Death of a Dissident (41 page)

“You are worse than a traitor to him. You are his ex-brother. He is out to destroy you, Boris, seriously. Putin is your creature, and you have some strange bond to him. If you don’t break this bond, you will perish. Lena, will you tell him, please?” I turned to his wife, who was standing helplessly on the steps of the château. “If he goes, you will spend the rest of your life in Tobolsk, Siberia, visiting him once a month in a dungeon.”

Lena shook her head. “I don’t want to go to Tobolsk.”

I got Elena Bonner, the widow of the dissident guru Andrei Sakharov, on the phone.

“Boris,” she told him, “Andrei Dmitrievich always said that if you have the choice of leaving the country instead of going to jail, it is prudent to take it.”

In the end, we wore him down. He dictated a statement: “They force me to choose between becoming a political prisoner or political émigré, and I am choosing the latter.”

The day after we kept him from leaving for Moscow, Boris seemed deeply depressed, the longest period of gloom I have ever observed in his manic personality. At the time I thought that he was coming to grips with the reality of being an exile, something I had had to live with for twenty-five years. But as I learned later, the reason was quite specific: he had left a hostage in Russia, Nikolai (Kolya) Glushkov, his loyal manager of Aeroflot.

Boris was consumed with guilt. Kolya stubbornly refused to leave the country, insisting that he had done nothing wrong and that he looked forward to clearing his name in court should the Aeroflot case go to trial. By refusing to answer the summons, Boris might be forcing the prosecutors to crack down on Kolya. Indeed, three weeks later he was arrested. Then word came from the Kremlin that the price of Kolya’s freedom was Boris’s 49 percent ownership of ORT.

By then, the battle for control of ORT was already in full swing. According to its bylaws, major decisions in the company, such as appointments and firings of senior editorial staff, required approval by 75 percent of the board of directors. At the time of the
Kursk
incident, Boris’s loyalists controlled the network. Among them were Konstantin Ernst, the executive producer; Sergei Dorenko, the anchorman; and Badri Patarkatsishvili, Boris’s long-time business partner and ORT’s COO. All three were on the board. Because of the 75 percent rule, gaining editorial control entailed turning either Dorenko or Ernst, or both.

If there was any journalist to whom Putin owed a debt, it was Dorenko. During the Duma campaign of 1999, week after week, his Saturday night show mocked and berated Primakov and Luzhkov in the blandest of styles, which earned him the scorn of many members of the journalistic community. Yet his programs were popular, and they did the job for Putin, making him appear to be a stark contrast to his much-ridiculed and degraded opponents. For Putin, Dorenko was unquestionably one of “us,” so it was only natural that he would start with him.

“He called me into his office, with a huge double-headed Russian
eagle hanging behind his desk, to make me an offer that I could not refuse,” recalled Dorenko years later. “‘You are either a member of our team or not. If you are with us, we will pay you well. If you go against us, you cannot continue. As simple as that.’”

Dorenko was in shock. Style is everything, he told me. When Boris wanted something, he would always discuss the substance and ask for objections. If there was a difference of opinion, Boris’s would likely prevail, but at least the discussion was civilized. If compromises were to be made, Boris would argue that they were a necessary evil in the context of larger strategies. Dorenko was no purist, but there are limits to everything. What he was facing now pushed him beyond those limits.

“It was the eagle,” Dorenko explained. “He was sitting under the eagle, the fucking head of state. I just could not take that. My dad was an officer, you know, I grew up in military towns, and I thought of all those poor bastards for whom the eagle means something. This kind of talk could come from anybody, but I just could not take it from the president.”

Dorenko did not take the offer. Later that week, Konstantin Ernst, the long-haired Moscow intellectual whom five years earlier Boris had made the most influential TV executive in the country, called Badri.

“I know that I am a piece of shit, but I will go with the winning side,” he said. “It’s pointless to resist. Sorry.” He hung up.

A few days later, Ernst pulled Dorenko’s program off the air and purged senior news editors from ORT. Dorenko was the most handsome face on Russian TV, the Peter Jennings of Russia. He knew that he was finished, but he was determined to have the last word. In an act of unbelievable defiance that brought millions of viewers to the edge of their seats, Dorenko went public on the rival channel, Goose’s NTV, which at the time was still under Igor Malashenko’s control. He told the national audience about his conversation with Putin, about the eagle, and the offer that he had refused. It was the last time his viewers saw him. A few months later, a navy captain claimed that Dorenko deliberately bumped into him with his motorcycle in the course of a dispute in a Moscow park. Dorenko was slapped with criminal charges, convicted of hooliganism, and given a four-year suspended
sentence. He is now hosting a talk show on Radio Echo Moscow, the last remaining outpost of Goose’s media empire.

With Dorenko gone and the newsroom under control, the Kremlin turned to ORT’s board. By then Boris had announced that he would give his 49 percent in trust to a group of prominent journalists, all of whom were serious men of integrity. But then Glushkov was arrested, on December 7, 2000. With a hostage at Lefortovo, Boris had no choice. He knew he had to compromise.

The Kremlin sent a messenger in mid-December in the person of soft-spoken Roma Abramovich, who flew from Moscow for a weekend on the Côte d’Azur. His villa was a ten-minute drive from Château de la Garoupe. When he drove over for a talk with Boris and Badri, his posture was that of “an honest broker, who was looking out for everyone’s best interests,” recalled Boris.

“I come with a message from Volodya [Putin] and Sasha [Voloshin, Putin’s chief of staff], at their explicit request,” said Roma. “You understand, of course, that if they wanted, they could take your share in ORT away and you’d get nothing. But to make it easier for all, we agreed that I would buy you out, on their behalf. I am offering $175 million. It’s a good deal.”

Boris and Badri looked at each other in shock; it was a fraction of ORT’s real value.

“No deal,” they said.

“Well, Volodya and Sasha say that they would let Kolya go, as part of the deal.”

“Can you guarantee that?”

“Volodya and Sasha say so.”

And they accuse me of ransoming hostages, Boris thought. They shook hands on $175 million, and by mid-January 2001 the transaction was complete. Roma allowed the Kremlin to nominate five new board members. Yet Kolya remained in prison.

Grozny, Chechnya, February 24, 2001: A mass grave containing about two hundred bodies is discovered next to Russia’s army base of Khankala. According to reports on NTV, many bear signs of torture.
Some of the dead are identified as civilians who had disappeared in different regions of Chechnya. In Moscow, Novaya Gazeta publishes an article by journalist Anna Politkovskaya, claiming that Russian soldiers were keeping randomly picked civilians as prisoners in a pit, demanding $500 ransom for their release. While covering the story, Politkovskaya is briefly detained by Russian soldiers, creating a media uproar in Moscow. She is later released
.

There are conflicting versions of what exactly happened in Moscow outside the Scientific Hematological Center on April 11, 2001. Nikolai Glushkov, officially in custody, was hospitalized there for treatment of a blood condition. Technically, he was under guard by an FSB detail. But the security was obviously lax: on occasion his guards would allow him to go home for an overnight stay, for a modest monetary incentive.

According to the prosecutors, in the early evening of the 11th, Glushkov left the hospital ward wearing his gown and slippers and walked to the gate, where his former Aeroflot associate Vladimir Skoropupov waited. As Glushkov was about to get into Skoropupov’s car, a squad of FSB plainclothes officers appeared out of nowhere, arrested both men, and charged them with attempted escape from custody. On the next day, the former head of ORT security, Andrei Lugovoy, was detained in connection with the alleged escape attempt. Two months later, former ORT COO Badri Patarkatsishvili fled to Georgia, making use of his Georgian citizenship. The whole group was indicted in the escape plot.

Glushkov, however, offered a different version of the events of April 11 when I interviewed him years later in London. He believed that he had been set up, insisting that he had no intention of escaping. He wanted the Aeroflot case to be tried because he knew he was innocent. In fact, he was under the impression that he was about to be released until the trial “through a secret high-level deal,” as his lawyers had hinted to him. He was walking in his slippers to the hospital gate simply to go home for the night, with his guards’ knowledge, as he had done a few days earlier.

Glushkov would eventually get his day in court. In March 2004 he was cleared of charges of fraud and money laundering but found guilty of attempted escape from custody and a minor, face-saving charge of “abuse of authority.” He was released from Lefortovo. When I asked him whether his stubbornness was worth three years in jail, he said, “Of course, I proved my innocence.”

Lugovoy was convicted in the prison escape case, serving a prison term of fourteen months. After his release, he started his own security business.

In 2006 he would become a prime suspect in Sasha’s murder.

On April 14, three days after Glushkov’s alleged escape attempt, the new Kremlin-friendly management of NTV, backed by armed police, arrived at the network’s studios and took control. Goose’s journalists were run through a re-interview process, which included a pledge of allegiance to the Kremlin-appointed editors. Some caved in; most did not. Boris immediately invited the unemployed NTV team to join his one remaining media holding, TV-6. Until then, TV6 had featured sports, music, movies, and comedy shows. Suddenly it became a news channel, the last independent voice in Russian TV broadcasting. Nobody expected it to remain independent for long.