AN ORPHAN JOINS 'THE FAMILY'
A black saloon pulled up outside the front door of the dacha outside Moscow where the daughter of President Boris Yeltsin, Tatyana Dyachenko, was hosting a barbecue for a group of friends and colleagues. The driver got out, opened the boot and began to unload a number of cases of 'very expensive' wine, some choice cuts of meat and baskets of fruit. 'Oh, that waiter looks very nice,' commented one guest. Dyachenko replied: 'That's not a waiter, that's Roman Abramovich.'
Yeltsin ruled Russia from 1991 to 1999 and during those years one of the most powerful groupings in the land was not his cabinet or the state security service but a tight-knit circle of friends and acolytes that became universally known as 'The Family'. Long before he became a figure on the national stage, Abramovich was at the heart of this informal but powerful grouping and he owed his introduction to it to his relationship with Boris Berezovsky. From his earliest days as a tycoon, Berezovsky had been shrewd enough to realize that he needed political clout in order to protect and expand his newly acquired wealth. One way he set about achieving this was by investing in the popular weekly Ogonyok and it was through one of the editors there that he succeeded in gaining access to the ultimate powerbroker, Yeltsin himself. The journalist in question, Valentin Yumashev, had got to know Yeltsin during the early days of perestroika and quickly won his trust, and when Yeltsin wanted a ghost writer for his memoirs, he turned to Yumashev. By the time Berezovsky encountered him, he had just completed Yeltsin's second volume, Notes of the President. It seems reasonable to assume that there would have been no problem finding a publisher willing to put out the innermost thoughts of the most powerful man in the country but Berezovsky's typically bold plan to curry favour was to undertake to print a million copies in Finland and pay Yeltsin 'royalties' into a London bank account. The result was a handsome volume that put Russian-produced books to shame and Berezovsky's reward was to be made a member of The President's Club, which Chrystia Freeland describes as 'a priceless gift'. The club was where members of Yeltsin's family and his closest personal friends went to swim, play tennis or have manicures. During his visits to the club, Berezovsky quickly spotted that Yeltsin's younger daughter Tatyana, often known as Tanya, was the key to getting the president's ear. As Aleksandr Korzhakov, the brutish head of Yeltsin's presidential security service, once said: 'If Tanya Dyachenko gave him her direct telephone number, what could anybody do to stop him?' Berezovsky went on to bombard her with gifts, including a Niva, a sort of Russian Jeep, and a Chevrolet.
Apart from Berezovsky, the club was an oligarch-free zone and, naturally, he behaved like a sweet-toothed toddler alone in a humbug factory. Korzhakov gave Freeland a vivid example of Berezovsky's thick-skinned approach to networking. He was having a shower after winning a game of tennis when he was joined by the pushy tycoon, who started a conversation despite the clatter of water on porcelain. 'I don'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.'
Berezovsky's cultivation of Dyachenko was soon to pay off in a way that even he could not have predicted: she obtained a position at the heart of government. Dyachenko owes her place in public life to her father's predicament in the run-up to the presidential election of June 1996. Late the previous year, Yeltsin had suffered his first serious heart attack and he was left feeling isolated and under threat following a poor performance by the party he supported in the Duma elections. Leftist parties, dominated by the communists under its forceful leader Gennadi Zyuganov, had won 40 per cent of the vote, leaving them with 200 seats in parliament.
In the wake of the parliamentary elections, even Yeltsin himself was unsure whether to run for re-election and his closest associates were already plotting the succession. Korzhakov and Mikhail Barsukov, the director of the Federal Security Service, wanted him to dismiss his prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and appoint their friend Oleg Soskovets, then first deputy prime minister, in his place. This would put Soskovets in pole position for the presidency should Yeltsin retire.
By the end of December, however, Yeltsin had pulled himself together and decided he was the only man who could beat the communists. As a consolation prize, he appointed Soskovets, a former head of an iron and steel plant, as his campaign manager and the process of organizing his re-election got under way. Almost immediately it became clear that Soskovets was not up to the job. So badly organized was his campaign that he almost failed to perform the simple task of gathering the necessary signatures to support Yeltsin's nomination. In a panic, Soskovets organized a system whereby rail and steel workers were forced to sign up for Yeltsin as they picked up their pay packets. Naturally, the Press jumped on the scam and the ensuing furore was severely embarrassing for Yeltsin.
By now the backstage scheming had reached epidemic levels and Yeltsin needed someone he could trust who would be both above the fray and a spy in the camp. When he discussed his problem with Yumashev, the man who was later to marry his daughter, the journalist - perhaps not surprisingly - said: 'What about Tanya?' On the face of it, apart from being the president's daughter, she had few qualifications for the job. A graduate in mathematics and engineering from Moscow University, she had worked as a computer programmer on Russia's space programme and was married at the time to the second of her three husbands, Leonid Dyachenko, an aeronautics engineer who worked in the same office. At the time Yumashev made his suggestion, she was on maternity leave looking after her second son Gleb. But Yeltsin warmed to the idea almost immediately. The bond between him and his younger daughter had always been a powerful one. She was said to have been the only person who could soothe him when he fell victim to black depressions that made him weepy and unable to sleep. When he invited her to work at his side, she responded enthusiastically and soon she was coming into the Kremlin on a daily basis, was given an office and regularly attended meetings.
Apart from a certain amount of nepotism, a Russian presidential election campaign wouldn't be the peculiar beast that it is without the involvement of the oligarchs, then in an early stage of their development. In early 1996, the fruits of the loans-for-share scam had been promised but it was clear they would only ever be delivered if Yeltsin won a second term. He had honoured his side of the bargain and now it was up to the oligarchs to offer the 'political, financial and strategic' support they had promised to ensure his re-election. If they ever had any thoughts of reneging on this part of the deal, they were banished when Abramovich's new partner, Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, another oligarch, and Khodorkovsky attended the World Economic Summit in Davos in February 1996. The communists' success in the Duma elections two months earlier meant that they were now the biggest single party in parliament and Zyuganov was feted by many of those at Davos as Russia's president-in-waiting. People asked for his autograph as he walked through the lobby of his hotel, the media were so keen for a piece of him that he was giving twenty interviews a day, and Western businessmen were noticeably eager to ingratiate themselves. For his part, Zyuganov told them what they wanted to hear. He insisted renationalization was not on his agenda: 'We know that if we start taking the factories back, there's going to be shooting all the way from Murmansk to Vladivostok.' But the oligarchs knew better than to take this at face value.
Something had to be done. They recognized their potential saviour in the unlikely figure of Anatoli Chubais, the former government minister who had been in charge of Russia's privatization programme. On the face of it, he was an unpromising candidate - apart from anything else, he had been fired by Yeltsin three weeks before and the president's parting shot had been particularly stinging. 'He sold off big business for next to nothing,' Yeltsin told the press. 'We cannot forgive this.' Yet Chubais was still fighting the good fight. So disturbed was he by Zyuganov's success in portraying himself as the capitalists' friend, that he arranged to have a dossier of Zyuganov's manifesto, speeches and interviews faxed to him at Davos. These revealed the leader of the communists to be rather more unreconstructed than he had been letting on to his Davos audience. Determined to alert an apparently complacent West to what he saw as an impending cataclysm, Chubais organized a press conference to expose Zyuganov's real agenda. 'There are two Zyuganovs, one for foreign and one for domestic consumption,' he said. 'If Zyuganov wins the Russian presidency in June, he will undo several years of privatization and this will lead to bloodshed and an all-out civil war.'
This diatribe made a strong impression on both Berezovsky and Gusinsky and when the former ran into the latter's right-hand man shortly afterwards, they arranged a meeting. The two men, who had been feuding bitterly for years, duly made their peace over lunch in the bar of the Fluela hotel. Having agreed that Chubais was the man to run Yeltsin's re-election campaign, they organized a private dinner with the other oligarchs who were at the conference, including Khodorkovsky, to enlist their support. Having established a united front, all that remained was to get Chubais on board. This was achieved in what was, for the oligarchs, an unusually straightforward manner. They offered him money, $3 million to be exact.
And so, after returning to Moscow, Berezovsky, Gusinsky, Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Friedman went to the Kremlin to alert Yeltsin to the seriousness of the position. If the communists came to power, they told him, they would be 'hung from the lamp-posts'. Their message was blunt: his campaign was a shambles and he only had a month to turn things round. At this stage, Yeltsin would have been unaware of their Davos discussions and, looking back, he wrote, with charming naivety:'... what amazed me most was that they all agreed that I needed Anatoli Chubais for my campaign.' Fortunately for the oligarchs, Yeltsin took the view that his quarrel with Chubais had been stirred up by the Korzhakov-Soskovets faction - a grouping that was by now increasingly out of favour - and he was happy to welcome him back into the fold. The oligarchs had prevailed once again.
Chubais was duly made head of what became known as the 'analytical group', a group of specialists that included a sociologist, a television station boss and a number of political analysts. It was to this group that Yeltsin - 'with my heart in my mouth' - had to introduce his daughter. 'At first no one understood what was going on,' he wrote later. 'Here was a new face, a woman who was willing to work late hours, who came very early in the morning, who sat in all sorts of meetings day and night, who talked to everyone, and who asked naive questions.'
Even with this sophisticated new team in place, however, the opinion polls stubbornly refused to respond and Yeltsin came to the view that desperate measures were required. It was Korzhakov who suggested a typically hard-line solution: dissolve parliament, ban the communist party and postpone the ballot. Korzhakov was just not a democratic creature. A former KGB general, he was a rough-mannered, coarse-faced individual, who tried to disguise his baldness by combing the lank strands of his hair across his gleaming pate, like some sinister Bobby Charlton. But he had all the confidence of a man who stood at the head of a small private army. In his ill-fitting, polyester suits, he looked increasingly out of place in the new image-conscious Kremlin but he had been the president's best friend for eleven years and would not be deposed easily. Indeed, in his autobiography, Against the Grain, Yeltsin spoke of Korzhakov in extremely affectionate terms. 'To this day, Korzhakov never leaves my side,' he wrote, 'and we even sit up at night during trips together. He is $r very decent, intelligent, strong and courageous person. While outwardly he seems very simple, behind the simplicity is a sharp mind and an excellent, clear head.'
In truth, Korzhakov was an over-promoted thug. A good example of the security chief's crude approach had occurred less than two years earlier: Vladimir Gusinsky had refused to betray his friend Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, by turning over Luzhkov's bank account details, and the following day, armed and masked men turned up at the country house where Gusinsky lived with his wife, his mother, his two-year-old son and the child's nanny. There they attempted to goad Gusinsky's security men into a fight. When that failed they followed his motorcade into the city in three cars, waving their machine guns through the car's open windows and trying to force Gusinsky's vehicles off the road. He managed to reach his office safely and a standoff ensued. A couple of telephone calls confirmed Gusinsky's suspicions - the men were not bandits but members of Korzhakov's Presidential Security Service. He succeeded in having five members of the mainstream FSB (Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB in Russia) dispatched to the scene and their presence initially deterred Korzhakov's men. When their boss discovered they had backed off, however, he was so furious that he sent in reinforcements. Heavily armed, and clad in black balaclavas and camouflage fatigues, they ordered Gusinsky's bodyguards to lie face down in the snow and then proceeded to kick them where they lay and strike them with their rifle butts. By this time, television crews were on hand to film the brutality and when Gusinsky went home in the early hours of the next morning, it was to be greeted by his wife holding a Winchester rifle. She had seen what had happened on the television news and was expecting the worst.
The man who presided over this fiasco succeeded in getting the president of Russia to consider seriously what was to all intents and purposes a military-backed coup. In mid-March, the Duma offered Yeltsin the excuse he was seeking to implement Korzhakov's proposal. It passed a bill declaring illegal the accord that had dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991. This, the hardliners argued, amounted to treason. Yeltsin ordered his staff to produce the relevant decrees. It was a ludicrously authoritarian plan that would have made Yeltsin a dictator and turned Russia into a pariah in the eyes of the West. According to Yeltsin, it was his daughter who saved the day. Without reference to her father, she called Chubais and asked him to come to the Kremlin for talks. Typically, Chubais emerged as the voice of sweet reason. According to Yeltsin, during the often stormy hour-long meeting that followed, Chubais succeeded in persuading him that the Korzhakov proposal was madness.
The truth is probably more complicated. Freeland wrote that Yeltsin's interior minister - the man who would bear responsibility for such a move - told him the draft decree was illegal and that he would refuse to implement it. Viktor Chernomyrdin, his prime minister, took a similar line. Yeltsin came under further pressure when Yegor Gaidar, a former deputy prime minister, was brave enough to tell the American ambassador about the plan and pleaded with him to ask President Clinton to intervene. Whatever the truth of the matter, the upshot was that Yeltsin drew back from the brink. From that moment on, Korzhakov and his faction were sidelined, the Soskovets campaign team was disbanded, and the analytical group under Chubais took full control.
They proceeded to produce an electoral strategy that was a model of its kind. After analysing the demographics of the electorate, they opted for a youth-oriented campaign that presented Yeltsin as a man of the people. He travelled the country pressing the flesh, attended pop concerts for his supporters, and generally presented himself as approachable and sympathetic. His bodyguards were persuaded to do away with their dark glasses on the grounds that it made them look thuggish and a television advertising campaign, with the slogan 'Choose from the heart', showed ordinary people saying what they thought about their president. This may sound a little cloying and sentimental to a Western audience but this radical new approach soon had the desired effect. The polls began to turn in Yeltsin's favour. Dyachenko was at the heart of the campaign. 'Tanya worked really hard,' said Yeltsin. 'She could get along with only three hours of sleep a night, and she displayed incredible persistence. Together with the speechwriters, she could rewrite a speech ten times. She could go over the scenario for meetings or a concert a dozen times.'
Her growing influence turned her into a hate figure for Korzhakov. She had no title, she was unpaid, but she was clearly a player. Her nebulous role irritated him so much that he took to asserting his superiority by keeping her waiting for hours if she wanted to see him and by attempting to impose petty rules. On one occasion, he banned her from wearing trousers in the office, an instruction she simply ignored.
But shortly after the first round of voting on 16 June, in which Yeltsin came first, Korzhakov over-reached himself. At 5pm on 19 June, in the foyer of the White House, members of his Presidential Security Service detained two of Chubais's aides who were carrying half a million dollars in cash. It is unclear where the money came from and why they were lugging it around in a cardboard box and Korzhakov thought he had found a scandal with which to undermine his enemies. Again, it was Dyachenko who thwarted him. After calling Korzhakov at midnight that night and being told not to interfere, she went to the offices of Logovaz, where Berezovsky was holed up with most of the members of the now beleaguered analytical group and a group of sympathizers. They told her that Korzhakov had deployed snipers on nearby rooftops and had the place surrounded by agents of his security service. Aware that he would not attempt to storm the office while the president's daughter was in situ, Dyachenko stayed with them until 5am. Within hours, Yeltsin had extracted the resignation not just of his old friend Korzhakov but also those of his allies, Barsukov and Soskovets. It seems logical to accept that no one but Dyachenko could have turned her father against Korzhakov, and with his departure her position became virtually unassailable.
On 3 July 1996, Yeltsin was re-elected with 54 per cent of the vote. Zyuganov, the man who had almost persuaded the West that communism was about to make a comeback, trailed with just 40 per cent. The president's victory in the bag, the oligarchs' ascendancy was complete - and Dyachenko, the woman Berezovsky had wooed so relentlessly, was about to formalize her position at the heart of power. With her father safe for another four years, she continued to come into the office and attend meetings. Not unreasonably, Chubais - who had been rewarded with the post of head of the presidential administration - was discomfited by the presence of someone who clearly had power and influence but no formal position and he asked Yeltsin to define her role and status. This presented the president with a quandary. He had come to rely on her judgment and didn't want to lose her but how would it look if he added her to the staff? Inspiration struck when he recalled that there was a precedent in the government of France. President Jacques Chirac had appointed his daughter Claude as his 'image adviser'. Yeltsin duly called Chirac and arranged for their two children to meet and compare notes. Dyachenko flew to Paris and called on Claude at the president's official residence. The pair discussed their respective roles and, as their conversation came to a close, Claude suggested they go to 'say hello to papa'. So the daughter of the president of Russia found herself discussing her father's upcoming meeting with the president of France with the president himself.
With Dyachenko formally installed in the Kremlin, Berezovsky's persistent wooing of her began to look far-sighted in the extreme. She was now held in fear by many of her underlings and was dubbed the tsarevna, or imperial princess, by the more cynical among them. She had encouraged her father to wear designer suits and get a semi-decent haircut, and now she appeared to perform a makeover on herself. Aged 35, she was an attractive woman who had previously done little to make the most of her looks. Now she began to appear with highlights in her hair and there were even rumours that she had started to use make-up.
If Dyachenko was the tsarevna, then Berezovsky was her Rasputin. He was well aware that Yeltsin did not trust him but he was equally aware that the president trusted no one more than his daughter and that it was through her that he would get his way. By planting seeds with her, which would flower as government policy, privatizations could be scheduled, auctions stitched up and ministers appointed.
Not long after gaining access to the Yeltsins' power centres - their Kremlin offices, and Yeltsin's and Dyachenko's dachas - Berezovsky established one of his own: the Logovaz clubhouse. Berezovsky's salon was an intimate and luxurious meeting place, whose decor was once likened to that of a Paris brothel. Situated on Novokuznetskaya Street, an old Moscow avenue with a creaky tramline, it was based in an early 19th century mansion that had at one time belonged to the Smirnoff vodka family. Its undistinguished grey frontage gave no clue to the ornately decorated interior, which Berezovsky had had lovingly restored. The bar-cum-waiting room, with its yellow walls and cafe-style tables, featured a red rose painted on the ceiling arch. As they sipped a glass of red wine from the extensive list available, visitors could admire the tropical fish in the illuminated aquarium.
Dyachenko became a regular guest at the clubhouse and her growing closeness to Berezovsky was noted by visitors to her office in the Kremlin, a room she had transformed into what one observer describes as 'a snow princess boudoir, with white marble walls and flouncy ivory curtains'. Here conversations would be interrupted regularly as she took calls from Berezovsky. He had her private mobile number and he made frequent use of it.
The Dyachenko-Berezovsky double act was supplemented by at least two other key players. One was Aleksandr Voloshin, who was to become Yeltsin's chief of staff, the other Badri Patakartsishvili. Voloshin, a balding and bearded man with a taste for intrigue and self-advancement, went on to become the most resilient man in Russian politics, serving as chief of staff under both Yeltsin and Putin. Patakartsishvili was so low-profile, he made Abramovich - the so-called stealth oligarch - look like a self-publicist. He had met Berezovsky when they were in the auto business and remains his close friend and partner to this day. These, along with Yumashev, were the founding members of the shadowy unit that was to become known as The Family.
The magic that membership of The Family could work did not go unnoticed by Berezovsky's once subservient partner, Abramovich. He soon realized that a place in the inner circle was best gained via the good offices of the president's gift-loving daughter, and it was not long before he was at least as close to Dyachenko as his business partner. Indeed, she and Yumashev, the man for whom she was to leave her second husband, found Abramovich easier to deal with than his more irascible partner. Apart from barbecues at her dacha, he became a familiar face at the Kremlin and began to take holidays with her and Yumashev. When Berezovsky bought a yacht, Dyachenko and Abramovich joined him for cruises on the Mediterranean. Elena Tregubova, the author of a scurrilous memoir of her time as a member of the presidential press pool called Tales of a Kremlin Digger, observed the progress of their relationship with great interest. 'Early in 1999,' she writes, 'Dmitri Yakushkin, the new press secretary, was trying to impress and, flirting with women journalists, showed off about going skiing with Tatyana Dyachenko and Roman Abramovich.' Later that same year, she came across more evidence of their growing intimacy. During a visit to the Kremlin office of Yeltsin's deputy chief of staff, Sergei Zveryev, he pointed out of the window and said: 'That's Abramovich's car over there. He's always here with Voloshin or Tatyana. He spends whole days hanging around her.'
In the febrile atmosphere of the Kremlin, the amount of time that Dyachenko and Abramovich spent together gave rise to the inevitable rumours that they were more than just friends. One of the few who went so far as to hint at this publicly was, not surprisingly, Dyachenko's old enemy, Korzhakov. Her father's embittered former right-hand man once claimed he had been ordered to dispose of paperwork that compromised Abramovich. 'The motive?' he asked. 'The presumed affectionate relationship between the handsome Roman and Yeltsin's older daughter Tatyana.'
What is not in doubt is that the young oilman won the trust of the Yeltsin family. Their faith in him was such that he was given responsibility for their financial affairs and eventually became known as 'the cashier'. He is even alleged to have financed the purchase of Dyachenko's dacha in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
When his enemies wanted to embarrass Abramovich on one occasion, they had posters put up in one of Moscow's most prominent streets which read simply: 'Roma is thinking about The Family. The Family is thinking about Roma. Congratulations - Roma has found a marvellous place.' He certainly had.