If he didn’t get any money out of it, why would he have risked his high position in the new government?
It’s possible that Putin was simply chumped—in Russia, swindling is an art form. Inexperienced in the ways of commerce, Putin may have unwittingly helped abet a scam. In the chaos of those years anything was possible. More likely, however, is that Putin knew some people would line their pockets with the money and he wanted those people in his own pocket for later use. It was a time when sudden and immense fortunes could be made, but it was also a time when sudden and immense power could accrue to those alert to the utility of secrets and favors. Putin preferred power.
Marina Salye tried to raise the issue again when Putin was running for president in 2000. In her version of events, she was made to understand that any such effort would simply cost her her life. She disappeared into a tiny village in northwest Russia far from Moscow.
There were no good years for Russia in the nineties, but 1994 seems particularly bad.
Something had changed in Russia after fall 1993 when Yeltsin ordered the tanks to fire on parliament. The society became more violent, precipitate, unhinged. In June of 1994, the oligarch Boris Berezovsky climbed into the backseat of his Mercedes. His driver and bodyguard were in front. As they left the courtyard a remote-controlled bomb in a nearby parked Opel exploded with tremendous force, decapitating the driver, taking an eye from the bodyguard, injuring seven pedestrians, and shattering windows a block away. Boris Berezovsky stumbled from the wreckage, badly burned but able to walk away.
There had already been fifty-two bomb blasts in Moscow alone by that June. The use of lethal force had become a part of business as well as of politics.
In July the giant pyramid scheme known as MMM collapsed, leaving millions penniless. The 27 percent plunge in the ruble’s value on Black Tuesday, October 11, inflicted suffering on those who still had rubles left to lose. Two months later, on December 11, Russian troops were sent into Chechnya. To chaos, poverty, and desperation now war had been added.
After simmering for three years since Chechnya had declared its independence in 1991, hostilities broke out in late December between Russia and Chechnya, a war that would quickly prove “barbaric on both sides.”[156] In the Kremlin’s eye oil-rich Chechnya was a lawless land with impudent aspirations to independence. But business mattered more than war.
To succeed in business in Russia during the 1990s three things were needed: capital, connections, and chutzpah. When Gorbachev tried to revive the economy, new, looser laws allowed for various cooperative-type enterprises, including financial ones that were essentially banks. Some people acquired capital by reselling goods bought abroad for fantastic profit. As one Russian exclaimed on selling a computer for 70,000 rubles: “It was my salary for forty-eight years!”[157] Others dealt in cars, designer clothes, it almost didn’t matter, since everybody needed everything. It wasn’t that long ago that enterprises like these could have cost you prison time or, in some cases, death. Russians were well aware that the last time anything like this was attempted was Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), which flourished for a few years before ending very badly. That this could happen again no one doubted. The Communists could come back into power—with a vengeance. The Red attempt to seize power in 1993 had been quashed by tanks firing at the White House, but there was an election coming in 1996 that at the least would be bitterly contested, a Communist defeat by no means a certainty.
It was an odd atmosphere that prevailed in those days. A mix of Klondike Gold Rush and Feast in Time of Plague, a sense that anything was possible, calamity included. Though Russian gangsters were making small fortunes via extortion, protection, drugs, and casinos, the great fortunes would end up in the hands of educated men like Boris Berezovsky, who held a Ph.D. in mathematics, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who, before he became Russia’s richest man and then its most famous prisoner, earned a degree in engineering. Though a few of the future oligarchs had street smarts, what they all had, and what made them all superrich, was knowing how to work the system. It really didn’t matter which system it was—the crumbling Soviet system, the system for transitioning to capitalism, or the new rudimentary capitalist system itself—as long as there was some sort of system they would find some way of gaming it.
The image of Berezovsky stumbling away from the smoking wreckage of his Mercedes is, in its way, an oligarch icon. It was a perfect example of Nietzsche’s “What does not kill us makes us stronger.” Only prison and death could stop those men in Russia who had dedicated their every waking moment to the acquisition of fabled wealth.
Berezovsky, born in 1946, an only child, a Jew, took Russian maximalism to the max. His applied-mathematics lab needed not only to flourish but to win the Nobel Prize. When he pursued wealth, only billions would do. Others said of him, “He uses every person to the maximum. That is his principle of life,” and he said of himself: “Everything I do, I do to an absolutely maximum degree.”[158] If Berezovsky wanted to speak with you, he would wait on your doorstep for hours or follow you fully dressed into the shower at your athletic club. Short, dark-haired, dark-eyed, he vibrated with incessant nervous energy. If he ever had a moment’s peace in his life, he would not have had the slightest idea what to do with it. “He was in one place one minute. And in another the next. He had a million phone calls. A million places where he was to arrive. Another million places where he promised to arrive but never went,” recalled a colleague.[159] He was insistent, infuriating, charming.
The USSR was officially based on so-called scientific socialism, and in the country’s waning days its rulers hoped science would save socialism. A great deal of hope, trust, and credence were placed in institutes and labs, like Berezovsky’s, which studied the mathematics of decision making. That plugged him into industry, specifically the auto industry, on a high level and allowed him to make a fortune by obtaining cars from the state with loans that soaring inflation allowed him to pay back with much cheaper rubles.
Berezovsky also wormed his way into the Kremlin by publishing Yeltsin’s ghostwritten memoirs in a deluxe edition that greatly pleased the “author,” who was even more pleased by the tremendous checks from the inflated, if not in some cases utterly bogus, foreign sales that Berezovsky routinely presented. Bribes disguised by vanity as royalties.
Now in the Kremlin’s inner circle, Berezovsky could put his capital to good use. He gained a controlling interest in the national airline, Aeroflot, and the television broadcast company ORT, which gave him access to the burgeoning advertising revenue; but more important, it gave him political power because Russians got their news and views from TV, as they do to this day.
His two daughters attended Cambridge. He had a new, glamorous trophy wife. He had attained both significant wealth and significant power. Nothing could stop him.
The post-Soviet Russian government may still have had enough nuclear power to destroy the planet, but it couldn’t pay its bills. Teachers, nurses, pensioners, weren’t being paid. Inflation was still sky-high. And there were presidential elections coming in 1996. Yeltsin could easily lose. Already there was a powerful nostalgia for Soviet stability, which the Communist Party promised to restore.
Yelstin was increasingly seen as a fool, a has-been, a drunk. Gorbachev had alienated Russians by his clampdown on vodka; Yeltsin had alienated them by his overreliance on it. At the final ceremony for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Germany in August 1994, Yeltsin grabbed the baton from the Berlin Police Orchestra leader’s hand and began vigorously conducting himself. Good for a laugh, but an uncomfortable one. His popularity rating was in the single digits and flirting with zero.