Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

Rozhdestvensky’s parents hoped their son would be released from prison once his old friend Vladimir Putin became head of the secret police, then head of government, and, finally, head of state. Instead, Vanyushin kept the case alive even as charges kept falling apart and away; he just kept raking in other, similarly shaky premises for keeping him in jail. At the end of the summer of 2000, a court would finally take Rozhdestvensky’s failing health into account and release him pending trial. Rozhdestvensky died in June 2002 at the age of forty-eight.

What I was now learning, as I went through the documents that I had kept for nearly two years, was the same thing Natalya Gevorkyan learned when she confronted Putin about the journalist Andrei Babitsky: “He is a small, vengeful man,” was how she put it. The case against Gusinsky was, just like the case against Rozhdestvensky, a case of personal vendetta. Gusinsky had not supported Putin in the election. He was friendly and had significant business dealings with Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who was a leader of the anti-Family opposition coalition. It was Gusinsky’s television channel that had aired the program about apartment building explosions two days before the election.

Gusinsky’s arrest had no real connection to Russkoye Video; it just so happened that the man behind the arrest had detailed knowledge of the Russkoye Video case—which was as good as any other when all that was required was to get one of Russia’s most powerful men behind bars. If there were any irregularities in the company’s founding documents, Putin knew of those too: sifting through my files, I found a document authorizing the formation of the company, signed by Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Gusinsky spent just three days in jail. As soon as he was released on his own recognizance, he left the country, becoming the first political refugee from Putin’s regime—only five weeks after the inauguration.

UNLIKE THE OWNER of my company, I was still in Moscow. And, it seemed, I was in a lot of trouble, just as prosecutor Vanyushin had warned me I would be. I had written an article about the Russkoye Video case; it was published a few days after Gusinsky left the country, and it was illustrated with the document I had found—the one signed by Putin. Next thing I knew, there was a man on a ladder parked outside my apartment door—twenty-four hours a day. “What are you doing here?” I would ask every time I opened the door to find him there. “Fixing,” he would growl.

A few days later, my home phone was turned off. The telephone company claimed to have had nothing to do with it, but it took days to get it turned back on. These were classic KGB tactics, intended to make me understand I was never safe and never alone: this approach had not changed since the 1970s, when the same sorts of goons would take up residence in people’s stairways to let them know they were being watched. This knowledge did not make things any easier for me. The intrusion tactics worked just as well now as they had thirty years earlier: within a few days of this, I was going crazy with unidentifiable worry.

I used a reporting opportunity to leave the country for a couple of weeks. And I decided to look for another job. Mine had been the best job in the world, and while I worked it, I risked my life many times over, going to Chechnya, the former Yugoslavia, and other post-Soviet war zones. But I was not prepared to live under constant threat, no matter how unspecific it was. There was an opening for Moscow bureau chief at the American weekly magazine U.S. News & World Report , and I jumped at the opportunity.

Meanwhile, Gusinsky, shuttling between England and Spain, where he owned a home, was negotiating with the Russian state the fate of his media empire. Gusinsky personally owned 60 percent of his company; another 30 percent was held by the state gas monopoly, Gazprom, and 10 percent more belonged to private individuals, mostly top managers within the company. Gusinsky had borrowed heavily from a state-held bank to finance the setup of his satellite network. Less than a year earlier, he had still entertained well-founded hope that his debts would be forgiven: his once cozy relationship with Yeltsin and his role in his 1996 reelection campaign made this seem a reasonable expectation, at least to Gusinsky himself. Now some of the credits were overdue and the state was calling in the rest early, demanding stock instead of cash—aiming to enable the state gas monopoly to take control of the companies. Gusinsky was trying to restructure the debt in such a way that none of the stockholders would own a controlling share, which would guarantee the media outlets’ editorial independence.

As negotiations grew more adversarial, someone—each side said it was the other—leaked to the press a document Gusinsky had signed before leaving the country. He seemed to have agreed, in writing, to cede a majority share of his company to Gazprom in exchange for his personal freedom. Most damningly, the document was signed not only by Gusinsky and the head of Gazprom’s media arm—reconstituted especially for the occasion—but also by the press minister, Mikhail Lesin. In other words, this was a classic organized-crime contract, formalizing the exchange of one’s business for one’s personal safety, and the state was a party to it. Once the document was leaked, Gusinsky said publicly that the minister had personally threatened him, forcing him to sign over his business under duress, “virtually at gunpoint.” He termed the entire process “state racketeering.”

Putin refused to comment on the situation. Yet no one seemed to doubt that the order to wrestle the media company away from Gusinsky had come directly from him. His prime minister, the white-toothed Mikhail Kasyanov, appeared genuinely surprised and even shocked by the revelations and reprimanded Lesin publicly, before television cameras. Three days later, Mikhail Gorbachev emerged from nine years of de facto political retirement to meet with Putin and ask him to set the Gusinsky situation right. The older man left the meeting dejected, telling the media Putin refused to interfere. The next day Prime Minister Kasyanov opened the cabinet meeting by once again reprimanding his press minister, Lesin. Russian journalists and political analysts took this as a clear sign that the prime minister felt helpless in a situation orchestrated by the president himself.

Soon enough, this kind of takeover of private businesses large and small would become commonplace. But the system Boris Yeltsin had left behind was not quite ready to accommodate “state racketeering.” Yeltsin’s successive governments had not succeeded in turning the Russian courts into a functioning justice system, but they had succeeded in planting the seeds of ambition in them. Now these courts, mostly at the lower levels, would refuse some of Gazprom’s claims, with one city court even throwing out the case against Gusinsky altogether. In the end, it took the state monopoly almost a year to gain control of Gusinsky’s media empire. In April 2001, after a nearly weeklong standoff when NTV staff maintained a live broadcast of the takeover, the old editorial staff was forced out. A week later, my former colleagues at the magazine Itogi came to work to find the doors locked and every last staff member fired.

I WAS ALREADY GONE, having taken the job at U.S. News & World Report the previous summer. Before I started, I had flown to the Black Sea for a short vacation. But after just a couple of days in the sun, I had to fly back up north: a nuclear submarine was sinking in the Barents Sea, taking 118 seamen with it.

Of all the heartbreaking stories I had ever had to cover and the people of Russia had ever had to witness, the Kursk disaster was possibly the most devastating. For nine days, the mothers, wives, and children of the sailors aboard the submarine—and the entire country along with them—maintained hope that some of them were still alive. The country kept vigil while the navy and the government flailed in their rescue efforts. Norwegian and British teams offered to help but were turned away, supposedly because of security concerns. Worst of all, the new president was silent: he was on vacation on the Black Sea coast.