Heidi Blake - From Russia with Blood

As Putin lurched toward autocracy, Berezovsky decided to show his protégé who was boss, using the pages of Kommersant to publish a searing critique of the president’s plans to centralize power. “In a democratic society, laws exist to protect individual freedom,” he lectured in one of his open letters. When Putin ignored that moral lesson and continued his crackdown, Berezovsky’s aides and advisers counseled the furious oligarch to let matters lie.

“You have to think, Boris! Slow down, calm down, think,” one adviser beseeched him over wine and cigars in the Logovaz Club lounge against the tinkling backdrop of the grand piano. “You have access! Work with the guy. You’re very persuasive, you’re cleverer than he is, you put him in that position in the first place—so work with him.” Badri Patarkatsishvili agreed. Why couldn’t Boris just keep his head down for a moment and let things settle? After all, hadn’t Putin said he’d leave the looted assets untouched as long as the oligarchs toed the line? But Berezovsky had developed a thirst for power that overwhelmed even his love of money, and he was incapable of conciliation.

“You son of a bitch,” he would mutter when Putin’s name arose. “I’m going to fight you.”

For his part, the old Logovaz director Yuli Dubov was left scratching his head about that first encounter with Putin over the lunch that never was in St. Petersburg. In retrospect, he came to believe that the appearance of monkish probity had just been Putin’s way of setting himself apart from the crowd.

“He was playing the long game,” Dubov mused. “It was too early for him to begin to enrich himself, so he waited for his moment.” Berezovsky’s fatal flaw, in Dubov’s mind, was an inflated sense of his own importance. He had believed Putin would be incapable of ruling without him, but it turned out that the new president no longer needed him—and neither did anyone else very much. Suddenly Berezovsky found himself quite friendless in Moscow’s corridors of power. But undeterred, he went on the attack again.

In August of 2000, the new president found himself in the throes of his first public scandal after his botched handling of a nuclear submarine disaster left 118 naval officers to sink to their deaths unaided in the bitter waters of the Arctic Ocean. Berezovsky seized the moment, using Channel One to eviscerate Putin for his role in the tragedy.

Berezovsky was sunning himself at his gleaming white villa overlooking the sapphire waters of the Côte d’Azur when a copy of Le Figaro landed on his doorstep carrying a message direct from the Kremlin. Putin had given an interview to the French newspaper declaring that oligarchs who stepped out of line in the new Russia would receive “a crushing blow on the head.” That warning was rapidly followed by a summons for Berezovsky to appear in Moscow for interrogation by the new prosecutor general, who had reopened the Aeroflot embezzlement case that Putin had helped squash two years before. The godfather of the oligarchs was now a wanted man and an enemy of the Kremlin.

One thing was immediately clear to him: while Putin was in power, he could never return to Russia.

*A transcript of this phone call was released by the Clinton Presidential Library in 2016.

iv

Wentworth Estate, Surrey, England, 2001

Scot Young was easing his Porsche up the gravel drive of his magnificent new mansion in Surrey on a breezy summer evening when Michelle came running through the topiary.

“There’s a strange man inside, and I can’t get him out!” she said. “Shall we call the police?”

Young marched through the grand columned entrance to find a small black-eyed man settled comfortably in an armchair.

“Welcome to my home!” the intruder boomed in a thick Russian accent, throwing his arms wide. “How much do you want for it?”

Later, Young liked to tell his friends that this was the first time he had ever laid eyes on Boris Berezovsky. The story appealed to him both because he was a great raconteur who loved to spin a good yarn and because it happened to be more convenient than the truth. Its punch line was that he hadn’t known the man was one of Russia’s richest tycoons, so he told Berezovsky to “fuck off.” But of course Young knew exactly who Berezovsky was.

Years later, private detectives hired to delve into Young’s association with the oligarch would uncover evidence that he had actually met Berezovsky’s people a few years earlier on a trip to Moscow and had been secretly operating as his point man in the UK ever since, helping him stash the money he was siphoning out of Russia in spectacular British properties and investments. Since Berezovsky fled, the previous year, Young had also been visiting Moscow regularly on his behalf, handing out a business card billing himself as a consultant to Channel One. It didn’t take long for the FSB to develop what the spooks called a “long-term interest” in the British businessman. The FSB surveillance team built up a picture of Young as a high-class fixer providing highly confidential assistance to the oligarch and being pampered in return. He had drunk and dined lavishly on Berezovsky’s ticket at Moscow’s exclusive Café Pushkin, Vogue Café, and Vanille—and he liked to end the night at Private Club Bordo, a brothel frequented by the city’s political and business elite.

The Youngs had sold Woodperry House for £13.5 million earlier that year—more than double what Young had paid for it—and in turn had bought the main manor house on the celebrity-studded Wentworth Estate, in Surrey. After many months luxuriating in his vast Italianate villa on Cap d’Antibes, Berezovsky had tired of soaking up the sun and moved to England to start building his new life in earnest. The oligarch was putting down roots as he settled into a long exile—and he had set his heart on his fixer’s home.

Berezovsky produced a case of exquisite red wine from behind the armchair and pulled out a dusty bottle. The two men spent a raucous night demolishing the offering as the Russian regaled Young with rip-roaring tales of the Wild East, and before long Berezovsky’s offer of £20.5 million had been accepted. Young would always tell friends the true price was £50 million, the lion’s share of which had been hidden offshore, but whatever the cost, Berezovsky had made Wentworth Estate his home.

The godfather moved into his new mansion with his wife and young children, displacing the Youngs to another spectacular property across the estate, and with that a new enclave was established. This lush corner of Surrey, with its follies, lakes, and roaming deer, was to become the seat of some of Russia’s richest men as they waged a long-distance war on the Kremlin.

Part Two

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