"And this is… successful?"
"Like you wouldn't believe. A price vacuum was created when Gorbachev encouraged free-market economics. The perfect condition for an arbitrager, and Konevitch swooped in. There's a lot of construction and no pricing mechanism for anything."
"Okay."
That okay aside, Yutskoi suspected this was going over his boss's head. "Say, for example, a factory manager in Moscow prices a ton of steel nails at a thousand rubles. A different factory manager in Irkutsk might charge ten thousand rubles. They were all pulling numbers out of thin air. Nobody had a clue what a nail was worth."
"And our friend would buy the cheaper nails?" Golitsin suggested, maybe getting it after all.
"Yes, like that. By the truckload. He would pay one thousand rubles for a ton in Moscow, find a buyer in Irkutsk willing to pay five thousand, then pocket the difference."
Golitsin scrunched his face with disgust. "So this is about nails?" He snorted.
"Nails, precut timber, steel beams, wall board, concrete, roofing tiles, heavy construction equipment… he gets a piece of everything. A big piece. His business swelled from piddling to gigantic in nothing flat."
Sergei Golitsin had spent thirty years in the KGB, but not one of those outside the Soviet empire and the impoverishing embrace of communism. Domestic security was his bread and butter, an entire career spent crushing and torturing his fellow citizens. He had barely a clue what arbitrage was, didn't really care to know, but he nodded anyway and concluded, "So the arbitrager is a cheat."
"That's a way of looking at it."
"He produces nothing."
"You're right, absolutely nothing."
"He sucks the cream from other people's sweat and labor. A big fat leech."
"Essentially, he exploits an opening in a free-market system. It's a common practice in the West. Highly regarded, even. Nobody on Wall Street ever produced a thing. Most of the richest people in America couldn't build a wheel, much less run a factory if their lives depended on it."
Golitsin still wasn't sure how it worked, but he was damned sure he didn't like it. He asked, "And how much has he… this Konevitch character… how much has he given Yeltsin?"
"Who knows? A lot. In American currency, maybe ten million, maybe twenty million dollars."
"He had that much?"
"And then some. Perhaps fifty million dollars altogether. But this is merely a rough estimate on our part. Could be more."
Golitsin stared at Yutskoi in disbelief. "You're saying at twenty-two, he's the richest man in the Soviet Union."
"No, probably not. A lot of people are making a ton of money right now." Yutskoi looked down and toyed with his fingers a moment. "It would be fair to say, though, he's in the top ten."
The two men stared down at their shoes and shared the same depressing thought neither felt the slightest desire to verbalize. If communism went up in flames, their beloved KGB would be the first thing tossed onto the bonfire. In a vast nation with more than forty languages and dialects, and nearly as many different ethnic groups, there was only one unifying factor, one common thread-nearly every citizen in the Soviet Union had been scorched by their bureau in one way or another. Not directly, perhaps. But somebody dear, or at least close: grandfathers purged by Stalin; fathers who had disappeared and rotted in the camps under Brezhnev; aunts and uncles brought in for a little rough questioning under Andropov. Something. Nearly every family tree had at least one branch crippled or lopped off by the boys from the Lubyanka. The list of grudges was endless and bitter.
Yutskoi was tempted to smile at his boss and say: I hope it all does fall apart. Five years being your bootlicker, I've hated every minute of it. You'll be totally screwed, you nasty old relic.
Golitsin knew exactly what the younger man was thinking, and was ready to reply: You're a replaceable, third-rate lackey today, and you'll be a starving lackey tomorrow. Only in this system could a suck-up loser like you survive. The only thing you're good at is plucking fingernails from helpless victims. And you're not even that good at that.
Yutskoi: I'm young and frisky; I'll adapt. You're a starched lizard, a wrinkled old toad, an icy anachronism. Your own grandchildren fill their diapers at the sight of you. I'll hire you to shine my shoes.
Golitsin: I cheated and backstabbed and ass-kissed my way up to three-star general in this system, and I'll find a way in the next one, whatever that turns out to be. You, on the other hand, will always be a suck-up loser.
"Why?" asked Golitsin. As in, why would Alex Konevitch give Yeltsin that much money?
"Revenge could be a factor, I suppose."
"To get back at the system that tried to ruin him. How pedestrian."
"But, I think," Yutskoi continued, trying to look thoughtful, "mostly influence. If the union disintegrates, Yeltsin will wind up president of the newly independent Russia. He'll owe this guy a boatload of favors. A lot of state enterprises are going to be privatized and put on the auction block. Konevitch will have his pick-oil, gas, airlines, banks, car companies-whatever his greedy heart desires. He could end up as rich as Bill Gates. Probably richer."
Golitsin leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. It was too horrible to contemplate. Seventy years of blood, strain, and sweat was about to be ladled out, first come, first served-the biggest estate sale the world had ever witnessed. The carcass of the world's largest empire carved up and bitterly fought over. The winners would end up rich beyond all imagination. What an ugly, chaotic scramble that was going to be.
"So why didn't we find out about this Alex Konevitch sooner?" Golitsin snapped. Good question. When, three years before, Boris Yeltsin first began openly shooting the bird at Gorbachev and the Communist Party, the KGB hadn't worried overly much. Yeltsin was back then just another windbag malcontent: enough of those around to be sure.
But Yeltsin was a whiner with a big difference; he had once been a Politburo member, so he understood firsthand exactly how decrepit, dim-witted, incompetent, and scared the old boys at the top were.
That alone made him more dangerous than the typical blowhard.
And when he announced he was running for the presidency of Russia-the largest, most powerful republic in the union-the KGB instantly changed its mind and decided to take him dreadfully seriously indeed.
His offices and home were watched by an elite squad of nosy agents 24/7. His phones were tapped, his offices and home stuffed with enough bugs and listening gadgets to hear a fly fart. Several agents insinuated themselves inside his campaign organization and kept the boys at the center up to date on every scrap and rumor they overheard. Anybody who entered or left Yeltsin's offices was shadowed and, later, approached by a team of thugs who looked fierce and talked even fiercer. Give Boris a single ruble, they were warned, and you'll win the national lotto-a one-way ticket to the most barren, isolated, ice-laden camp in Siberia.
Concern, not worry, was the prevailing mood among the big boys in the KGB. This was their game. After seventy years of undermining democracy around the world, they knew exactly how to squeeze and strangle Yeltsin. An election takes money, lots of it; cash for travel and aides and people to carry and spread the message across the bulging, diverse breadth of a nation nearly three times the size of America.
Boris wasn't getting a ruble. Not a single ruble. He would rail and flail to his heart's content in empty halls and be roundly ignored. After being thoroughly shellacked in the polls, he would crawl under a rock and drink himself into the grave. So long, Boris, you idiot.
It was the inside boys who first raised the alarm. Hard cash was being ladled out by the fistful to campaign employees, to travel agencies, to advertisers, to political organizers. The conclusion was disquieting and inescapable: somewhere in the shadows a white knight was shoveling money at Yeltsin, gobs of it. Boris was spending a fortune flying across Russia in a rented jet, staying in high-class hotels, and to be taken more seriously, he had even traveled overseas to America, to introduce himself to the American president; Gorby was forced to call in a big favor, but he got Boris stiffed by a low-level White House flunky before he got within sniffing distance of the Oval Office. Boris's liquor bills alone were staggering.