The end came for Berezovsky when his TV station wounded Putin. It happened when it exposed the new leader as a bad communicator. Just months after Putin’s inauguration he made his first gaffe, in August 2000. It could have proved fatal. The Kursk – the pride of the Russian fleet, one of the nation’s most modern submarines, which only a year before had been tracking the US Sixth Fleet during the bombing of Kosovo – suffered a crippling explosion and sunk to the bottom of the Barents Sea. The sailors called for help; they were asphyxiated when none came. That nothing could be done stunned the country – the submarine had been on a training exercise. The event saw the public seized with mass grief, not unlike the response in Britain to the car crash that killed Princess Diana. But at the time of the sinking Putin was on holiday; he did not return for five days. It was as if Tony Blair had refused to return to London for almost a week after Diana had died.
Berezovsky’s ORT began rolling out negative coverage. In a panic, the key PR hands in the Kremlin convinced Putin to act. He flew to the scene but, without a crowd of carefully preselected people, he completely mishandled the genuine grieving families. Dressed in black for mourning, but coming across as a shifty mobster in a polo neck, he showed his stress and found difficulties in communicating. At times he seemed wide-eyed. He offered only the most pitiful of excuses:
‘There have always been tragedies at sea, including in the time we thought we were living in a very successful country. There have always been tragedies. I just never thought that things were in this kind of condition.’28
ORT’s cameras caught all of this. The channel blamed him for the deaths of the 118 sailors, accusing him of preferring to let them die rather than accept the foreign help that had been offered. It was media disaster for Putin and a demonstration of the power of Berezovsky’s ORT. But his protégé was determined that a TV station would never hurt him again. After this humiliation, Putin chose to confront his former patron, venomously saying in October 2000, ‘If necessary we will destroy these instruments of blackmail.’ This is exactly what he did in the months that followed. At that moment Leonid Parfyonov, one of the most famous journalists in the country and the face of Russian television, realized that every TV screen in the country was about to be turned into a Kremlin megaphone, recalling:
It was between the Kursk and the NTV affair that the realization dawned on me that we were moving into an authoritarian regime based on control of TV. These events showed that you could say power was bad or dysfunctional. But now you could no longer say power could make a mistake.
The last time Berezovsky met Putin it was in the offices of his chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin. Putin accused him of putting up prostitutes in front of the cameras as the wives and girlfriends of the sailors. He then told Berezovsky: ‘I want to control ORT. I will manage it.’
The oligarch recalled that once Putin left the room he turned to the bearded and bald Voloshin and said, ‘I think we have made a mistake… We have let the black colonels in.’ Berezovsky claimed that Voloshin blew off his comparison of ex-KGB colonel Putin to the South American and Greek ‘colonel’ regimes that had seized power during the Cold War. Yet it was men like Voloshin who had once craved ‘a Russian Pinochet’.
Regardless of the right historical analogy, Putin had no intention of being exposed. Picking them off, one after the other, he managed to force both Gusinsky and Berezovsky into exile. The key to his success was how utterly unexpected his power grab was. No one had prepared for it. That day in the Kremlin, the last thing Putin said to Berezovsky was this: ‘You were one of those that asked me to become President. So how can you complain?’
No one had expected anything like this from the lieutenant colonel. The next episode in the hostile takeover of the media was the end of the NTV affair. In September 2000 Gazprom sued Media-Most for the non-repayment of its 1996 ‘bribe’. By April 2001, after lengthy legal manoeuvring, the exiled Gusinsky’s TV channel was finally brought under full Gazprom control by means of its outstanding debts. Its home in the Ostankino TV tower, a Moscow icon taller than New York’s Empire State Building, was entered by force. The new ‘editorial’ team then ousted all its popular government critics.
The ease with which Putin seized the main television stations reflected the weakness of society, of journalism and the oligarchs. The 1990s had produced few strong non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or civic movements, as the economic depression had ravaged the civil society that had sprung up during the perestroika years. Moscow’s journalists were far from a community, but a fragmented, inexperienced demi-monde full of hired columnists, hysterical TV hosts and paid-for agitators. Oligarchs such as Berezovsky were themselves despised by the public, to the extent that even when they started telling the truth about creeping authoritarianism they were doubted. There was little for resistance to form around.
In November 2000 Berezovsky had fled first to France, then to Britain. It was there that he received the news that the man that he had done so much to help was issuing an international arrest warrant against him. ‘I felt when I first heard the news – how small is Putin to behave like this? I thought he was above using the instruments of pressure and oppression. I thought he was not so weak. I thought he could use the power of persuasion, of explanation, not those of oppression.’ Nevertheless, in what Berezovsky did not say, and in the regret of what he did, I could tell that he felt he had been a fool. Months before his death, he left an emotional post on Facebook: ‘I repent and ask forgiveness for what led to the power of Vladimir Putin.’
The man who Berezovsky had thought was the ‘family’ bodyguard had robbed him. He had been destroyed as a Russian politician. Putin had asserted his independence in the boldest way. He had devoured his patron. Criminal investigations were opened against Berezovsky who, under pressure, sold his share of ORT to Roman Abramovich, who promptly handed it over to the state. By taking over ORT and NTV Putin had achieved exactly what he wanted – he had become Berezovsky. It was the beginning of a massive redistribution of assets. By 2008, some 90 per cent of all Russian media was directly or indirectly under Putin’s control.29
Putin called this asset grab the ‘war on the oligarchs’. With the creation of two oligarch-exiles all federal TV stations were easily brought under Kremlin supervision. News coverage or satire that could undermine the regime would disappear from the screens. But it was something more than pulling puppet shows that lampooned Putin – it installed a modernized form of authoritarianism in Russia.
Putin had created a ‘videocracy’. This is an ascendancy where hegemony over national broadcasting underwrites political dominance, a style of power that eschews relying on mass parties or arresting men for telling anti-regime jokes or distributing leaflets. This was not unique to Russia, but in step with the changes new technology had brought to power in Europe as a whole. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi dominated Rome as he controlled the country’s most powerful media holding, whilst in London Tony Blair governed as much through spin as through a grip on the House of Commons. Like Blair and Berlusconi, Putin realized that power now sprung from an ability to dominate 24-hour news. The difference was that in this regime TV editors would get calls from ‘up top’ setting the agenda; the secret services would call reporters to tell them they had gone too far, and journalists were frequently murdered.