The Oligarchs

It was on the crest of the hill that a few wealthy Russian businessmen gathered at a private villa overlooking the river in September 1994. They were mostly young, and their fortunes were even younger. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then thirty, had only seven years earlier tried to start his youth café at the Mendeleev Institute. Alexander Smolensky, then thirty-nine, had been building dachas from logs seven years earlier. Boris Berezovsky, at forty-seven the oldest in the group, had founded Logovaz in a café barely five years earlier. They were joined by several others: Vladimir Vinogradov, thirty-nine, a pioneer among the early cooperative businessmen who became president of Inkombank, one of the biggest of the new commercial banks; Vladimir Potanin, thirty-two, a son of the nomenklatura whose bank was expanding very rapidly; and Mikhail Friedman, thirty, who made his first money in a cooperative—washing windows—but was now also head of a fast-growing bank. Two others were quite prominent at the time but later faded from view: Oleg Boiko, thirty, a financier who had supported Yegor Gaidar’s party in the early years, and Alexander Yefanov, thirty-eight, president of Mikrodin, a company that invested in heavy industry but was later absorbed into Potanin’s empire. As a group, these onetime hustlers and jeans traders were blossoming as tycoons.

They came to the club at the urging of Vasily Shakhnovsky, then thirty-seven, one of Yuri Luzhkov’s top aides. Shakhnovsky, who had steely gray-blue eyes that crinkled at the edges, receding, wiry hair, and a brownish beard speckled with gray, was one of their generation. Only five years earlier, Shakhnovsky had been drawn into the ferment of the democracy movement in Moscow city politics. He worked for Gavriil Popov and then Luzhkov, holding a top position on the mayor’s staff. From his perch at city hall, Shakhnovsky saw that Russian political and business life was increasingly chaotic. The years of upheaval—the August 1991 coup attempt, the 1992 Yeltsin economic revolution, the October 1993 violent confrontation with parliament—left businessmen without established rules of the game. It was a time when the young financiers and industrialists knew quite well how to get what they wanted from politicians or bureaucrats, but they had only a faint notion of their collective power. They could bribe their way to an export permit but had no idea how to change export policy. Shakhnovsky called the group bolshoi kapital, or big capital, but they were adrift, without a voice. The businessmen said they wanted a “normal country,” with normal laws and a normal government and a normal economy, but they didn’t have one, nor a clue about how to get there. Most of them had been working so intensely on their own businesses, they had not looked at the big picture.

Moreover, Shakhnovsky saw that the young tycoons dealt with the government in one crude way: bribery and coercion. It was an all-ornothing environment, and every businessman faced a stark choice, as was often said: “annihilate or be annihilated.”

There were no rules. “If one was playing soccer and another was playing rugby, there was no game; it led to a fistfight without rules,” Shakhnovsky recalled. Increasingly, Shakhnovsky saw that the businessmen settled their scores on the street. “At that time in particular, there were no rules at all.” Worried about the disorder, Shakhnovsky decided on his own to do something about it. “Bribes cannot be given forever,” he said. “Sooner or later, there is an end to everything.”

Shakhnovsky recruited the businessmen to join an exclusive, secret club of their own. In Shaknovsky’s mind, the club was to be a protected place where they could be free to talk, argue, and hopefully coalesce around their common interests. Shakhnovsky told me he did not want to create a salon of deal making. He wanted his guests to think broadly: how bolshoi kapital could make an impact on the newly emergent Russian democracy and economy. He wanted them to come up with ideas about how to lobby the government in a civilized way—how to create good public relations for themselves—as was done in every normal country.

The club took shape, but not in the way Shakhnovsky had envisioned. The businessmen were far too concerned with their own problems to see the big picture. Two years later, in 1996, they finally came together as a single, powerful group, when they felt their wealth and property were threatened. But at the beginning, they had pressing parochial worries. They wanted protection—from each other. The first order of business at the club was to create “civilized rules of the game with each other,” Shakhnovsky said. They drafted a charter. The essence was that they would not attack each other. They pledged not to bribe the law enforcement authorities to go after each other, or use newspapers and television to smear each other. At the time, all of them were building up their own private corporate armies and intelligence agencies for doing just that. Many of them had hired ex-KGB chiefs for the task. One purpose of these well-paid, well-equipped spies was to dig up dirt and compromising materials, known as kompromat , to use against rivals or the government. Kompromat could be purchased, easily, from the official security services and agencies, including the ones that had been part of the KGB and still had access to its mountains of files. Or, if not bought, kompromat could be manufactured—using forged documents—and it would be just as effective. Moreover, it was not difficult to spread. To deploy a war of kompromat against enemies, a banker did not need to own a newspaper or television station or radio station. It was enough to pay a relatively small sum, even a few hundred dollars, to a desperate journalist. Not all journalists were corrupt, but some were, and they would publish or broadcast just about anything for money.

In their charter the tycoons agreed: no kompromat against each other. “Maybe a bit utopian, a bit of a childish idea, but at that early stage, they agreed to it, and had some success in somehow channeling the process,” Shakhnovsky told me later.²

It was the nature of their informal, exclusive club that no one quite remembered years later whether the charter was written or oral, and whether they had signed it or not. Leonid Nevzlin, who was Khodorkovsky’s partner, recalled that it was an oral agreement. “It was discussed, but not put on paper,” he told me. Khodorkovsky could not remember attending the meetings at all. Vinogradov said, “I don’t remember whether we actually put our signatures on it.” Smolensky said, “There was no document, there was an oral agreement. We agreed not to bite each other, not to resort to the mass media in order to settle our relations, not to use law enforcement to settle our commercial problems.”³

Shakhnovsky told me the document was written down, drafted and redrafted; the language was kept very general. “It was being corrected, some would sign it, some would add corrections,” he recalled. “There was a document all right, but since this was a very amorphous creation, it cannot be said that all accepted it and all began to follow it. It was signed.”

“I think the minute they walked out of the gates of the building,” Vinogradov recalled, “they immediately broke the agreement.” He was right, and the following years brought every one of them into fierce conflict with each other. They broke their promises and used the law enforcement agencies and the mass media to attack each other.

Yet Shakhnovsky had indeed started something. The members of the club on Sparrow Hills multiplied their millions, and their quiet little club later blossomed into much more than the debating society envisioned by Shakhnovsky. It was the beginning of a daring attempt, far more audacious than Shakhnovsky could have imagined at first, to take over the country.

From the first meetings, the businessmen were frustrated in their search for a political patron. Yeltsin’s Kremlin was split by competing factions. Chernomyrdin, the jowly, inarticulate prime minister, was the epitome of the old Soviet factory directors, hardly a promising candidate. None of the young economic reformers such as Gaidar and Chubais were prominent, experienced, or powerful enough to lead the ambitious new elite. The view from Sparrow Hills, as one participant later recalled, was “completely disillusioned.”⁴

One evening Shakhnovsky invited Luzhkov to meet them. According to Shakhnovsky, the club was pondering whether Luzhkov could be their standard-bearer. “These people were prepared to put their stake on him,” he said, “and were ready to perceive him as a man who would move their interests forward among political circles.” But the effort failed. In the first meeting, it was evident they simply did not speak the same language. Luzhkov, then fifty-eight, had traveled part of the way toward the market economy, but he was suspicious of the young businessmen, who seemed to represent the speculative, gambling side of what he called “parasitic” capitalism. He retained the instincts of his training as a Soviet-era manager; he was a khozyain. By contrast, the young banker-industrialists, most of them two decades younger than Luzhkov, were cynical and ambitious. They, unlike Luzhkov, had never run a factory, but they knew more than he did about how to gamble on the ruble-dollar exchange rate and move their winnings offshore. At least two of the young tycoons, Smolensky and Khodorkovsky, long ago, during perestroika, applied to Luzhkov for a license for their cooperatives. They may have shared some common ideas back then, but no longer.

Smolensky recalled that Luzhkov immediately alienated the tycoons by bringing along two of his lieutenants, Vladimir Resin and Boris Nikolsky. Smolensky saw Luzhkov’s men as cut from the same cloth as the mayor, old-school guys out of sync with the fleet-footed financiers. “Nonliquid stuff,” Smolensky scoffed at the memory. Smolensky remembered that one of the young businessmen said to Luzhkov, “Yuri Mikhailovich, you want us to invest in Moscow? You are digging a hole in Manezh Square” (the excavation had just begun). “We think this is not a valid project.” In other words, it was a money loser.

Luzhkov stubbornly replied, “I dug, and will keep on digging! And you are not to give orders to me, and I won’t take your advice on that.”

“Fine,” the businessman said. “It’s your decision, Yuri Mikhailovich.”

The young bankers felt themselves to be newly minted Masters of the Universe. They did not want to be bossed around. Luzhkov, however, could have it no other way. He was the boss. He would decide where to dig, even if he had started digging for no reason at all except to stop a protest rally. His entire mind-set was that of digging, and his model of capitalism revolved around his own central role.

“Luzhkov arrived to this meeting as, above all, a khozyain who considered himself much wiser and more farsighted than the people sitting around the table,” Shakhnovsky recalled. “And he was not talking with these people as partners. No. This was a conversation looking very much down, very much so. He was lecturing them some, he was giving them advice some, but it was not a conversation.”

Berezovsky was appalled at what Luzhkov told the tycoons. Berezovsky believed Big Capital should tell the government what to do, and not the other way around. “We just scattered away from him,” Smolensky recalled of Luzhkov after that meeting. “We were the Moscow bankers, and he just lost us.”

Although Shakhnovsky wanted to keep the club’s attention on the big picture, he was undone by Berezovsky, who soon brought to the club just the kind of deal making that Shakhnovsky hoped to avoid. Berezovsky remained the compressed ball of energy his friends had described in earlier years. In the autumn of 1994, he launched himself into a new orbit of dreams and plans. While other members of the club were still debating who in politics could become the patron of Big Capital, Berezovsky was already out recruiting. He didn’t start small: Berezovsky wanted Boris Yeltsin.

But the car dealerships had a dark underside—the business was a magnet for criminal gangs. Moscow became a playground for rival underworld mobs, who saw the car dealerships as a prize. At one point in late 1993 Berezovsky fled Moscow for Israel, where he received citizenship. ⁶ He apparently had been targeted by the gangs. In Moscow, two warring mobs, one led by Chechens, who were known for their ferocity, and the other by the Solntsevo gang, a Slavic mob named after a district in southwestern Moscow, were competing for control of the auto dealerships. In September 1993, Berezovksy’s Logovaz car parks were attacked three times, and his showrooms bombed with grenades.⁷

On Novokuznetskaya Street, an old Moscow avenue with a creaky tram line, Berezovsky’s command center was the Logovaz Club, a restored early nineteenth-century Smirnov family mansion. From the outside, the Logovaz Club is an unmarked, low-lying gray building. But inside it is an old world–style salon, lavishly gilded and ornately decorated. The room I remember most was the spacious anteroom where I waited before appointments with Berezovsky: soft yellow walls, a red rose painted on the ceiling arch, tinkling glasses at the bar, a battalion of red wine bottles, blond wood chairs arranged in front of small round Parisian-café tables, an illuminated aquarium against one wall, and always a crowd of people shifting in their chairs, waiting to see Berezovsky. He would come breezing through, hands in his suit pockets, stride up to you, and beg your pardon. He was running late—always running late. He would be back, he promised, and he usually was. Meanwhile, the anteroom stirred, cellular telephones hummed, buzzed, and screeched, and the soft colors were broken by the latest news bulletins from a jarring, oversized, wide-screen television mounted on one wall.

At 5:00 P.M. on June 7, 1994, Berezovsky walked out the door of his club and climbed into the backseat of his Mercedes 600 sedan, behind the driver. In the front, next to the driver, sat his bodyguard. At the peak of rush hour, Berezovsky’s Mercedes wheeled out of the courtyard and onto the street, passing a parked Opel. A remotely controlled bomb, concealed in the Opel, exploded with enormous power, ripping apart the front of Berezovsky’s Mercedes, sending thousands of small, deadly metal pellets flying through the air. Berezovsky’s driver was decapitated, his bodyguard lost an eye, seven pedestrians waiting for the tram were injured, and windows in a building a block away were shattered. Climbing out of the bloody, smoking wreckage, Berezovsky was burned and badly shaken. Logovaz issued an angry statement that “this tragedy shows beyond a doubt that there are forces in society that are actively trying, by barbarically criminal means, to keep civilized entrepreneurship from developing in our country.” No names were named.

It was a fearsome time: police said fifty-two bombs had gone off in the city by June of that year, compared with sixty-one for all of 1993. The bomb set for Berezovsky was the most powerful of them all. Vladimir Kadannikov, Berezovsky’s partner and director of Avtovaz, offered a $1 million reward for information leading to identification of the “initiators and perpetrators of the terrorist act” against Berezovsky. They were never found.

Berezovsky told me that four days after the bombing, still in bandages, he attended a reception held by Yeltsin to mark a Russian holiday. “Yeltsin saw me and he was surprised and asked what happened. I told him.” According to Berezovsky, Yeltsin motioned to his security ministers. “Do you see what happened to him?” he said of Berezovsky. “I am giving you one month to find out who did it.”⁸ They never did find out. Berezovsky flew to Switzerland for medical attention.

When he returned to Moscow, he was burning with ambition. He wanted to be more than Russia’s biggest car dealer. Leonid Boguslavsky, his friend from early years at the institute, recalled that Berezovsky was thinking as early as 1992 about television, especially powerful Channel 1, with a broadcasting signal that reached almost every household in the former Soviet Union. The Soviet authorities had invested in expensive satellites to make sure Channel 1 blanketed nearly 200 million people. The Logovaz business was “just a tool,” the Logovaz clubhouse was “just a tool,” Berezovsky told his friend Boguslavsky. “The most important tool will be Channel 1.”⁹

Channel 1 and the related transmission and production facilities—including the 1,771-foot broadcasting tower in Moscow, Europe’s tallest structure—were once supported by the state, but the government no longer shelled out the lavish subsidies of the Soviet years. Moreover, Channel 1, or Ostankino as it was also known, was riddled with theft. While the government continued to provide enough support to keep the powerful signal on the air, advertising money was diverted by individual production companies, very little of it finding its way back to the channel as a whole. The situation was similar to the assembly line in Togliatti, where cars rolled off practically for free, and middlemen sold them for a small fortune. In television, the state kept the “factory” going by subsidizing the broadcasting signal, but others reaped the cash from advertising. While Channel 1 claimed it ran only nineteen minutes of advertising a day in mid-1993, a study of programming found it broadcast one hundred minutes a day. Thus, even at the lowest rates, the revenue flow was 60 to 75 billion rubles a year, but a government audit found only about 11.2 billion rubles actually reached the station.¹⁰

Igor Malashenko, who resigned in early 1993 after a brief stint as director of Ostankino, told me: “Commercially, it was an absolute disaster. It started in a very simple way: you know, when advertising was introduced, nobody knew how to sell it. And managers of Ostankino were just these old-time Soviet bureaucrats. Suddenly they found that they didn’t have money to buy programs because state financing virtually stopped. And then imagine, some young producer would come to them and say, ‘Okay, I will provide you with programs. I just need to barter with you. I don’t need any money from you. Just give me a certain amount of advertising time. I will sell it myself, it’s my risk.’ These idiots were absolutely happy—but economically they destroyed Ostankino.”¹¹

Sergei Lisovsky, a concert promoter and entertainment mogul who became one of Russia’s leading advertising tycoons, told me that in the early years Channel 1 merely sold off the errant blank spots between programs—the thirty-second or sometimes five-minute holes that were the result of sloppy scheduling. Later, as big advertising money flowed in to Russia, the various producers and programs began freelancing, selling their own advertising. To advertisers, especially Western consumer goods companies like Proctor & Gamble, this was bedlam. If they bought time, they had no idea what was being shown and no guarantee that it would be film, sports, or soap opera.

Moreover, the state continued to underwrite the costs of broadcasting the signal—electricity, satellites, and all the other expenses of Channel 1—although there was less money than in the old days. The carcass of a state-owned television network remained, while the lifeblood, advertising revenue, disappeared into the hands of the independent producers.

Berezovsky knew where the money lay. He had his own inside line to Channel 1 through a company called Reklama Holding. The word reklama means advertising in Russian, and Reklama Holding was formed to try and monopolize the advertising time on Channel 1. Berezovsky’s advertising agency, Logovaz Press, had been among the founders of Reklama Holding. Lisovsky was the power behind Reklama Holding. The plan was that the company would be an intermediary, selling time on Channel 1 to advertisers and then buying it in wholesale blocks from the channel, cutting out other middlemen and gaining more control. Lisovsky and Berezovsky, as well as others involved in Reklama Holding, were making themselves the middlemen, while turning over a slice of their profits to Channel 1.¹² Berezovsky’s ad agency, Logovaz Press, earned $1 million in profit in 1993–1994, according to the annual report.¹³ One reason for the profits was that Logovaz Press was enjoying an 80 percent discount on advertising time. Once again, Berezovsky was getting something practically for free—the airtime—and reselling it for a small fortune.

Meanwhile, the television audience was burgeoning. After decades of dry programming, Russian viewers were entranced with films and soap operas from the West. Programs like the Mexican serial The Rich Also Cry and the American-made Santa Barbara drew enormous audiences. For advertisers, Channel 1 could deliver tens of millions of potential consumers who had a pent-up demand for Western goods like toothpaste and breakfast cereal. The cost of advertising in Russia per viewer was ridiculously cheap compared with the West. It cost about $1 to reach a thousand viewers in Russia, compared to about $15 per thousand viewers in the United States.¹⁴ Channel 1 had much broader reach in 1994 than Gusinsky’s smaller, private NTV, although Gusinsky’s channel was attracting attention with popular movies and talented news broadcasters. Channel 1 bridged the vast distances of Russia through transponders and satellites erected and supported by the state.

In the early meetings of the club on Sparrow Hills, Berezovsky launched an idea that catapulted him from a car dealer to a kingmaker for the remainder of the decade. He wanted the political influence, as well as the profits, that would come from commanding a television channel. He told the other businessmen he was putting together a plan to privatize Channel 1. Was it a business deal or a political deal? “Both,” Berezovsky declared. By cutting out all the other thieving middlemen, Berezovsky could make a fortune. By dictating the news coverage, Berezovsky could become a power broker.¹⁵

Simultaneously, he was working his way into Yeltsin’s inner circle. The restless Berezovsky could demonstrate an unexpected humility, and patience, when it served his ends. He had waited at the door for his friend Boguslavsky on those long-ago mornings; he had patiently played chauffeur to the Italians to learn more about their business with Avtovaz. Now he was applying the same tactics with the Kremlin and Yeltsin’s family. He patiently infiltrated Yeltsin’s inner circle.

Berezovsky had been introduced to the Kremlin crowd by Valentin Yumashev, a fresh-faced young journalist who had ghost-written Yeltsin’s memoirs. Yumashev had been close to Yeltsin since the days of perestroika, and he was an editor at the popular weekly magazine, Ogonyok, which Berezovsky began to support financially. How did Berezovsky first meet Yumashev? The intermediary was Pyotr Aven, whose father was a mathematician at Berezovsky’s institute. Aven had worked alongside Gaidar during perestroika, was foreign trade minister in Gaidar’s government, and had been present at the café when Logovaz was formed.¹⁶

A key witness to these events is Alexander Korzhakov, Yeltsin’s beefy longtime bodyguard, who stood loyally at Yeltsin’s side in the 1980s when Yeltsin was cast out of the Communist Party. Korzhakov, who had been assigned to protect Yeltsin by the KGB’s Ninth Directorate, remained Yeltsin’s friend and sidekick. They drank together and traveled together when Yeltsin was out of favor. Korzhakov was rewarded when Yeltsin came to power. Korzhakov built himself a small army in the early 1990s as head of the Kremlin’s presidential security service. By some accounts, Korzhakov’s army contained several thousand men, including the crack Alpha antiterrorist troops. Korzhakov’s recollections are valuable because he had a firsthand view of events, but they are colored by his bitterness at being fired by Yeltsin in 1996 and his deep suspicions of the new capitalists, chiefly Berezovsky, who helped get him fired. Korzhakov comes across as a reactionary who saw no need for democracy or capitalism, a one-time factotum who rose beyond his abilities but had a front row seat at the time Berezovsky arrived in the Kremlin.¹⁷

Korzhakov said it was Yumashev who first brought Berezovsky into the Yeltsin inner circle, just after Yumashev finished writing up Yeltsin’s second memoir, published in Russian as Notes of the President. It was late 1993, after the violent October clash with parliament. Yumashev had penned the book quickly, but the Kremlin did not have a good idea how to get it published. “Now I understand that if we had organized an open tender, there would have been a line of publishers,” Korzhakov recalled. “But Valentin presented the whole business of publishing the book as a feat, a courageous act, implying that only Boris Abramovich Berezovsky was capable of such an act.” Yumashev invited Berezovsky to the Kremlin and introduced him to Yeltsin. Berezovsky supposedly arranged for a million copies of the book to be published in Finland. The publisher was Ogonyok. Berezovsky brought the royalties to the Yeltsin family, Korzhakov recalled. He claimed a London bank account was opened to accept Yeltsin’s royalties.¹⁸ “That is how this businessman found himself in Yeltsin’s grace,” Korzhakov said.¹⁹

Berezovsky was soon invited to join the Presidential Club, an exclusive Moscow sports enclave Yeltsin had set up for his closest cronies. But instead of playing tennis there, Berezovsky set about lobbying for the television channel with a clever line that played to Yeltsin’s political instincts. The Russian president was under attack from all sides. The new channel would be Yeltsin’s instrument, Berezovsky promised; it would be the “president’s channel.” Berezovsky was aided in his lobbying efforts by Yumashev, who had Yeltsin’s trust.²⁰ The charm offensive worked, and on November 29, 1994, Yeltsin signed a decree, number 2133, which effectively privatized the enormous television channel without an auction as required by law. The new owners’ founding capital was $2.2 million.²¹ The name of the new organization was Russian Public Television—ORT in the Russian acronym. The idea of “public” television, which would not be state television, was a novelty, and no one knew precisely what it would become. The government retained 51 percent of the shares of ORT, but the rest were divided among a group of wealthy bankers and a smattering of industrialists. An ORT oversight board was created with Yeltsin as chairman, but Korzhakov later said it never met. Berezovsky was the driving force behind the new channel; the state was sure to be an absentee landlord.²²

Berezovsky drew his partners from the Sparrow Hills club of businessmen. The new shareholders included Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky, Friedman, Smolensky, and a few others. Khodorkovsky recalled that Berezovsky simply telephoned him to ask if he would take 5 percent. “I fully trust him; he created his own deal, which successfully developed,” Khodorkovsky said.²³ Berezovsky later consolidated most of the shares in his own hands.

Berezovsky said that when he began to take over the television channel, costs were running at $250 million a year while advertising revenues were only $40 million.²⁴ He said a large amount of advertising revenues were being siphoned off by the independent producers. He slashed spending and came up with a plan to recapture the advertising market.

The new owners were preparing to take control in April. The channel’s new executive director was to be a popular television personality, Vladislav Listyev. With his handlebar mustache and probing, brazen style, Listyev, thirty-eight, was perhaps the best-known television star of his generation. His broadcasts had broken public taboos on topics such as sex and money in the late Soviet years, and his Field of Miracles, a sort of Wheel of Fortune game show, was a hit. Listyev was not only an on-air host; like other independent producers, he owned an advertising agency, Inter-Vid, which had been a participant in Reklama Holding.

Berezovsky decided the only way to regain control over advertising was to stop everything and start over. He proposed a three-month moratorium on advertising on the new channel. “This was my personal idea,” he said. “This caused wild surprise.” Berezovsky said Listyev was originally against it but eventually agreed.

On February 20, 1995, Listyev announced a moratorium on advertising on Channel 1, a risky move designed to give the new channel time to cut out the cancer of corruption and theft. Malashenko later told me that Listyev and Berezovsky had no choice if they were taking control of Channel 1. “You could not reform Ostankino,” Malashenko said. “The only thing you can do is you start a new entity, transfer the license, and take anything you need from Ostankino, and just destroy this piece of shit entirely. And it was done.”

Millions of dollars were at stake. Listyev’s announcement meant losses for those who had already booked time or wanted to sell time in these months on the station, including the independent producers. At least in theory, those who would suffer losses also included Lisovsky, Berezovsky, and Listyev himself. Lisovsky, the advertising mogul, tried to get Berezovsky to negotiate a new contract. Berezovsky refused and demanded a moratorium on all advertising. “We calculated how much we were going to lose” without commercials, Berezovsky recalled, “but how much more we were going to gain later,” once they controlled the advertising. The moratorium was a bold move—and one that potentially could create many enemies.

On March 1, 1995, a month before he was to take over a revamped ORT, Listyev was gunned down by two unknown assailants in the entranceway of his apartment. The murder shocked the country. Yeltsin came to the Ostankino station and denounced the “cowardly and evil murder of a very talented world television journalist.” Yeltsin sacked the Moscow prosecutor and police chief and blamed Luzhkov, whom he accused of “turning a blind eye to the mafiosi” in the city.²⁵ It was a gesture meant to underscore the Kremlin’s distrust of Luzhkov, which, as we shall see, was deepening.

No one was ever accused of the Listyev murder, and the investigation eventually ran cold. The case was entangled in speculation and intrigue; the truth seems to have long vanished.²⁶ Yevgeny Kiselyov, the prominent NTV journalist who had left Channel 1 to work for Gusinsky, told me he did not accept the theory that Listyev was killed because of the conflict over advertising. “I am quite convinced he had nothing to do with advertising,” Kiselyov said. “All the financial matters, concerning advertising—to stop advertising—they weren’t his decision. Other people were responsible. He was just in charge of programming. . . . He was a creative person.”

Others also agreed that the moratorium, which lasted four months, was decided by Berezovsky, not Listyev. As Lisovsky said to me, “Everyone knew perfectly well that from the moment ORT was created, it was Boris Berezovsky who managed all the issues concerned with advertising. Solely Berezovsky. Because Berezovsky said from the very start that money is to be discussed only with him, and only he will make the decision.”

Another television figure who was close to Berezovsky at the time told me, “Everyone knows that Berezovsky controlled all the finances. Lisovsky and Listyev came to see him about money.” Although this source said no one really knows who killed Listyev, he believes the assassins were shadowy security services, or their hired guns, seeking to prevent the channel from being passed to Berezovsky.²⁷

Later, in taking over the channel, Berezovsky set up a new monopoly advertising system. In this arrangement, the channel sold blocks of airtime to Lisovsky’s agency, Premier SV, which was the sole agency reselling the time to advertisers. Berezovsky said the moratorium had worked, and the contract with Lisovsky was on favorable terms. “We dictated the conditions,” he said.²⁸ Berezovsky also controlled the news decisions at ORT, and the Logovaz waiting room was often full of television officials coming to him for their instructions.

“We prevented the ruin of the main national channel. We blocked the rivers of theft,” Berezovsky said.²⁹ He made a similar claim about the way he handled the assembly line in Togliatti. There Berezovsky became a big player who displaced all the small-scale operators. He had created a “civilized car market,” as he liked to say. Likewise, in television, he took over the advertising market. He took control of the money—blocking out all the small-scale rip-offs. “Berezovsky, it’s another one of his traits,” Lisovsky recalled. “When he comes to a place, he controls all financial flows himself. That is his strict rule.”

Berezovsky had reached his goal, taking over Channel 1, but the way he went about it injected a sour note into the club on Sparrow Hills. Shakhnovsky recalled the businessmen “were supposed to communicate there and work out some common approaches, while business should have remained outside.”

“What destroyed it? If we look back, it was Berezovsky’s position that destroyed this idea. When concrete business was introduced to this club’s work, it actually ruined it.”

Yet Gusinsky was not invited to Sparrow Hills, and it was no accident. Shakhnovsky told me as he met the businessmen that summer, trying to organize the club, Gusinsky was blacklisted by the others. “Everybody spoke against it because Gusinsky had a conflict with practically every one of the participants,” Shakhnovsky recalled.

In the months that followed, Gusinsky sailed into a storm. The dark clouds were the result of a combination of factors that suddenly came together like a hurricane, an unpredictable mix of high winds and choppy seas. One reason for the storm was the frenetic energy of Berezovsky, who was ruthlessly expanding—and colliding with Gusinsky. Another was Yeltsin. Forever guarding his own political supremacy, plagued by paranoia and weakened by illness, Yeltsin was especially nervous about Luzhkov’s growing popularity in Moscow. With the fears about Luzhkov came paranoia about Gusinsky. Moreover, the Kremlin was stumbling into a dirty little war in Chechnya, the horrors of which were magnified many times—and for the first time—by Gusinsky’s television station, NTV.

Berezovsky was indefatigable. He liked to say that in Russia, the first treasure to be privatized would be profit, then property, and finally debt. Berezovsky meant that the first thing he wanted to take in a company was its cash flow, and only later would he be interested in owning it, and perhaps never. It was in pursuit of such cash flow that he ran headlong into Gusinsky over a lucrative business deal. At the time, Gusinsky’s Most Bank and Avtovaz Bank, which was under Berezovsky’s control, were competing for the right to handle hundreds of millions of dollars in overseas ticket sales from the Russian national airline, Aeroflot. At the time, Aeroflot often ran short of fuel, and pilots went unpaid for months. Aging planes—beached dinosaurs with droopy wings, punched-out windscreens, doors open forlornly to the winds—could be seen on tarmacs scattered across the country, missing engines and parts that were scavenged to keep other planes in the air. The decrepit, huge, erratically scheduled airline was another vivid example of post-Soviet theft. The government paid for the fuel and salaries, sometimes, but the cash from ticket sales, especially tickets bought with hard currency overseas, just disappeared. Just as the auto factory and television station gave rise to corrupt middlemen, so too Aeroflot spawned theft. The cash from ticket sales, instead of flowing back to the airline, was being siphoned off to hundreds of secret foreign bank accounts. Nikolai Glushkov, one of Berezovsky’s partners, later claimed that Aeroflot was a treasury for the Russian secret services abroad.³¹

Sergei Zverev, who was a lobbyist for Gusinsky then, told me that Most Bank planned to take over the Aeroflot accounts, which they were sure contained hidden treasure. “We knew that if we could command the financial flows in the right way, we would be able to find additional tens of millions of dollars inside the company, or even hundreds of millions,” he recalled.³² But Berezovsky had the same idea. Ownership of shares in Aeroflot was not an issue—the company had been privatized but the majority of the block of shares remained state-owned. The trick was to get control of the huge cash flow, which Glushkov estimated at between $80 million to $220 million at any one moment.

In the corridors of the Kremlin and at the exclusive Yeltsin sports club, Berezovsky spread tantalizingly poisonous gossip about his rival, Gusinsky. According to Korzhakov, Berezovsky “would regularly report what and where Gusinsky said about the president, how he cursed him, what name he called him, how he wanted to deceive him.” Berezovsky came to the Kremlin with real or imagined bits of intelligence, what Korzhakov called “new ominous details.” For example, according to Korzhakov, Berezovsky claimed “Gusinsky was sitting in a bunker with Luzhkov and drinking. And making a toast to Yuri Mikhailovich as the president.” Berezovsky then supposedly told Korzhakov that Gusinsky sent a little package every Thursday to the Moscow government, with a specific sum of cash for each person, from five hundred to several thousand dollars, depending on how useful they have been. It is impossible to know who is more creative in this tale: a vengeful Korzhakov, who later turned against Berezovsky, or Berezovsky himself, devilishly competitive, who was trying to discredit Gusinsky and Luzhkov simultaneously.

Korzhakov claimed that Berezovsky turned to Yeltsin’s younger daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, when Korzhakov would no longer carry Berezovsky’s tales to Yeltsin. Why Korzhakov stopped being the courier is not clear. Korzhakov claims Berezovsky lavished gifts on the president’s daughter, including a Russian-made Niva jeep and a Chevrolet Blazer, which Dyachenko later denied.

Gusinsky knew that Berezovsky was feeding the growing hostility toward him. But he told me in retrospect, “Let’s not demonize Berezovsky. Everybody says, Berezovsky arranged it. But it was not Berezovsky—Yeltsin did it. What does Berezovsky have to do with it? Certainly, Berezovsky was stirring things up, since he wanted to get this, to do that. Yes, this is true. But if there were no Berezovsky, there would be some Sidorov—so, what’s the difference?” When I pressed Gusinsky, however, he acknowledged the conflict with Berezovsky was real. “Of course, a hundred percent, a war was on, more than this, a very tough confrontation about Aeroflot and many things. Berezovsky was very envious that there was NTV.”³³ The war between them was just the first in what became almost constant internecine combat among the tycoons and their various financial empires in the years ahead.

Yeltsin’s inner circle was hardening in the autumn of 1994 around a hawkish group known informally by critics as “the party of war,” with Korzhakov in the center. They were directly responsible for the onset of the Chechen war and, two years later, came very close to persuading Yeltsin to cancel elections. Korzhakov became so powerful that, at one point, he attempted to dictate oil export policy to Chernomyrdin. ³⁴ The “party of war” dominated the Kremlin just as Yeltsin’s grip was weakening. On August 31, Yeltsin was in Berlin attending a ceremony marking the withdrawal of troops from Germany. He appeared drunk, grabbed the baton of a band leader, and tried to conduct the orchestra, a bit of unbecoming clownishness seen around the world on television. Some of Yeltsin’s more liberal aides wrote him a letter complaining about his behavior, and they were sidelined. When Yeltsin flew back from the United States on September 30, he failed to get off the plane in Ireland to see the waiting prime minister. Many assumed he was drunk. Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovyets, another in the “party of war” who eventually met the Irish prime minister, was quoted by Tass as saying: “Boris Yeltsin is healthy.” This was a lie. Korzhakov later admitted Yeltsin had suffered a heart attack on the plane.³⁵

In Moscow, fast-paced crises kept the Kremlin reeling. On October 11 came the unexpected “Black Tuesday,” when the ruble lost 27 percent of its value. On October 17, Dmitri Kholodov, an investigative reporter for the mass-circulation daily Moskovsky Komsomolets who was probing military corruption, was killed in a bomb blast. Many journalists and politicians were outraged at the brazen murder of the young reporter.

Yeltsin, isolated and ill, was told that his enemies were everywhere. Korzhakov claims Berezovsky brought him kompromat about Gusinsky. Berezovsky had lit a fuse, and it was burning inside the Kremlin. He was using Korzhakov and Yeltsin for his own goals, to crush a rival.

One day at a Kremlin lunch with Korzhakov, Yeltsin asked, “Why can’t you deal with what’s-his-name, with Gusinsky?” According to Korzhakov’s account, Yeltsin then complained about Gusinsky’s car cutting off his wife and family on the highway into town. “How many times did it happen when Tanya and Naina were driving somewhere and the road was blocked to make way for Gusinsky? His NTV has gotten out of control; it behaves imprudently. I order you, deal with him!”

Korzhakov claims he protested that they had no legal grounds. “Find something,” Yeltsin steamed, according to Korzhakov’s recollection. “Follow him around everywhere, give him no peace. Make the ground burn under his feet!”

The ground soon began to burn. One of the first signs came on the morning of November 19, 1994, with an article in Rossiiskaya Gazeta, a pro-Kremlin state-owned newspaper. The article was headlined, “The Snow Is Falling.” It quoted unnamed sources with dark hints that a shadowy Moscow financier—Gusinsky—was preparing to make Luzhkov president. The article reflected the depths of the Kremlin’s paranoia about the Moscow mayor and Gusinsky, who was blamed for the October ruble crash and depicted as a diabolical powerbroker, buying up the mass media. The Most empire, the article said, “is planning to force its way to power.”³⁶ Gusinsky read the article knowing that it was a threat. “The first political hunt had begun,” he recalled. He was the prey.

Gusinsky’s troubles also had their origins in the Chechnya misadventure that Yeltsin, Korzhakov, and the “party of war” were soon to embark upon. The Chechen republic, in southern Russia, was increasingly coming under the control of separatist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev, and the Moscow authorities, isolated and blind, were sliding toward war. The first stage came in mid-November, when Russian intelligence services secretly arranged an assault by forty-seven tank crews, under the cover of an attack by an “opposition” to Dudayev. The “opposition” were really untrained Russian troops, recruited just days before from Moscow’s Interior Ministry forces, the Kantemirov and Taman Tank Divisions. The youthful soldiers were not even told where they were going or why. The tank offensive was begun on November 26, but as they rolled into the capital, Grozny, the poorly prepared troops were slaughtered by a fusillade of rocket-propelled grenades fired by the Dudayev forces. The whole covert operation turned into a bloody debacle for which the Kremlin was slow to admit responsibility. Twenty-one soldiers were captured by Dudayev’s forces and shown on television. The head of the Kantemirov division, General Boris Polyakov, resigned, saying the assault had been arranged behind his back.³⁷ What made these tense days even more dangerous for Gusinsky was the sudden, amplified power of television. Polyakov’s resignation had been broadcast on NTV, which infuriated the Kremlin. “When these guys decided to start the war, they started to think about media coverage, and it made them extremely nervous,” Malashenko recalled. They were nervous because there was one channel, NTV, that they could not control. One day in November, just before the tank debacle, Malashenko, then president of NTV, met a top official from the security services while waiting for an appointment in the Kremlin. The man was intimately involved in the tank assault. He was an old friend of Malashenko. “Igor!” he implored Malashenko. “Can you forget about Chechnya for just two weeks? In two weeks, we’ll finish the whole operation and I personally will go on NTV and tell you the whole story.” Malashenko was stunned. Was he crazy? “Do you sincerely believe you can wind up this problem in two weeks?” Malashenko refused to stop the coverage.

Just as the tank debacle was unfolding in Grozny, Gusinsky was summoned to the Kremlin by Korzhakov’s deputy, Georgi Rogozin. “He started a soul-searching discourse about how one should be in love with the authorities,” Gusinsky told me, “and what one is to do.”³⁸

On the morning of December 2, black-masked men wearing fatigues without any insignia and carrying automatic rifles pulled up to Gusinsky’s home outside Moscow and tried to start a fight with his security detail. The masked men left, but they returned to tail Gusinsky on the highway as Gusinsky was driven from his country house to the center of the city. They followed him all the way to his offices in the high-rise building on Novy Arbat. The high-rise also housed offices of Luzhkov’s city government. Gusinsky had no idea who the armed, masked men were, but in fact they had been sent by Korzhakov, who later chortled, “The bankers’ security guards were nervous, and Gusinsky himself was scared to death.” When Gusinsky reached the high-rise, he scurried inside and up to his twenty-firstfloor offices, while Korzhakov’s goons began to gruffly interrogate Gusinsky’s security guards in the parking lot. Up in the windowed tower, Gusinsky began madly calling for help. The goons left, and at 5:30, another group of masked, armed men arrived in crisp fatigues with weapons. They bore no markings, no insignia, just menacing masks and guns. They roughed up Gusinsky’s security guards in the parking lot and forced several of them to lie in the snow for several hours. An agitated, panicked Gusinsky then called a friend, Yevgeny Savostyanov, head of the Moscow branch of another federal security service.³⁹ Savostyanov was a liberal, a bearded academic who participated in the pro-democracy movement during perestroika and had been close to Gavriil Popov. Savostyanov sent a team of agents to the high-rise tower.

Korzhakov’s Kremlin goons were suddenly nose-to-nose with Savostyanov’s Moscow agents, and a fight broke out. Korzhakov claims that Savostyanov’s men were slightly drunk. Shots were fired, one of which grazed the leather jacket of one of Korzhakov’s men. Another bullet hit a car. Just when the situation was about to explode, one of Savostyanov’s men recognized one of Korzhakov’s, with whom he used to work. The Savostyanov team realized they were up against the elite presidential security service and retreated.

Korzhakov recalled that when he heard about the episode, he went immediately to Yeltsin, who signed a decree firing Savostyanov. Then Korzhakov sent a small unit of rapid-reaction troops to Gusinsky’s parking lot. They blocked the entrances to the building and began checking all the cars in Gusinsky’s fleet. “The driver of Gusinsky’s armored Mercedes locked himself inside the car,” Korzhakov recalled. “When he was asked to get out, he refused. Then a grenade was put on top of the car. He immediately jumped out.” It was typical of Korzhakov’s swaggering style. He claimed the grenade didn’t even have a fuse.

Meanwhile, Gusinsky summoned Moscow’s press corps to the scene. The Korzhakov goons were captured by two dozen television news crews, with the Gusinsky men still facedown in the snow. The episode was known long after as “faces in the snow.” The reasons for the confrontation remained unclear to the outside world that night. Certainly, the Kremlin’s anger at Gusinsky over coverage of Chechnya was one plausible reason for the assault, but it was not evident precisely who had sent the goons. After the confrontation in the parking lot, Gusinsky realized who he was up against, and he was furious.

Gusinsky later reflected on the events: “If back then these morons at the Kremlin were smarter, they would have called me and said, ‘Volod, we beg you, please give us your support here.’ I probably would have tried to. But they decided to intimidate me. And I’m an idiot, a ram from childhood. If you are going to threaten me, get lost!”⁴⁰

On December 5, Gusinsky was again invited to see Korzhakov’s deputy, Rogozin. He decided to disarm all his bodyguards, so there would be no question about shooting back if another confrontation erupted. He also decided to send his wife, Lena, and his young son to London. As he was headed for the Kremlin, Gusinsky got a call from his security chief that three blue Volvos, unmarked, were trailing his wife on the way to the airport. “There are men with machine guns sitting inside,” the security man said.

“Got it,” Gusinsky replied, curtly.

At the table with Rogozin, Gusinsky broached the idea of a compromise. What would it take?

“Chechnya, Kukly,” said the Korzhakov deputy, suggesting that Gusinsky’s television station needed to fall into line. He was referring to Kukly, a brand-new television satire program, based on puppets, which often made fun of Yeltsin and his men.

“I am not going to discuss it,” Gusinsky cut him off. He would not give up the station.

Rogozin replied, “Something needs to be done; the emotional temperature needs to be lowered.”

“Are you letting my wife fly out today, by any chance?” Gusinsky asked.

“Judging by your behavior,” Rogozin replied cagily.

Gusinsky had a sudden flashback. He was in the courtyard as a small boy. He was picking up the pipe in his hands to smash the man who had called him a Yid. He looked Rogozin in the eyes. “I told him that I would personally kill him, if anything happened to my wife and child,” Gusinsky recalled. “This was an unpleasant incident for me. I told him, ‘I don’t need any security. I will personally strike you dead, I’ll strike you dead myself.’ Probably this is wrong, uncivilized, but I had no choice. Had something happened to my wife and child at that point, I would have killed him in his office with something heavy, an ash tray, anything.”

Gusinsky’s wife flew out of the country. But the pressure on Gusinsky did not let up. Korzhakov boasted in a newspaper interview a few days later that “hunting geese is an old hobby of mine.” The Russian word for goose—gus—is a play on Gusinsky’s name, and a favorite nickname for Gusinsky.

In mid-December, Kiselyov got a telephone call from the Kremlin. The warning was blunt. “You are in great danger,” said Viktor Ilyushin, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, who had dialed Kiselyov directly, not even through a secretary. Kiselyov went to the Kremlin to meet Ilyushin for a formal interview, in which Ilyushin said nothing. But after the interview, Ilyushin took the television anchor aside, and said, “You have big problems, guys.” Just a year before, Yeltsin had signed the decree giving NTV the expanded airtime on Channel 4. Now Yeltsin’s wife, Naina, could hardly watch the channel, Ilyushin reported. “Why did you do that terrible story?” Ilyushin demanded to know.

“What terrible story?” Kiselyov asked.

Ilyushin said the Yeltsin family was distraught over an NTV feature about how Yeltsin was deeply unpopular even in the village where he was born. The story reflected a sad truth: Yeltsin’s public approval ratings were sliding into single digits because of the strains of reform and the shadow of war.⁴¹

Gusinsky too was feeling more and more pressure. “They summoned me to the Kremlin and they told me, if you continue showing Chechnya, we will strip you of NTV and kill you,” Gusinsky recalled. “It felt scary. But I could not agree to it, of course. I grew up on the street, didn’t I? I don’t like to be threatened. I am deeply scared, of course I am, but I cannot show to anybody that I am afraid, can I? I said, fuck off—all of you.”

If his tormentors thought they had defeated Gusinsky, they were wrong. They saved him. The beginning of the Chechen war in December 1994 changed Gusinsky’s life forever. It forged a new, popular, private television channel, NTV, which soon posed a serious challenge to Yeltsin’s authority.

NTV not only brought home the horrors of the war but became a sort of alternative power center, telling the stories that the government would not admit. Night after night, NTV broadcast in a way that television in Russia had never done before. When a Russian helicopter was downed, NTV showed the bodies, but government officials said nothing. When Russians were taken prisoner in mid-December, NTV showed them; the government said there were no prisoners. When Yeltsin said the bombing of the presidential palace in Grozny had stopped, NTV showed the bombs still falling.

Kiselyov told me that in 1994, even before the war began, “We were permanently in Chechnya from late spring, throughout the summer, into the fall.” More than any other television channel, NTV was prepared when the war broke out, and broadcast footage of the troop concentrations, the mobile field hospitals, and the war itself. Gusinsky recalled, “Thanks to our honesty in covering that war, we became the NTV company. We were honest. We were showing what we had to show. It was exactly at that point that I realized what public service was. Exactly at that point.”

Fearing arrest, Gusinsky left Russia on December 18 and remained in London for six months. The pressure, the threatening phone calls, and the vows to shut down NTV continued into the spring as the war turned into a quagmire for Yeltsin. Kiselyov told me that after all the tumult he and his colleagues had been through in recent years, when the Chechen war began, they knew exactly what to do. They did not debate how to cover the war—they went and did it. “We had a good understanding that information was a powerful tool in our hands, to fight back,” he said. The reporting was impassioned, at times sickening in its unblinking treatment of the war’s ghastly, bloody victims. My colleague Lee Hockstader, who covered the war at great risk and with enormous personal intensity, wrote of NTV: “Mangled limbs, agonized death throes, eviscerated corpses, all of it was fair game for the evening news. The tone of some of the coverage became overtly antiwar.” Oleg Dobrodeyev, who had founded the channel with Gusinsky and Kiselyov, led the day-to-day coverage. His rule was that if correspondents saw it, they aired it. “I remember myself sitting and watching all those reports, making decision about what would and would not be put on the air,” Dobrodeyev told me. “I broadcast everything,” he said, because the footage spoke for itself—powerfully. The pathos of war on television, which Americans had discovered a generation earlier in Vietnam, proved gripping to Russian viewers, who had never seen anything like it.⁴² NTV enjoyed a surge of public trust. Television became the chief source of information about the war; newspapers and magazines were far behind. Vsevolod Vilchek, a longtime public opinion specialist for Channel 1 and later for NTV, reported that when people were asked at the outbreak of the war if they were following events, 80 percent said yes. The audience for television was expanding, but the share of the new viewers that went to Channel 1 was tiny, just a few percent. The second channel, RTR, did better, but NTV got an astounding 70 percent of the new audience.⁴³ NTV doubled its total viewers and at the peak of the war NTV audience in Moscow was 48 percent—nearly half of all the televisions turned on at that time.⁴⁴ Those early months of the Chechen war transformed NTV into Russia’s most professional television channel, and people noticed. So did Yeltsin.

On July 8, 1995, NTV aired another segment of its regular weekly satire program, Kukly, which featured life-sized puppets and was written by a wicked humorist, Viktor Shenderovich. Kukly had been launched just as the Chechen war was getting under way, and it unexpectedly became another thorn in Yeltsin’s side. The show that evening depicted government leaders as tramps who could not subsist on the government’s minimum wage. Yeltsin was shown wandering through a passenger train, begging for change, dragging his security chief, Korzhakov, along as a baby. Yeltsin had a thick skin after years in politics, but Gusinsky believed Kukly provoked him into fits of rage. After the train episode, the general prosecutor launched a criminal investigation of Kukly, which brought the show even more attention. Nothing ever came of the probe, but Gusinsky realized the penetrating influence of his television channel. “Yeltsin had quiet hatred reserved for me,” Gusinsky said. Yeltsin once called Luzhkov personally and implored him to ask Gusinsky to stop the puppet show.

“They humiliate me!” Yeltsin begged. But the show went on.

The Kremlin attack on Gusinsky had one major consequence: it drove a wedge between Gusinsky and Luzhkov. The Moscow mayor felt the pressure from the Kremlin and wanted to keep his head down. Gusinsky’s Most Bank depended on the “authorized” accounts of the city, but those accounts were shifted to the new Bank of Moscow. Gusinsky’s relationship with Luzhkov cooled. At some point the two men, who had been so close to each other since their days in the cooperative movement, stopped talking to each other. Gusinsky also lost the Aeroflot business to Berezovsky, a decision taken in the Kremlin as punishment for his opposition to the war.

“It was a very difficult time for the whole group,” Malashenko recalled of Gusinsky’s team, “because people in the bank were of course extremely upset. For them, it was the death of their business. But I told them, listen guys, we don’t have much choice. We are not going to sacrifice NTV.”

Gusinsky had reached a crossroads. He decided that his future lay not in banking and not in construction, but in media, as a mogul. A one-minute advertisement on NTV cost about $10,000. It was a tremendously valuable enterprise, both for business and for politics. He had built it up from almost nothing. Gusinsky was proud of this: his assets were not “ready-made” Soviet-era enterprises like Berezovsky’s Avtovaz or Ostankino. Gusinsky was an entrepreneur, perhaps because he had to be—he built from zero. He had no reservations about lobbying the government, as he had done to win the license for NTV, but the station itself was created by him. It was not a Soviet leftover. It was his ticket to the future.

The view from the club on Sparrow Hills was different. The other tycoons were just beginning to look over a thick book from the State Property Committee. It was a list of ready-made Soviet-era factories and other industrial assets that would soon be theirs for the asking. They didn’t want to start something from scratch, as Gusinsky had, when there were such lucrative properties just waiting to be plucked—the best mines and oil refineries in all of Russia.