 1 network. Yeltsin called in the tanks. On his command, they blitzed the White House, setting the upper floors ablaze and killing 150 people. Through the smoke, several figures stumbled into the open waving a white flag. Rutskoy, Khasbulatov and their followers were herded into buses and driven away.
Yeltsin was at his most eloquent when he addressed the nation. ‘The nightmare of those dark days is now behind us,’ he said. ‘Nobody has won, nobody has scored a victory. We have all been scorched by the lethal breath of fratricidal war. Our people, our fellow countrymen, have perished. No matter what differences existed among us in our political views, they are all Russia’s children. This is our common tragedy. This is our huge grief. Let us remember this insanity, so that it will never happen again as long as we shall live.’
Later that year Yeltsin brought in a new constitution granting him stronger presidential powers, but he couldn’t stop the runaway locomotive of economic chaos. In 1994 share prices plunged, inflation ran out of control and the government did not have the money to pay wages and pensions. By the following year Russia was in deep crisis. ‘A good communist,’ the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht maintained, ‘has many dents in his helmet. And some of them are the work of the enemy.’ The same could be said of Boris Yeltsin’s Russia: the vast majority of blows against the fledgling democracy had been struck not only by diehard Communists but also by Yeltsin and his cronies, through multiple acts of greed and corruption which would ultimately rebound on them.
With its evocation of corruption and dread, Brecht’s masterpiece The Threepenny Opera offers an allegory about such men. Brecht poses the question: ‘Who is the greater criminal; he who robs a bank or he who founds one?’ Parallels between post-Soviet Russia and the Weimar Republic of the 1920s that gave birth to Brecht’s critique of the capitalist system are striking: hyperinflation, civil unrest, political extremism and the unseating of numerous prime ministers.
While the vast majority of Russians struggled with rising prices, acute shortages and unpaid wages, they had been infuriated by the enrichment of a handful of insiders through the voucher system. Their fury led to an abiding suspicion of democracy and a loathing for a freemarket system in which most of them were too poor to participate. This was the power base on which a new Communist challenge would be built, while at the opposite end of the scale was the new breed of tycoon soon to be christened ‘the oligarchs’. It was these opposing forces that would decide Russia’s destiny.
The sharpest and most controversial of the oligarchs was Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky. ‘Misha’, as his family calls him, was born on 26 June 1963 to a Jewish father and Orthodox Christian mother. He grew up in a standard two-room Moscow apartment, and although his parents were not particularly religious, young Misha was considered Jewish by the neighbours. Anti-Semitism turned him into a fiercely combative little boy who took great pains to succeed in everything he did. He was so selfdisciplined that his nickname was ‘Toy Soldier’.
The abject failure of the Communist economic and political system was abundantly clear to anyone living in the Brezhnev era. Khodorkovsky took it as a personal challenge. ‘We as citizens were denied true voting rights, the right to create political parties, or to participate in public life,’ he says. ‘Not only did we not have these rights, we would definitely have ended up in jail or in a mental hospital if we had tried something like that.’
Both of Khodorkovsky’s parents were chem ical engineers and he embarked on a chemical engineering course at the Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology. He quickly made his mark. Few of his fellow students had his drive, intelligence or daring; women fell for his charm and dark good looks. He sought membership of the Komsomol as the quickest route to success and by the end of his second year had been promoted to branch secretary.
Around the same time, he got married and soon had a son as well as wife and son to support. Every morning at 6 a.m., he queued up to buy baby food with state-issued ration cards. ‘Today’s young people do not remember what life was like for us in the Soviet Union before the start of perestroika,’ he says. ‘I sometimes find it difficult to explain that rising prices for goods are not the most frightening thing in life. It is worse when you walk into a store and there is simply nothing there to buy.’
As a trusted Komsomolite, Khodorkovsky was permitted to travel abroad. He followed the Moscow-Paris axis to France, where he discovered the delights of capitalism and the free market. It changed his view of the world around him. Khodorkovsky was in charge of the Mendeleev Institute’s canteen and bar and his first co-operative venture, in 1986, was to open a student cafe in the local Komsomol bureau with another young official, Alexei Golubovich, whose parents held senior posi tions in Gosbank, the state bank that administered all of the country ’s payments, including salaries, state subsidies and pensions.
Well-connected patrons were essential to any would-be impresario and Khodorkovsky schmoozed his way into favour with such people. His next move was to set up a co-operative to import computers, which were modified for Russian use and sold at a huge mark-up. He also recruited a team of programmers from among the institute’s student population to service the IT networks of state enterprises and government ministries. This operation was called the Centre for Inter-Industry Scientific and Technical Progress, known by its Russian acronym as ‘Menatep’.
By now, Khodorkovsky sported an impressive moustache and dressed in jeans and polo-neck sweaters. He had been given the added responsibility of vetting new employees at the Mendeleev Institute. One applicant – a beautiful young laboratory assistant named Inna – was invited to work with him in the Komsomol bureau. They had an affair and his marriage broke up. He married Inna two years later.
At the same time – 1988 – Khodorkovsky turned Menatep into a bank which sought deposits of government funds controlled by Communist Party apparatchiks. As one of the bank’s executives explained to David E. Hoffman, the Washington Post’s correspondent in Moscow, Khodorkovsky would have a sauna with one of his chums at the Finance Ministry, which would deposit 600 million roubles in Menatep. This money would be put into dollars or high-yielding rouble bonds and Menatep would collect the exchange-rate gains and the interest. When the ministry asked for its money back, inflation would have eroded its rouble value and Khodorkovsky would be left with a substantial profit. All of which, of course, is perfectly legal.
PUTIN ON AN EXPEDITION to the Ubsunur Hollow Biosphere Preserve. Inspecting a snow leopard’s habitat.
Recognising the threat to his businesses posed by the attempted Communist coup of 1991, the embryonic tycoon had dashed to the White House to support Boris Yelstin. ‘It’s true to say that 1991 made me a confirmed supporter of democracy and the market economy,’ he says. Practising what he preached, he and his partners took full advantage of the opportunities offered by Anatoly Chubais during the voucher years to acquire shareholdings in dozens of different industries, including textiles, chemicals, metallurgy, fertilisers, glassmaking and food processing. When they were accused of plundering state assets for a fraction of their true value, he pointed out that the risks were high and that many of these businesses, including his food processing operations, had to be closed down.
‘I played according to the rules of that time,’ he says. ‘Of course those rules could have been better. Then we could have avoided some of the current problems. But nowadays, it’s like going to someone who bought an apartment back in 1994 when prices were very low and saying to him: look at what that apartment is worth today – there must be something crooked here. And if they apply today’s laws to the time when all this was happening, then of course it’s perfectly possible for them to accuse anyone. That’s the danger: they’re trying to use that time when the legal system was completely chaotic to formulate accusations today.’
Inevitably, Khodorkovsky’s brilliance attracted the attention of the Yeltsin administration. In 1993, he offered his services to the President. It was a shrewd move. Yeltsin appointed him deputy oil minister in the Department of Energy, an appointment that would bring him the promise of untold riches along with the heady smell of crude oil.
The most voluble of the oligarchs was the hyperactive maverick Boris Berezovsky. Seventeen years older than Khodorkovsky and desperate to make up for lost time, he had followed the path to oligarchdom like a hunting dog on the trail of a wounded stag. Born in Moscow on 23 January 1946, Boris Abramovich Berezovsky was the only child of an engineer at a brick factory, and a nurse at the Institute of Paediatrics. Although he describes his childhood as ‘absolutely fantastic’, he admits his father was laid off during Stalin’s anti-Semitic purges and there were times the family didn’t have enough food.
Berezovsky studied science in the computer technology department at the Moscow Forestry Engineering Institute. After graduating, he moved to Moscow State University and the prestigious Academy of Sciences and took a PhD in mathematics and physics. ‘He was an outstanding organiser and problem solver,’ says fellow student Alexander Mandel. ‘He always had fat notebooks and a big intellect.’
Berezovsky’s first research position was at the prestigious Institute of Control Sciences. He wasn’t a brilliant scientist, but he was an indefatigable networker, constantly giving speeches and organising seminars and foreign trips. Even so, he struggled to provide a decent standard of living for his wife and two children. As the Soviet economy staggered towards free-market capitalism, he set up a business selling computer software and succeeded in persuading a Soviet committee to order 30,000 state institutions to buy his programs.
Berezovsky operated on the old Onassis principle that everyone has his price, although he adds with a touch of sensitivity: ‘It is impossible to buy feelings. All the rest it is possible to buy.’ Berezovsky entered Russia’s highly volatile (and dangerous) car trade in 1989, importing Mercedes-Benz cars which he drove back to Moscow one at a time from trips to Europe and resold at a huge profit. He founded his own company, Logovaz, taking ‘logo’ from Logosystem, a Turin-based Fiat supplier, and ‘vaz’ from Avtovaz, makers of the Zhiguli on an imported Fiat production line at Togliatti on the Volga in central Russia. (In fact, the car took its name from the hills on the west bank of the river.)
Avtovaz loaned Berezovsky $5 million to import a fleet of 846 Fiats. The deal failed to return a profit, but it taught him a lot about the motor trade and consolidated his relationship with the company. The director of the plant, Vladimir Kadannikov, agreed to supply Berezovsky’s expanding empire of car showrooms and dealerships with no fewer than 35,000 Zhigulis for a deposit of just 10 per cent, with the balance to be paid over the next two and a half years.
This remarkably generous deal was similar to many others made in post-Soviet Russia, which had the advantage of separating the profit centre – in this case, the sale of the cars – from the cost centre – the Avtovaz factory that bore all of the overheads for producing them. Tax loopholes enabled dealers to buy Zhigulis for almost $3,000 less than their retail price. The plant might be antiquated and the workers might not get paid, but the entrepreneurs at the sales end would make a fortune.
Berezovsky was soon the biggest Zhiguli dealer in Russia. He opened a club in the lavishly renovated Smirnoff mansion in central Moscow, where he entertained important clients, useful politicians and potential partners. He was rightly proud of the club’s décor, which had matching silk upholstery on the walls and chairs, and a display of Chinese porcelain on the sideboard. He had only to tap a bell to summon a whitejacketed waiter to refill his glass of St Emilion or Chateau Latour. George Soros, the American financier who broke the Bank of England (and made billions of dollars’ profit) on Black Wednesday 1992, was lured into Berezovsky’s orbit with promises of lucrative investment opportunities. After they had fallen out, Soros wrote: ‘His anger gave me the chills – I literally felt he could kill me’.
But it was Berezovsky who was the marked man. Just after 5 o’clock on the evening of 7 June 1994, a car bomb exploded as his Mercedes 600 pulled out of his clubhouse. His driver was decapitated by the blast, his bodyguard lost an eye and Berezovsky was lucky to stagger out of the wreckage with minor injuries. No one was ever arrested for the attack; the bombers were most probably contract killers hired by one of his business rivals in the car trade.
Berezovsky and the other new Russian tycoons were now a small but potent force in Russian life, the New Russians, or new business class. Another mansion – on Sparrow Hills on the right bank of the Moscow River – was designated neutral territory, where Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky, Smolensky and a young newcomer named Vladimir Potanin (but not Vladimir Gusinsky, who was in dispute with most of the other tycoons and was therefore blackballed) could discuss business and show off their wealth. They pledged to stand together in an alliance against their growing number of business enemies, but internecine squabbles would inevitably set them at each other’s throats. And there was an even bigger menace: the Communists still hadn’t quit after Boris Yeltsin’s ‘shock therapy’ had turned ballistic in October 1993.
The Reds were threatening a sensational comeback under an aggressive new leader, Gennady Zyuganov; a thickset, balding, 51-yearold former physics teacher and Communist Party propagandist. Yeltsin was also opposed by the neo-fascist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who openly advocated a return to authoritarian rule. For the men sipping iced vodka on Sparrow Hills, a Communist victory would mean triumph for the Red Directors, and a return to nationalisation, while most of them would face charges of fraud and corruption. It was Berezovsky who galvanised them into action on Yeltsin’s behalf to protect their empires and their lives.
The tycoon had gained entrance to the Kremlin’s inner circle at the end of 1993 through Valentin Yumashev, a former journalist whom Yeltsin treated as the son he never had. The bond between the two men had been sealed in 1990 when Yumashev spent weeks with Yeltsin ghosting his first book of memoirs Against the Grain (a title which drew its inspiration from Yeltsin’s early life as a master craftsman).
For someone from the sciences, Berezovsky was remarkably mediasavvy. He had bought a popular weekly magazine, Ogonyok, where Yumashev was one of the editors. He persuaded Yumashev to introduce him to Yeltsin’s Cerberus-style gate-keepers, the liberally inclined chief of staff, Viktor Ilyushin, and the ferocious chief of security, General Alexander Korzhakov.
Korzhakov had stuck to Yeltsin after he quit the Communist Party in 1990 and developed his own political machine, which propelled him into the chairmanship of the Supreme Soviet, and from there into the presidency. For his loyalty, Korzhakov had been promoted to general and given control of the Federal Bodyguard Service (FSO), the agency which supplied bodyguards to federal bureaucrats, but which Korzhakov had drilled into a private army. ‘Korzhakov was much heavier on muscle than grey matter and about as Neanderthal as they come,’ says a senior British diplomat. ‘He was close to the boss and was very loyal for a long time. He became one of Yeltsin’s prime drinking companions.’
As an unreconstructed hard-liner dogmatically opposed to democracy and the new-fangled market economy, Korzhakov was the natural enemy of men like Berezovsky. It didn’t require much grey matter to deduce that the oligarch’s prime target was Boris Yeltsin. Indeed, Berezovsky intended to privatise the presidency, thus making himself inviolable, while protecting his newly-acquired wealth. That he was successful in these objectives is beyond doubt, but his belief that he had an inalienable right of access to the presidential suite, irrespective of who might occupy it, would ultimately bring about his downfall.
Berezovsky’s chance to inveigle his way into Yeltsin’s favour came when he learned that Valentin Yumashev had just completed the second volume of the president’s memoirs, Notes of a President, and that he was looking for a publisher. There would have been no shortage of Russian houses willing to bring out the innermost thoughts of the most powerful man in the country, but Berezovsky’s typically bold plan was to print a million copies in Finland and pay Yeltsin ‘royalties’ from foreign sales into a London bank account.
Yumashev recommended the deal to the group known as ‘the Family’ – Yeltsin’s wife Naina and two daughters, Yelena and Tatyana, plus a handful of trusted cronies including Yumashev himself – and it was accepted. Korzhakov claimed that Yumashev presented the business of publishing the book as ‘a great feat, implying that only Boris Abramovich was capable of such an act’. The result was a handsome volume, but even more satisfying was the $16,000 in cash that Yumashev brought to the President’s office every month – Yeltsin’s interest on the $3 million ‘royalties’ that Berezovsky had lodged for him at a branch of Barclays Bank in Mayfair.
According to Korzhakov, Yumashev did ‘everything he could’ to connect Berezovsky with the Family. There was nothing the embittered general could do to prevent Yeltsin making Berezovsky a member of the President’s Club, where the Family and their guests swam, played tennis and disported themselves in luxurious surroundings. Korzhakov gave Chrystia Freeland, the Financial Times correspondent in Moscow, a vivid insight into Berezovsky’s thick-skinned approach to networking. He was having a shower after a game of tennis when he was joined by the pushy tycoon, who started a conversation above the roar of the water jets. ‘I can’t hear half of what he’s saying, but he keeps on shouting,’ Korzhakov recalled. ‘Berezovsky never did sports. He came to the club to prevent other people from doing sports; to approach the necessary people with his questions, his affairs, his issues.’
His chutzpah was extraordinary. Resembling a slightly taller version of Danny DeVito, he bobbed and weaved among Russia’s political elite, offering opinions and dispensing favours. He spotted that the quickest route to the President was via his younger daughter, the shy and timid Tatyana (‘Tanya’) Dyachenko, former wife of businessman Leonid Dyachenko. As Korzhakov says, ‘If Tanya Dyachenko gave him her direct telephone number, what could anybody do to stop him?’ Berezovsky lavished gifts upon her, including a Niva – a type of Russian Jeep – and a Chevrolet Blazer (although she could not recall receiving either vehicle). He consolidated his position by becoming the Family’s financial adviser in such matters as arranging the purchase of a house for the Yeltsins to use at Cap d’Antibes, where he also had a holiday mansion.
Berezovsky floated the idea to Viktor Ilyushin and Alexander Korzhakov that the state-run television station Channel 1 should be ‘the President’s channel’, relaying pro-Yeltsin propaganda to its 200 million viewers across 10 time zones. Channel 1 was part of Ostankino, a hotchpotch of TV studios and programmes that the Communists were trying to take under their wing. Although suspicious that Berezovsky intended to turn this cumbersome giant into his own network, Ilyushin and Korzhakov could do little other than support the idea. At the time, the only private network in Russia was Vladimir Gusinsky’s NTV, which held roughly 15 per cent of the market share. And Gusinsky was not only Berezovsky’s enemy, he could not be relied on to support the President.
KNOWN AS ‘GOOSE’, Gusinsky was a Russian theatrical director whose only claim to fame was that he had directed the opening and closing ceremonies at Ted Turner’s 1986 Goodwill Games in Moscow. Born on 2 October 1952 (five days before Putin), he was driving a taxi when first perestroika and then Chubais’ voucher system introduced him to the infinite possibilities of free enterprise. He made millions of dollars by teaming up with Moscow’s Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, then an old-style Soviet bureaucrat, to renovate state-owned buildings and sell them on at a vast profit in the capital’s booming property market.
As his fortune grew, Gusinsky launched the liberal newspaper Sevodnya and a bank called Most (Russian for ‘bridge’). On 10 October 1993, just a week after Yeltsin declared war on the Communists, he launched NTV with the slogan ‘News is our profession’, poaching well-known presenters Tatyana Mitkova and Mikhail Osokin, as well as managers, directors and technicians, from the ossified Ostankino network. ‘I just wanted to be No 1,’ he explains.
RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin (centre) visits the apartment of submarine officer Vitaly Shebelev and his wife Polina in Vilyuchinsk (Kamchatka).
Despite its near-monopoly, Ostankino was costing the state $170 million a year to run, whereas its advertising revenues produced just $40 million. Berezovsky’s suggestion was that Yeltsin grant the Channel 1 licence to a new company in which 51 per cent would belong to the state and 49 per cent to private investors, controlled by him. Yeltsin agreed to the proposal as much from a desire to keep it out of Communist hands as to enrich Berezovsky and his partners: Khodorkovsky, Alexander Smolensky and the Ukrainian physicist-turned-banker Mikhail Fridman among others.
At the same time, Avtovaz Bank, controlled by Berezovsky, was involved in a titanic battle with Gusinsky’s Most Bank for the right to handle the overseas earnings of Aeroflot. The Russian national airline had been privatised but the majority of its stock – and therefore control of its assets – remained with the state. Once the largest airline in the world, it was now in dire straits, often running short of money to buy fuel and pay its staff. Tarmacs across the country were littered with obsolete aircraft, which had been cannibalised for parts to enable other planes to take off.
Although the state was expected to provide the funds to keep Aeroflot solvent, the cash from tickets sold abroad for hard currency – estimated at between $80 million and $220 million at any given time – never flowed back into the system. Instead, it was siphoned off by middle-men and disappeared into hundreds of secret foreign bank accounts. Much of the money went into a company called Andava, founded by Berezovsky.
At the same time, there were whispers in the Kremlin. According to Korzhakov, Berezovsky ‘would regularly report what Gusinsky said about the president, and where, how he cursed him, what name he called him, how he wanted to deceive him.’ Knowing Yeltsin feared Yuri Luzhkov as a potential presidential rival, Berezovsky played on his paranoia by claiming that Gusinsky and Luzhkov had drunk a toast to the day when the mayor would become president.
Korzhakov claims he finally refused to act as a conduit for such tittle-tattle, so Berezovsky turned to Tatyana Dyachenko. When he took control of the Aeroflot’s accounts a short time later, he appointed Valery Okulov – previously one of the airline’s pilots – as head of the national carrier. It was no coincidence that Okulov was at the time married to the attractive Tatyana.
BY FAR THE BIGGEST event of 1994 was the outbreak of the First Chechen War. Chechnya, once part of southern Russia, had declared its independence three years earlier but Moscow had sought, without success, to stage a referendum in Chechnya on whether the breakaway republic should stay in the Russian Federation. The separatist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev’s power was increasing and Moscow was seen to be dithering. Yeltsin was loathe to send in the Russian armed forces to crush the rebellion, but a series of unedifying incidents drove him into the belligerents’ camp.
On 31 August that year he attended a ceremony in Berlin to mark the final withdrawal of troops from a unified Germany. Live television images of him grabbing the baton from a band leader and drunkenly conducting the orchestra were flashed around the world. Then on 30 September, on a return flight from the United States, he failed to get off the plane in Ireland to see the waiting Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds. Once again, television pictures recorded the occasion; but instead of the Russian President, they showed only the steps of the aircraft and an empty doorway. Once again, many people assumed that he was drunk. The Deputy Prime Minister, Oleg Soskovets, finally got off the plane to meet Reynolds and was later quoted by Tass as saying that Yeltsin was in good health, when in fact he had suffered a heart attack during the flight.
Yeltsin was now assailed by one crisis after another. On Black Tuesday, 11 October 1994, the rouble lost 27 per cent of its value in an unexpected meltdown on the currency markets. Yeltsin was an ignoramus in matters of economics. Blaming the liberals in his government for the collapse, he moved closer to his drinking companion General Korzhakov, who had formed a hawkish group within the Kremlin labelled ‘the party of war’ by its liberal opponents. Its members included Soskovets, a veteran of the Soviet military industry, whom Korzhakov had secretly marked down as a future president.
Realising the advantage of having his own uncritical television network in these trying times, Yeltsin signed a decree on 29 November, dismantling Ostankino and replacing it with ORT (Russian Public Television). There was no auction, as required by law, not even a token one. Berezovsky was initially appointed chairman of an oversight board but later consolidated control in his own hands.
The following month, the President sent forces into the Chechnyan highlands at the behest of the ‘party of war’. Gusinsky’s NTV focused on the horrors of the conflict, and support for the war evaporated among the electorate. In less than 18 months, more than 30,000 people, including 5,000 Russian soldiers, would be killed in that savage conflict. Yeltsin’s poll ratings dived into single digits, while the Communist leader, Gennady Zyuganov, was polling 30 per cent.
IT HELPS to get out of the Kremlin once in a while. Putin, here with Civil Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu (centre), savours local food and entertainment on a visit to Tuva, where Tuvan throat singing is the specialty.
On 20 February 1995 ORT severed all links with the middlemen who had been making huge profits selling advertising time on Channel 1. ‘This was my personal idea,’ Berezovsky says. ‘It caused wild surprise.’ As payback, ORT’s popular new Director-General, Vladislav Listyev, was gunned down by two assassins at the door of his Moscow apartment. Though only 38 years old, Listyev was Russia’s Larry King figure and his Field of Miracles game show had been a national hit.
Yeltsin drove to the ORT studios and denounced ‘this cowardly and evil murder’ in a live broadcast. In homage to the dead man, every television station then closed down for twenty-four hours. Berezovsky fell under suspicion: the special police were ordered to arrest him and went to his home. When they arrived, FSB operative Alexander Litvinenko (later poisoned in London) emerged from the house waving a gun, and told the special police (OMON) that their services would not be required because the FSB were going to pick Berezovsky up for questioning. Berezovsky would be forever grateful to Litvinenko for saving him from arrest and the two later worked together. After an investigation, the FSB decided that Listyev’s murder and the bomb attempt on Berezovsky’s life eight months earlier were the work of the Kurgans, a gang of mobsters who had penetrated Moscow’s police department.
The oligarchs simply bought more armoured Mercedes and surrounded themselves with more bodyguards. They licked their lips at the prospect of further financial killings. One of the Sparrow Hills clique had an idea which would turn the locomotive of economic chaos into a richly-endowed gravy train.