The New Tsar (24 page)

At the end of the month, Putin quietly summoned Litvinenko to his office, just as Litvinenko had asked for him to do. Litvinenko arrived with an armful of documents, including a chart that in his mind linked all the names and crimes he and his colleagues had known of. Litvinenko, presumptuously, imagined Putin as another lieutenant colonel like him, “a mid-level
operativnik
suddenly put in charge of some hundred seasoned generals with all their vested interests, connections and secrets.”
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He was not sure how to address the man who now directed his agency—“Comrade Colonel”?—but Putin preempted him by rising from his desk to shake his hand. “He seemed even shorter than on TV,” Litvinenko remembered thinking. The meeting was brief and, Litvinenko thought, chilly. Putin insisted on meeting him alone, without the two colleagues who had accompanied him. He politely declined to
accept the dossier that Litvinenko had brought with him. Litvinenko described the meeting to his wife, Marina, as a disaster. “I could see it in his eyes that he hated me.”
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Putin had compiled his own dossier against Litvinenko and the others. On the evening of November 19, he appeared on the state television network Rossiya and, though promising an investigation, insisted there was no evidence that any of the accusations against the FSB were true. He ridiculed the press conference as a specatacle with “characters from a children’s story,” wearing masks even though they announced their names. The ex-wife of one of them—he did not say whom, but apparently he did not mean Litvinenko—had called him afterward, he said, improbably, to complain that he had fallen behind on alimony payments. “Perhaps this was the reason why he wore dark glasses.” Then he turned the tables, and said that the agents themselves had conducted illegal operations.
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Yeltsin summoned Putin to his dacha again the next day and demanded that he resolve the embarrassing and escalating scandal. “Everyone knows what happens to people carpeted like this by a stern Yeltsin,” one newspaper wrote about the meeting.
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Putin did not relent, though; even if some of the agents’ accusations were true, they were as complicit as their superiors. He considered that by holding a press conference the agents had betrayed their oath of office as intelligence officers. Instead of investigating their claims, he presented the president with the evidence he had compiled of their wrongdoing. And then he fired Litvinenko and his cohorts. “People like this cannot work in the FSB,” he said.

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P
utin’s handling of the affair did not earn him universal support in the Kremlin. Rumors floated that Yeltsin would sack him for incompetence—only four months into the job. The staff cuts at Lubyanka were not politically popular in the Duma, which continued to assault Yeltsin’s presidency at every opportunity. Putin’s position suddenly seemed precarious—all the more so after a prominent liberal deputy from Petersburg, Galina Starovoitova, was killed only three days after Litvinenko’s press conference.

Starovoitova was an ethnographer who rose to prominence during perestroika as a champion of the rights of Russia’s many ethnic groups. She and Putin were never close, but their paths crossed in Petersburg throughout the 1990s, and she knew Sobchak and his wife well. In September 1998 she appeared on a television program with an apt name
for the era,
Scandals of the Week
, and suggested that the renewed leaks of criminal charges against Sobchak appeared to be an attempt to discredit the FSB’s new director—that is, Putin. She noted that officially Sobchak remained only a witness in an investigation, not a suspect. Only a deeply cynical conspiracy could somehow scorch Putin himself she thought. “I don’t rule it out, at least, although of course it is ridiculous.”
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On the night of November 20, Starovoitova returned to her apartment on Griboyedov Canal with an aide, Ruslan Linkov. The assailants fired at least five bullets. Three struck Starovoitova in the head, killing her instantly. Two hit Linkov, who survived.
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The gunmen dropped their pistols at the scene and drove off in a waiting car. The attack, with all the characteristics of yet another contract hit, provoked international condemnation. “To kill a woman—a woman in politics—that has not happened in Russia since Stalin’s time,” a supporter of hers, Sergei Kozyrev, said.
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Yeltsin denounced the murder, calling it “a peremptory challenge” to “our entire society.” He was so distraught by the news, an aide said, that he was hospitalized the next day.
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He and Primakov ordered Putin; the interior minister, Sergei Stepashin; and the prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov, to take “personal charge” of the investigation and demanded results. Starovoitova had recently declared her candidacy for governor of the Leningrad region (which, unlike the city, had not changed its Soviet name). She had denounced the nationalistic bile flowing in the parliamentary debates and amassed evidence of corruption in the Petersburg government. There was no shortage of potential motives and suspects—in fact the police arrested more than three hundred people in the weeks after her death
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—and yet the motive for her murder would never be fully established.

Yeltsin, ill and frustrated, lashed out. He blamed the country’s mounting problems that winter on “the outbreak of Communist hysteria,” which included not only repeated denunciations of Jews, but also a call to return the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky to its pedestal outside the old KGB headquarters where Putin now worked. Yeltsin was infuriated by the inaction of “our usually threatening Prosecutor General’s Office” in the face of what he saw as criminal incitements to overthrow Russia’s democracy.
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Starovoitova’s murder seemed like another crippling strike against the country, against him.

As the chief of the country’s domestic intelligence agency, Putin shouldered at least some of the blame, in Yeltsin’s mind. Putin’s political fate now seemed tied to Yeltsin’s unpredictable whim. Yeltsin summoned
him again on December 15, this time to the Kremlin during one of his rare days at the presidential office. He wanted to discuss the Starovoitova case, the outbreak of racist statements in the parliament, the plot against Berezovsky, and Putin’s progress in restructuring the FSB. Putin emerged from the meeting emphasizing that he had not lost the president’s faith, while sounding like someone who worried he had. He accused those spreading the rumors, apparently from inside Yeltsin’s warring camps, of wanting “to sow seeds of uncertainty among the administrative and executive staff of the service or weaken its control.” At the base of the rumors “lies fear,” he said, “fear of the security service.” Putin seemed to be barely clinging to his position. He announced that when Yeltsin ended his term—then barely a year and a half away—he would resign to make way for a new intelligence chief under a new president. “It’s clear that I’ll have to go.”
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CHAPTER 9

Kompromat

T
he next spring, late in the evening on March 17, 1999, the nightly news program on the state television broadcast a report preceded by a warning that it might not be suitable for anyone under the age of eighteen. Excerpts of a black-and-white videotape appeared. It was clearly taken by a surveillance camera, secreted in position above a double bed in what turned out to be a Moscow apartment owned by a banker of some renown. Two young women, described as prostitutes, move in and out of the frame in various stages of undress. Soon there appears a man who, as the announcer intoned, “very much resembles the Prosecutor General,” Yuri Skuratov. The Kremlin’s struggle with the prosecutor had intensified, and its counterattack had just taken a lurid turn.

All the major networks had received cassette copies of the video earlier in the week from an anonymous source. It lasted fifty minutes in all. Only the state television channel, RTR, chose to use it—at least at first.
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The decision to do so was made, over the objection of some of the network’s correspondents, by its general director, Mikhail Shvydkoy, who would later become Russia’s minister of culture.
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The source and authenticity of the videotape remained murky, and the quality was poor enough that no one could say absolutely that it was Skuratov cavorting with the two women, though when one of them asks his name, having refused to give her own, he replied “Yura,” the diminutive of Yuri. The videotape had all the characteristics of the “honey traps” the KGB once used to embarrass or blackmail businessmen or politicians. A joke soon circulated that the source of the video was a man who “very much resembles the director of the FSB,” Vladimir Putin.

According to Yeltsin, it was his chief of administration, Nikolai Bordyuzha, who first obtained the videotape. Shocked, Bordyuzha confronted Skuratov privately at the Kremlin on February 1, long before the
scandal became public.
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Skuratov promptly wrote a letter of resignation, citing the deteriorating state of his health, and checked into a hospital the next day. Yeltsin had just been released from his own hospitalization, undergoing treatment this time for a bleeding ulcer. Bordyuzha himself checked into a hospital a month later. It was as if a plague were sweeping the country’s political elite. On February 2, Yeltsin returned to his Kremlin office for the first time since the end of 1998. He stayed only for an hour and a half, but it was long enough to dismiss four aides and to accept Skuratov’s resignation. The reason cited in the announcement was Skuratov’s health, which, since the sudden “illnesses” of Soviet leaders had long been a euphemism for deeper intrigues, no one believed.

Rumors of other dismissals, including Putin’s, soon spread. No one knew what was unfolding behind the scenes. The upper house of parliament, the Federation Council, controlled by the country’s governors, had the sole authority to confirm Skuratov’s resignation; already eyeing the power vacuum that would follow the imminent end of Yeltsin’s term, the council refused to consider Skuratov’s fate as long as he was in the hospital and unable to explain himself.

Yeltsin claimed at the time that neither Bordyuzha nor his other aides had told him about the videotape before it became public. He was simply happy that Skuratov had resigned, and with ample reason. Skuratov had served as prosecutor general for more than three years, yet had distinguished himself only by a spectacular failure to solve the country’s most notorious crimes, including the murder of Galina Starovoitova two months before. “The endless monotone of Skuratov’s excuses was beginning to annoy me,” Yeltsin wrote.
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Skuratov, however, had not been completely idle. He showed more zeal investigating the president’s affairs than the country’s other notorious crimes, and in the months leading up to his dismissal, some of his investigations had suddenly gained new momentum. On the day in February that Bordyuzha confronted him with the videotape, Skuratov had delivered a report to the Duma accusing the Central Bank of Russia of secretly funneling $50 billion worth of foreign currency reserves through an obscure firm called Financial Management Co. Ltd. It was registered in 1990 in the Channel Islands, apparently by the KGB and the Communist Party, and used as an offshore account, though many of the details remained unclear, including who might have profited from what were clearly illegal transfers.
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The next day, investigators from Skuratov’s office, accompanied by masked special police officers, raided the Moscow headquarters of Sibneft, an oil
company that was part of Boris Berezovsky’s empire; a day after that they showed up at Berezovsky’s security firm, Atoll, where the investigators found electronic eavesdropping equipment and tapes labeled the “Family,” in reference to Yeltsin’s inner circle of advisers, and “Tanya,” Yeltsin’s younger daughter and political adviser, Tatyana Dyachenko.

Despite his resignation, or possibly because of it, Skuratov’s prosecutions suddenly shifted public attention—and outrage over corruption—to those at the heart of power in the Kremlin. After the wild abuses of privatization in the early 1990s, calls for justice grew louder, and sensing the political winds, the new prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, announced at a cabinet meeting on January 28 that the government would amnesty ninety-four thousand nonviolent prisoners in order to free up space “for those who are about to be jailed—people who commit economic crimes.”
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It sounded very much like a warning that even the oligarchs around the Kremlin could no longer count on immunity in the wake of a Yeltsin presidency. Berezovsky, whose intense dislike of Primakov was reciprocated, responded by declaring that Primakov’s threat sounded like a return to the Great Terror. The raids on his companies followed not long afterward.

Primakov’s remarks had the rhetorical sweep of a politician ambitious to become Russia’s next president. In his few months as prime minister, he had already built support in parliament and won over Moscow’s powerful mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, who had once been a friend of Yeltsin’s but now seemed to hover in wait for the president’s demise. Yeltsin increasingly saw the political jockeying—and Skuratov’s investigations—as an existential threat to his power and even his personal well being. He mused on the internal Communist Party conspiracy that had toppled Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, and now he was sure Primakov and Luzhkov were scheming with the prosecutor general to overthrow him. He had to do something to stop it.
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