The Invention of Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War

On 4 October 1993 Igor Malashenko sat in his rickety white Moskvich – a step down from a Lada – watching tanks fire shells and set fire to the White House. His office at the top of the mayor’s building – the scene of a battle a day earlier – was sealed off. Malashenko’s car, provided by his business partner, the media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky, was equipped with a satellite phone which he used to call Hollywood Studios to arrange meetings at the Cannes television and entertainment fair where he was planning to buy content for NTV, a new television channel he was setting up.

The people Malashenko was talking to on the phone were watching live CNN coverage of the same dramatic events. ‘It must have seemed completely absurd that some Russian guy at this point was calling from Moscow trying to buy movies,’ he said later.¹ Malashenko was less concerned with the outcome of the battle – which, he was certain, would end in Yeltsin’s victory – than with the programming of the new channel.

NTV’s launch had been scheduled for the previous day, 3 October, when the ultra-nationalists and communists had tried to storm Ostankino. But things were not quite ready and it was decided to push the launch back by a week. When NTV finally came on air, on 10 October, its first analytical programme, Itogi (Conclusions), was almost entirely dedicated to the siege of the White House a week earlier. Gaidar explained to viewers his reasons for calling people out onto the streets at that time. The fact that he was doing so in the comfort of a private television studio was proof of Yeltsin’s victory and that life was getting back to normal, or at least so it seemed at the time.

NTV was the first Western-style television in Russia. It was based on an American model, producing its own news and buying everything else from outside. In searching for a name, Malashenko went through a list of similar-sounding abbreviations – along the lines of BBC, CNN, ABC, CBC – until he settled on NTV. Nobody, including Malashenko himself, knew what the abbreviation stood for. Did the ‘N’ stand for ‘nezavisimoe’ (independent) TV, or was it ‘new’ TV? Perhaps the adjective that reflected Malashenko’s intentions best was ‘normalnoe’ (normal) TV, the sort that any normal country should have.

In October 1993 Russia had few attributes of such a country. It had no proper banking system, no independent court and, after the shelling of the White House, no parliament. Its police and its army were in a sorry state. Television was supposed to deliver its makers and its viewers to that ‘normal’ country – Westernized, energetic and bourgeois.

However disturbing the news, it was countered by the calm manner in which NTV reported it. The channel conveyed stability and order. Like Kommersant, but on a much larger scale, it programmed and organized life, provided a timetable and a structure. ‘When you create a TV schedule, you have to live with your audience, imagine when they get up, how they eat breakfast with the television on in the background, how they are getting their children ready for school, what they do during the day, what time they get back from work,’ said Malashenko.²

In Soviet times, a television set was a peaceful and domesticated object. People knitted special covers for it and put porcelain statuettes on top. Mass production of TV sets began after Stalin’s death and they populated the first separate flats that Khrushchev had had built. After the years of Stalinist mobilization, television worked like a tranquillizer. It provided background noise, like radio. The only threat it emanated was that it might explode (sets often did) and the only drawback was a high electricity bill. Its aim was to sedate rather than excite the audience and make people stay at home. At about 8 p.m. the main Channel One would show a children’s programme Bedtime for Tired Toys, which would be followed at 9 p.m. by the equally soporific Vremya and Soviet feature films – hardly riveting stuff. The programming would usually finish at 11 p.m., which was often a relief. Television-watching was a collective and calming experience. ‘Sleep well, the state is looking after you’ was its message.

Unlike its Soviet predecessors, NTV was a channel of mobilization of private initiative and existence independent of the state. Its aim was to stop people from falling asleep. As a model of a new country, NTV targeted a ‘model’ audience: the urban professional class, those who had done well out of Soviet disintegration and benefited from market reforms, the educated, active and on the whole liberal-minded people with the means to buy a car or put their money in a bank – banks were among the biggest Russian advertisers on NTV. It was a channel for clever and successful people.

This audience wanted quality news and good entertainment. NTV provided both. Professionalism and common sense were its top priorities. Privacy – a word that has no equivalent in the Russian language – was its main value. Everything about it conveyed respectability, confidence and optimism, from its sleek logo – a green globe nestled between the letters NTV – to its modern studios and well-dressed young presenters. The green globe bounced and spun and, in children’s programmes, morphed into hot air balloons which dissolved into sparkling fireworks. It was unlike anything previously seen on Soviet television – a celebration of private life and personal freedom.

The face and voice of the new channel was its anchor Evgeny Kiselev, who presented the weekly analytical programme, Itogi. He was a symbol of solidity and authority. Dressed in a conservative double-breasted suit, sporting a moustache, often pausing for thought and groping for the right word, he spoke in soft, deep, deliberate tones that inspired confidence. Kiselev did not entertain or lecture the audience – he appealed to its intelligence and common sense.

NTV was sober and serious. Its news and current affairs programmes were devoid of irony or styob. Irony was preserved for the weekly non-political programme presented by Leonid Parfenov, NTV’s bright and style-conscious young journalist who ‘toured’ his ‘advanced’ audience around theatres, exhibitions and fashion shows. While Parfenov’s style was closer to that of Kommersant, Kiselev carried on the line of the Soviet-era liberals such as Alexander Bovin and Yegor Yakovlev. Kiselev was the man the old intelligentsia and the nascent Russian middle class most trusted and identified with.

Kiselev was born in 1956 – the same year as Yegor Gaidar – and was part of the first post-Stalinist generation. Like Gaidar, he belonged to the Soviet nomenclatura. His father was an aviation engineer who worked at one of the closed Soviet institutes, with a ‘postbox’ for an address. He grew up in the most comfortable Soviet milieu with none of the fear or hardship that had shaped the previous generation. The times had not demanded heroes or fighters, but bred softer, more flexible and reflective types, capable of compromise and mindful of creature comforts.

‘I had a happy childhood. And even if it was not quite settled at first – it was not uncomfortable. We had our own apartment. I went to a good school – a five minutes’ walk from home – no thugs, no gangsters,’ Kiselev said.³ Kiselev studied Persian at university and spent a year in pre-revolutionary Iran – where he had access to British and American newspapers and watched Western films. The defining experience for Kiselev’s generation was the war in Afghanistan – pointless and costly, both in terms of money and of human life. Kiselev observed it at first hand.

A few months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Kiselev was sent to Kabul as a military interpreter – a job which involved close cooperation with the military intelligence service and the KGB. He saw how the KGB prepared a coup in Afghanistan, how they staged the storming of President Amin’s palace. The natural thrill of being part of a spy movie plot was mixed with a nudging sense of the stupidity, futility and opportunism on the part of the Soviet government. Unlike the Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia, the invasion of Afghanistan did not crush any illusions because there were none left.

Kiselev’s stint in Afghanistan was followed by three years in the KGB school where he taught Persian to young spooks. This was not a matter of choice – turning down a proposal from the KGB was not an option. The fact that Kiselev came through the KGB school was not unusual – many of those who enjoyed successful careers had KGB connections one way or another. So did many businessmen.

When he was finally released from service, Kiselev joined Radio Moscow – the Soviet foreign language service that broadcast communist propaganda around the world and which also worked closely with the KGB. None of the people who worked there believed their own propaganda. Nor did they expect it to be heard. ‘It was a common grave for an unknown journalist: a shortwave station that nobody wanted to listen to broadcasting to a foreign audience,’ Kiselev said.⁴ Yet what the job lacked in terms of professional fulfilment it made up for by providing plenty of free time and access to information. In the late 1980s it supplied readymade cadres for Perestroika television. Kiselev ended up in the foreign department of the Vremya news programme.

It was here that he met Oleg Dobrodeev – a man who was to play a similarly important role in the creation of Russia’s first independent television channel and an even greater one in its subsequent demise. The first head of news and current affairs at NTV, Dobrodeev subsequently climbed to the pinnacle of the Russian propaganda machine – under Vladimir Putin – a journey that passed through the destruction of NTV.

Dobrodeev was part of the same generation as Kiselev, but he grew up in a family of the artistic intelligentsia. Even more than Vladimir Yakovlev, Dobrodeev was a ‘son’ of the shestidesiatniki. His father was a film scriptwriter and secretary of the Film-Makers Union, a mecca of the liberal artistic intelligentsia in the 1960s. Dobrodeev Sr was an author of a documentary film about the early years of Karl Marx and belonged to the same circle as Yegor. The Dobrodeev family lived in a house for writers in the north of Moscow. His co-author shared a flat with Evgeny Primakov, a future head of the Russian intelligence service and prime minister. A fluent French speaker and historian by background, Dobrodeev Jr was erudite, clever and extremely hard-working. He moved to television in 1983, but did not participate in boisterous Perestroika conversations that started a few years later and kept himself to himself, Kiselev recalled.

‘He had a very systematic brain. Facts and quotes were on the right shelves ready to be retrieved,’ said Kiselev. ‘He did not show off, kept a modest appearance, but he appreciated the trappings of power – an office with a secretary, a chauffeur-driven car, a special government telephone line, the ability to talk informally to those in power. We could be having some important meeting and suddenly there would be a call from the Kremlin. Oleg would say: “Sorry old chap – I’m being called to the Kremlin. Got to go. We’ll continue tomorrow.” He savoured it, like one savours wine – its smell, its taste, its aftertaste,’ said Kiselev,⁵ a connoisseur of good wine himself who was also not indifferent to the trappings of power.

Dobrodeev had an unmistakable sense for news and trends; he sensed the mainstream and knew how to put himself at the head of it. In terms of his intellect and his work ethic, Dobrodeev was way above anyone at Ostankino and he quickly became one of Yegor Yakovlev’s favourites. Malashenko, Dobrodeev’s boss for many years, said he was a workaholic. ‘Nothing interested him apart from work. He read every text, watched every news bulletin. When he went on holidays abroad, he made his secretary put a telephone receiver next to a TV set, so that he could at least listen to the news, if not watch it.’⁶ On 5 January 1992, ten days after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, Dobrodeev and Kiselev went on air with Itogi – a forty-five-minute analytical summary of the week’s news.[1]

In terms of prominence, Itogi filled the place vacated by Vremya as a trend-setting (or trend-explaining) programme. Foreign ambassadors often based their Monday morning dispatches on Itogi which came out on Sunday evenings. Kiselev invited news-makers and experts to ‘try to work out what is going on’. The measure of Itogi’s success became apparent a year later when they decided to celebrate its first anniversary and invited everyone who had featured in Itogi over the past year. ‘To our complete astonishment, they all came, apart from Yeltsin of course.’⁷

The happy days of Itogi ended with the firing of Yegor Yakovlev and the resignation of Malashenko. Bragin, who replaced Yakovlev, was an insult to human intelligence, a ‘clinical case’, as Dobrodeev put it. For an erudite man, the crème de la crème of the Soviet establishment, the idea of answering to a provincial party apparatchik who had hastily rebranded himself as a ‘democrat’, was humiliating. Ten years later, Dobrodeev himself would turn into the Kremlin’s chief propagandist, but in 1992 he found the idea of using television as a means of propaganda distasteful. ‘Information as such is not needed by the authorities; they see it as an instrument of instantaneous influence and rapid reaction,’ he complained.

Kiselev, too, was unhappy – not so much because of censorship, but because he realized that he was sitting on a gold mine and getting paid peanuts. Everyone around him was making money by turning programmes into independent production companies which then sold the programmes back to the state channel, pocketing the profit. Itogi, however, remained part of state television and Kiselev was a state employee on a modest salary that was being wiped out by raging inflation. Kiselev decided it was time to walk away from Ostankino and take the programme with him. When Dobrodeev, once again, came into his office to moan about the pressure, Kiselev told him it was time to act.

The speed with which the events unfolded in the next few hours was typical of 1990s Moscow. Kiselev picked up the phone and called Sergei Zverev, an old acquaintance who worked for Vladimir Gusinsky, the owner of a bank, a newspaper and radio station Echo Moskvy. ‘I am here with Oleg,’ he told him. ‘We’ve been reading your paper. Big success. Have you thought of doing something similar in television?’ ‘Who would do it?’ Zverev asked. ‘We would.’ ‘Come over now,’ Zverev told him.⁸ Less than two hours later Dobrodeev and Kiselev were discussing their idea with Gusinsky, a theatre director turned oligarch.

The Oligarch and the Intellectual

‘The oligarch was a special species which could only have been born in Russia in the late 1980s. We came out of the Soviet system, but we overcame that system and the remarkable criminality in the country. We were the people with fangs growing from the back of our necks,’ Gusinsky said in the mid-2000s, several years after being kicked out of Russia.⁹

The business world of the early 1990s was a jungle in which only the fittest survived and Gusinsky was among those. He did not come from a privileged background, like Kiselev or Dobrodeev. The story of his family was fairly typical: grandfather shot in 1937, grandmother sentenced to seven years in the Gulag. Gusinsky was born in 1952 – a few months before Stalin’s death – and grew up in a single-room, 18-square-metre (21.5-square-yard) flat with his parents. He received his first education on the street, fighting with other boys in the courtyard who picked on him as a ‘little Yid’.

At school he wanted to be a physicist, but ended up studying engineering at an oil and gas institute – a fairly typical downshift for someone who was marked down as a ‘Jew’ in his Soviet passport. (High-profile university departments had secret, but strict, quotas for Jews and physics was enormously popular.) But he was not an academic type and after he had served his two-year conscription in the Soviet army, his boisterous temperament and his taste for theatrics guided him to GITIS, a Moscow drama school, where he studied to be a theatre director. He staged a couple of shows in the provincial, industrial Russian town of Tula, but left no mark on the theatre.

To make a living, he drove a gypsy cab ferrying foreigners to and from airports, pushed blue jeans and American cigarettes he bought from foreigners on the black market and traded foreign currency – all of which was illegal. In his excellent and thorough book The Oligarchs, David Hoffman describes Gusinsky as a fartsovshchik – a huckster.¹⁰ As someone who was buying stuff from foreigners, he came to the attention of the KGB, which caught him trading foreign currency. He was brought in, though never charged, and had an audience with Filipp Bobkov, the head of the KGB’s fifth directorate that dealt with dissidents. As Hoffman suggests, Gusinsky may have been a useful source for Bobkov who kept tabs on the intelligentsia.

In the late 1980s Gusinsky founded a co-operative that made bogus, vaguely oriental ‘healing’ bracelets out of copper wire that he bartered for a few bottles of vodka from a tramway depot. He also used copper to cover fake figurines made out of moulded plaster – copies of Russian art – and persuaded a senior man at the Central Committee to give him permission to export them for hard currency.

Connections mattered and nowhere more so than in the construction and real estate business in Moscow – another of Gusinsky’s ventures. Gusinsky struck up a friendship with Yuri Luzhkov, the bald, stout and fiercely energetic future mayor of Moscow who, at the time, oversaw vegetable distribution and co-operatives in Moscow. Gusinsky’s friendship with Luzhkov bordered on partnership – a private–public partnership of a very Russian sort which resulted in Gusinsky’s company setting up its headquarters on top of the Moscow mayor’s office.

Almost all big business in Russia grew out of this nexus between state and private interests. Gusinsky’s construction company received city land and permits with miraculous ease. But the real trick was latching onto the cash flow of state enterprises or the government itself. All Russian oligarchs did so. Gusinsky latched onto the Moscow government which channelled its operational capital into a consortium of banks led by Gusinsky himself.

The difference between Gusinsky and others was in how they used the state capital. While most of the oligarchs used it to privatize state assets, effectively bidding for state companies with the state’s own money, Gusinsky prided himself in using city hall cashflow as starting capital for building his own business from scratch, including newspapers and now a television channel. He felt that while most oligarchs were simply scrounging off the state, he was creating something new. None of the businesses that he owned had existed in Soviet days.

By the standards of the early 1990s, Gusinsky’s business was still on a small scale. But what he lacked in terms of industrial assets he made up for in appearance and in status. Along with Boris Berezovsky, who managed to work himself into Yeltsin’s inner circle and take charge of Channel One, he was the ultimate Russian oligarch. A man of the theatre who did not fulfil himself on stage, he did not just live the life of an oligarch with all its trimmings, including private jets, yachts and bullet-proof cars, but he also acted it.

One of the key attributes of a Russian oligarch in the early 1990s was a large security service that could fend off gangsters and racketeers. Instead of paying for protection, they recruited policemen and KGB staff. Gusinsky’s security services, however, amounted to a small army, numbering 1,000 people. And although he sometimes deployed it for business purposes (he once helped Luzhkov to reclaim dozens of petrol stations that had been raided by gangsters), it was mainly a status symbol. It was as though Gusinsky was playing soldiers.

At one point Gusinsky had a proud collection of five top KGB ranks in his employment, including Bobkov, who had questioned Gusinsky when he was brought in just a few years back. What kind of work Bobkov did for Gusinsky was never entirely clear, but it certainly flattered Gusinsky’s ego. Gusinsky’s media interests fell into the same category. When he bankrolled the newspaper Segodnya, he did not do it as a business proposition. It was largely an ornament on the façade of his business empire, a symbol of status and influence. A television channel, however, would move him to a different league.

So when Kiselev and Dobrodeev came through his door with their idea of a television production company, he was ready and waiting, but he was thinking on a completely different scale from Kiselev, who simply was looking to sell his programme. Half an hour later, Gusinsky’s office was swarming with aides and lawyers who were told that they were setting up a new private television channel. It was like a scene out of a 1950s Hollywood movie. Money was not an issue.

With the state being poor and pitiful, oligarchs created their own parallel infrastructure which substituted for a state. Gusinsky’s holding, called Media Most, comprised a small army, a bank, a foreign service, his own newspaper, radio and a television channel. In time he would also try to get hold of an airline and his own telecommunications business. He was driving around Moscow in a cortège of cars with blue flashing lights, using a lane reserved for senior state officials.

Had the Soviet Union survived, Kiselev would have likely gone on to become the main commentator on foreign affairs in Soviet television and Dobrodeev would have climbed into the chair of the head of Soviet television. Like the older generation of ideologues, they were part of the Soviet elite. But unlike their Perestroika predecessors who had lost their status in the process of economic liberalization, they seized opportunities generated by the destruction of the Soviet command economy. The privileges and perks that were earlier provided by the party were now provided by Gusinsky. They got free flats in special houses, country dachas, chauffeur-driven cars and pay cheques well above market rates. They emerged as the winners because they were not burdened by communist principles – like Anpilov or Nina Andreeva – or obsessed with the Russian national idea or its past. They were professionals who lived in the present, free of any state ideology. They had education, skills and confidence in their own abilities and, as a result, made a seamless transition from the Soviet to the Russian elite. It was only natural that when Gusinsky asked Kiselev and Dobrodeev who would be the best person to lead the new channel, both named Igor Malashenko – their former boss who had served as the deputy head of the state-owned Ostankino and was widely considered to be one of the smartest and most able people in television.

Malashenko’s first encounter with Gusinsky, the man who changed his life, was a meeting of two parallel universes which, had it not been for the end of the Soviet Union, would probably never have collided. ‘He made a strange impression on me, and I am sure I made a strange impression on him,’ Malashenko said.¹¹ A son of a Russian general and a member of the nomenclatura, he certainly had little in common with a Jewish millionaire, a former huckster, who had a strange way of showing off by hiring senior former KGB officers. Accidental as it was, there was an historic logic in this encounter.

It was a union of two different social milieux: big business that grew out of co-operatives and Soviet-era meritocracy. Malashenko, who despised the notion of the ‘intelligentsia’ as a measure of liberal and moral values, was nonetheless a quintessence of the intelligentsia as a professional, educated and skilled class bred by the Soviet system. He had studied philosophy at university and eschewed Marxism and Leninism in favour of Dante’s political philosophy. He wrote a dissertation on De Monarchia, a work that dealt with the relationship between religious and secular powers. A proud and ambitious man, he soon realized that the field was too narrow for him, so he started to climb the career ladder of secular power. He got a job at the US and Canada Institute, harbouring no illusions about socialism with a human face. ‘All this stuff that Lenin’s ideas were being distorted – I never bought it.’¹²

Malashenko was no dissident. Solzhenitsyn did not interest him much. The book that made the strongest impression on him was Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:

Like many smart, energetic and ambitious people in the Soviet Union, Malashenko was faced with a problem: how to use his energy and talents without losing his self-respect. A talented mathematician or Latinist could carry on their studies with the minimum of sacrifices – the state did not interfere unless they tried to challenge it politically. But what if your energy and talents were in politics, media, or public relations? ‘I understood very clearly that either I would waste my life or the system had to change.’¹⁴

Thirty years old when Andropov died and Chernenko was given office, Malashenko ‘felt that we did not deserve this humiliation’. So when Gorbachev started to dismantle the system, Malashenko felt like joining in and giving him a hand. At the time when many, including Yeltsin, were heading out of the Central Committee, Malashenko went in. This was a peculiar career move – and it was underpinned by Malashenko’s realization that his future depended on the dismantlement of the Soviet system. Yet, when on 25 December 1991 Malashenko stood in the Kremlin along with Yegor Yakovlev, watching Gorbachev sign his resignation, he was dumbstruck:

When the dust settled, it became apparent that the landscape looked like ground zero, a barren place. It did not have a grand design (nor did it need one after a seventy-year-long experiment), but it did not have as much as a simple blueprint. ‘Yet, there was also a feeling that things would work out, that despite all the demoralization and ruin, something new would grow in its place,’ Malashenko said.¹⁶ What would grow in place of Soviet ideology depended largely on people like him.

Malashenko did not believe in a state or in ideology. He believed that an individual, himself or herself, valued dignity and freedom. Perhaps it was his studies of medieval and Renaissance philosophy that infected him with the idea of individual will and self-respect as the base of European civilization. He was not typical of his generation. He had an odd combination of cynicism and idealism, of misanthropy and respect for other people (perhaps as a form of respect for himself). He did not share the ideas of the 1960s generation, but nor did he want to settle scores with it. He valued the bright, independent-thinking people like Yegor Yakovlev who had invited him to work as his deputy at Ostankino, not as members of a generation but as individuals.

When Yegor got fired, Malashenko publicly stuck up for him and, a few months later, handed in his own resignation. ‘I don’t like my own generation,’ he told a Russian newspaper. ‘I found working with Yegor easy, simply because I myself have traits which I too consider anachronistic. And although I understand the sarcasm… about the ’60s generation, many of these people are close to me – at least the strong and bright figures like [Yegor] Yakovlev.’¹⁷

He was unwilling to participate in the corrupt schemes that permeated Central Television, not because he was indifferent to money, or because he had high morals, but because he considered it beneath his sense of self-worth. His state job as the deputy head of Ostankino offered a choice: ‘Either you steal and take bribes, or you live in relative poverty.’ He wished for neither, but when his former journalists pitched the idea of launching a private television channel, he jumped at it.

Malashenko was much more than the general director of NTV. He was its main ideologue and creator, a man who, to a large degree, inherited the role played by Alexander Yakovlev in the Soviet Union – albeit for a much shorter period and with very different results. However, unlike Alexander Yakovlev, who believed in social democracy as a way of transforming Russia into a normal, free and Westernized country, Malashenko believed that the way to political freedom and the West lay through laissez-faire, individual freedom and private ownership.

Both Alexander Yakovlev and Malashenko agreed on the essential power of free information flow. News was not what the state wanted its citizens to believe, but what NTV decided it was. Malashenko’s slogan was ‘News is Our Profession’ – a variation on the motto of General Curtis LeMay, the legendary head of America’s Strategic Air Command, whose B-52 bombers carried on their tails the words: ‘Peace is Our Profession’. The combative origin of NTV’s slogan was fully justified by the battles that accompanied its birth and which it waged for much of its existence for as long as it stayed independent of the state.

NTV did not have a full licence and was considered an ‘experiment’. Security men, better known as ‘siloviki’, tried to thwart it from the very start, rightly seeing in it a threat to their own power. But every time, throughout the 1990s, NTV came out the winner. The battles varied in subject and in pretext, but they were invariably part of the same conflict between the private and the state, between competition – however imperfect – and restriction, between individual rights and statism, and, in the end, between war and peace.

NTV made its name at a pivotal and, as it later turned out, ill-fated point in Russia’s history – the war in Chechnya. The first Chechen war (1994–6) was partly the result of the December 1993 parliamentary elections that brought up Zhirinovsky with his ultra-nationalist rhetoric and a shift in the balance of power within the Kremlin.

As was always the case with Yeltsin, he thrived in a crisis, mobilizing himself in the face of a threat, and flagged when the danger passed. Periods of high concentration were followed by periods of depression and drinking. This happened when he disappeared from sight after the defeat of the August 1991 coup and again after October 1993. ‘Yeltsin had become more isolated, angry and vengeful,’ Sergei Shakrai, Yeltsin’s close aide, recalled.¹⁸ In his memoirs, Gaidar called the chapter about the period that followed the October 1993 crisis ‘The Time of Lost Opportunities’.

In early 1994, Yeltsin was absent for five weeks and when he was around, he was almost invariably in an awful mood and often drunk. After the December elections, Gaidar lost his influence and, three months after being reappointed to the government, had to resign. Yeltsin allowed himself to be surrounded and influenced by scheming, crude and thuggish lackeys who played up to his worst habits. His inner circle included Alexander Korzhakov, his bodyguard, and Mikhail Barsukov, the head of the security services – ‘toadies’ and ‘half-brains’ as Gaidar called them. By the summer of 1994, the changes in Yeltsin’s entourage started to show.

Yeltsin was obviously drunk when he attempted to conduct an orchestra during an official ceremony in Berlin marking the withdrawal of Russian troops from Germany. He failed to emerge from the presidential plane when it landed in Ireland on the way back from America. In the minds of many ordinary Russians, this was far worse than shelling the White House. Not only was Russia withdrawing its troops, but it also had a drunkard for president. And the perception of Russia by the outside world often mattered more than the conditions the Russians were prepared to put up with at home. Hardship was one thing – humiliation, quite another.

Korzhakov, who had always stood behind Yeltsin’s back as his bodyguard, was suddenly sitting next to him at Security Council meetings in the Kremlin. Kiselev spotted the change while watching the Kremlin footage and turned it into news. ‘The rumours about the growing influence of Korzhakov have been confirmed,’ he explained on Itogi. ‘The head of presidential security is taking part in important and confidential state affairs.’ This would have been alarming in any event, but in the autumn of 1994 it became lethal. Trouble in the North Caucasus republic of Chechnya was brewing and Yeltsin’s advisers, Korzhakov and Barsukov, saw it as a perfect opportunity for a small victorious war that could steal Zhirinovsky’s thunder, boost Yeltsin’s rating that had been falling as the result of economic difficulties and strengthen their own positions. Chechen separatism was part of a chain reaction set off by the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yeltsin decided to end it by force.

NTV seized on Chechnya several months before the war actually started. ‘Starting from June, there was hardly an Itogi programme that did not mention Chechnya,’ Kiselev recalled.¹⁹ In September, NTV’s future war reporter, Elena Masyuk, reported from a southern Russian region neighbouring Chechnya that field hospitals were being set up. In November 1994, Malashenko ran into Evgeny Savostyanov, the soft-spoken head of the Moscow KGB whom he knew from his days at the Central Committee. ‘He told me in his carefree way: “Igor, listen, forget about Chechnya for a couple of weeks. We will finish it all off and then I will tell you all about it.” I realized that they really didn’t understand what they were doing.’²⁰

At the time of this encounter, Savostyanov had signed a contract with forty-seven tank crews, behind their commander’s back, to lend President Dudaev’s disparate and weak opponents in Chechnya a helping hand. But when the Russian-contract soldiers reached Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, they came under intense fire from Dudaev’s army. Most of them fled and some were captured. Chechen ‘opposition forces’ broke ranks and started to loot Grozny. While the state media peddled the official line that Dudaev was fleeing and that there were no Russian soldiers on the ground, NTV exposed the operation for what it was – a humiliating debacle.

Malashenko had no sympathy for Dudaev – a paranoid and narcissistic dictator. In fact, his biggest problem with the war was not what it might do to Chechnya, but what it would almost certainly do to Russia. The war was not just an assault on separatists, it was an assault on everything that NTV stood for: professionalism, respect for individual rights, normal life and common sense. ‘I realized that the war in Chechnya would inflate the role of the army and security services and that it would change the rules of the game in Russia, because once you start shooting people in Chechnya, you can shoot them anywhere, the hand almost involuntarily reaches for the gun or a truncheon,’ Malashenko said.²¹ So Malashenko and Dobrodeev decided that NTV would show the war in its full and gruesome details. Its correspondents reported it from both sides. They went behind the Russian lines and interviewed Chechen commanders, inciting the outrage of the Russian army chiefs.

When the government said there were no prisoners, NTV showed a line-up of captured young conscripts, disarmed and helpless. When the government kept silent about its losses, NTV showed a downed Russian helicopter and bodies of Russian soldiers. When state TV channels said that civilians had left Grozny, NTV showed wounded civilians bombed out of their houses, old people desperately looking for cover, a woman whose face was just a bloody wound. The Kremlin was not only losing militarily; it was also losing the information war to NTV.

The images of devastating military action, blood and destruction provided by NTV’s own correspondent and particularly by its star war reporter, Elen Masyuk, were invariably more powerful than written statements supplied by the Kremlin or even official footage of Russian tanks driving down a dusty road. ‘In Grozny we use no other sources apart from what [our reporters] directly see,’ said Oleg Dobrodeev, NTV’s news director.²² In the winter of 1994–5, the majority of Russians, according to polls, were on the side of NTV against the war. Polls also showed that it was television that commanded attention during the war in Chechnya and it was NTV that was in the lead. Nearly 30 per cent of the television audience chose NTV news for objective coverage of the war, compared with 12 per cent for the pro-Kremlin Ostankino/Channel One news.²³ NTV was changing the Kremlin’s agenda.

The beginning of the war in Chechnya also coincided with the launch of NTV’s satirical show Kukly (Puppets). Based on Britain’s Spitting Image, it featured rubber latex puppets of all Russia’s top politicians and was unabashedly irreverent. The idea of the programme came from a Russian producer who lived in France. The scriptwriter was the former actor and satirist Viktor Shenderovich who knew Gusinsky from the days of drama school. Each Kukly skit was based on a famous book or film rewritten to fit in with the reality of the day. One of the first skits stylized Mikhail Lermontov’s Hero of Our Times, making the most of the parallels with the nineteenth-century war in the Caucasus. The puppets parodied the voices of Russian politicians. It was decided that Yeltsin should be left out of the show – at least to start with. ‘We thought that would be too much of a shock and we should prepare the audience,’ Malashenko said.²⁴

Russia had a long tradition of political satire, but not of turning its leaders into funny puppets. The Kremlin rulers could be hated or loved, feared or despised, but they had always preserved some mystique of power and were never laughed at in public. It was that mystique that NTV deliberately sought to destroy, de-sacralizing state power at a time when the state was trying to justify its brutal war in Chechnya.

In one of the skits, Vyacheslav Kostikov, Yeltsin’s press spokesman, introduced Pavel Grachev, the defence minister, as ‘the brain behind the Chechen operation’. He then knocked on Grachev’s puppet head producing a hollow wooden sound. ‘We have many soldiers here who have experienced defeat in Afghanistan,’ Kostikov said. ‘Yes, and we are using their experience to the fullest.’

As Yeltsin’s bodyguards, Korzhakov and his men saw their task not just in providing physical security but also in dealing with his critics and shielding him from political attack. The first Kukly programme went on air on 19 November 1994. The same day an article appeared in the state newspaper Rossiyskaya gazeta, portraying Gusinsky as an evil media mogul from a James Bond film. ‘Now the Most group has its sights set on the pinnacle of power… For this purpose the Most group is gradually “taking over” the most influential media outlets.’²⁵ Gusinsky knew the article was a black mark, a threat from Korzhakov.

Two weeks later Korzhakov’s men, in unmarked fatigues, clashed with Gusinsky’s security guards outside his office in the Moscow mayor’s building. Pointing their guns at Gusinsky’s men, they ordered them to lie on the ground, face down in the snow, while they roughed up the head of security, breaking several of his ribs. This ‘special operation’ became known in Moscow as ‘mugs in the snow’. Malashenko called around the foreign television bureaux and asked them to send their crews which arrived just in time to capture images of Korzhakov’s men forcing Gusinsky’s security guards onto the ground and kicking them even when they were down.

Watching the whole scene from his office at the top of the tower, Gusinsky called in the Moscow KGB, headed by his friend Savostyanov. Soon, a team of Moscow state security agents arrived at the scene and pointed their weapons at Korzhakov’s men whom they mistook for gangsters. After a brief clash, Savostyanov’s men retreated. Korzhakov quickly reported the whole incident to Yeltsin and within two hours Savostyanov – the last man who was hired to work at the security services from outside the KGB – was fired.

Soon after the raid, Gusinsky was summoned to the Kremlin and told that he would lose his television channel unless it stopped its damaging coverage of Chechnya. Gusinsky refused, but thought it would be safer to send his family to London where he soon joined them. In a newspaper interview, Korzhakov boasted that his favourite sport was chasing geese – wordplay on Gusinsky’s nickname ‘Gus’ which means goose in Russian.

After a few months of shuttling between Moscow and London, Gusinsky’s business and media partners, including Malashenko, Kiselev and Dobrodeev, gathered in the dimly lit wine bar in the basement of London’s exclusive Lanesborough Hotel in Park Lane – a favourite hang-out of Russian oligarchs – to discuss the situation. Gusinsky, who presided over the long wooden table, let his partners on the banking side speak first. They told him that NTV was jeopardizing their business and so it had to be either sold or transformed into a non-political channel. Then it was Malashenko’s turn to speak. ‘Your partners are wrong,’ he told Gusinsky. ‘NTV is your only defence.’ Malashenko called it the principle of ‘explosive reactive armour’ used to protect tanks against artillery fire. Reactive armour is stuffed with elements that counter-explode when hit by a charge. ‘So, if you close down NTV, they will consider you a weakling and that will be the end,’ Malashenko said. ‘If they attack you – we will counter-explode.’²⁶ Gusinsky thought for a moment and sided with Malashenko.

What gave Malashenko and his journalists confidence was the knowledge that they and not the military and security services were on the right side of history. They were clever, skilful and Westernized. They held out the promise of a normal life that most people craved. The state was weak, dysfunctional and unattractive. The slogan Malashenko came up with was simple and powerful: ‘News is power. Power is in truth.’ Behind this statement, as armour, was the large and growing empire of one of Russia’s top oligarchs.

As Malashenko predicted, the Kremlin did not shut down NTV, although not for the want of trying. Chernomyrdin’s government considered revoking its licence, but Alexander Yakovlev, who now headed the Federal Commission for Television and Radio – his last official post – came to the rescue. ‘I realized we had to save NTV. To a great extent, it was a question about the fate of democracy.’ Without telling Chernomyrdin, he prolonged NTV’s licence. ‘You’ve made a mistake,’ Chernomyrdin told him that evening. ‘It did not even occur to me that you could do it over the head of the government.’ He demanded that Yakovlev cancelled his decision. ‘It is your error – you correct it.’ But Yakovlev, a former member of the Soviet Politburo, put Chernomyrdin, a junior member of the Central Committee, in his place: ‘Don’t raise your voice to me, Viktor Stepanovich. I had no legal excuse to refuse them a licence.’²⁷ Moreover, in May 1995, Gusinsky decided it was safe enough to return from his London exile. He carefully timed his return to coincide with Bill Clinton’s official visit to Moscow for the Second World War Victory Day celebration. Harassing the owner of an independent television channel while America’s president was in Russia discussing financial aid with Yeltsin would be too daring even for Korzhakov. Shortly after Gusinsky’s return, NTV put out a Kukly skit which he had considered to be risky a few weeks earlier. The skit was called ‘Don Quixote and his Bodyguard’ and portrayed Yeltsin as a drinking knight in a nightcap and Alexander Korzhakov as Sancho Panza.

Astride a donkey, Korzhakov/Sancho shouts down a radio to his officers: ‘I am an ass, I am an ass, receive.’ Towards the end, Sancho falls asleep, dreaming of turning into Yeltsin’s master and Yeltsin turning into his servant. Yeltsin/Don Quixote tries to wake him up. ‘Was that a dream?’ Sancho asks. ‘No, that was a nightmare,’ Yeltsin replies.²⁸

Seeing that NTV not only got away with its coverage, but was actually getting stronger, other television channels started to follow its critical reporting of the war. NTV doubled its number of viewers. In Moscow the share of NTV’s audience was nearly 50 per cent, shaping the public perception of the war and eventually leading to an anti-war sentiment. Malashenko’s party was winning. Not only was NTV setting its own agenda, it was also changing the behaviour of the government, as the first major terrorist attack by Chechen fighters made apparent.

When, on 14 June 1995, one of Chechnya’s most notorious field commanders, Shamil Basayev, with 200 men, bribed his way through various Russian checkpoints and took 1,600 people hostage in a hospital in the small town of Buddenovsk, demanding an end to the war, the Russian government initially responded with a familiar mix of cover-ups and heavy-handedness. With Yeltsin on his way to a G7 meeting in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Chernomyrdin, who was left in charge, dispatched the heads of police security agencies to Buddenovsk.

Their first step was to ban journalists from attending a news conference called by Basayev. Furious, Basayev executed five of the hostages. On the fourth day of the crisis, Russian special forces attempted to storm the hospital which resulted in total mayhem. Basayev was interviewed live by NTV, defending his position: ‘We don’t need anything – not ammunition, not clothes, not food – only to stop the war in Chechnya… If [Russia’s war in Chechnya] over the past six months is not terrorism, then this is not terrorism either. I am not a terrorist, I am a saboteur.’²⁹ Gaidar called on Chernomyrdin to start immediate negotiations. After a couple of botched attempts to storm the hospital, with more than 100 people already dead, Chernomyrdin agreed to negotiate with Basayev.

If Basayev used television cameras, so did Chernomyrdin. He invited journalists into his office and let them film his telephone conversation with Basayev. Chernomyrdin looked composed and resolute, taking responsibility for the lives of people in front of the cameras. The country watched an extraordinary scene: the prime minister talking on the phone to the prime terrorist: ‘Shamil Basayev, can you hear me? I am at work and I am responsible for everything that is happening in the country at the moment. I am ready. Tell me how much time you need…’ Chernomyrdin promised a ceasefire in Chechnya from 8 p.m. that day and safe passage for the terrorists back to Chechnya. His agreement was broadcast on television, along with footage of the burials of the hostages who had died in the attack.

Buddenovsk was a turning point in the war. For the first time since the start of the war, the Kremlin bowed to public pressure and began serious talks. Television and NTV in particular helped to break the pattern of lies and cover-ups by the Kremlin. It was, arguably, NTV’s finest hour.

In the mid-1990s, any attempt to ‘do something with NTV’ invariably failed. When prosecutors launched a case against Kukly for ‘the conscious and public humiliation of the honour and dignity of high officials, expressed in an indecent way’ they only boosted Kukly’s fame. Malashenko and Kiselev, flanked by the puppets of Chernomyrdin and Yeltsin, held a press conference which was as embarrassing for the Kremlin as it was helpful to NTV’s rating.

When they realized that they could not beat NTV, the smartest members of the government decided to join them. Chernomyrdin came to the channel’s studios to meet his own puppet. To the disbelieving laughter and applause of NTV journalists, Chernomyrdin joked with his ‘double’, showing himself once again to be a real person and winning the sympathies of journalists and viewers alike. ‘Why have you got such a fat mug?’ he laughed to the cameras, in the way that any Western politician would do. For a second, Russia seemed almost like a normal country where the ability to criticize and ridicule politicians is a sign of a healthy democracy.

Yet, there was one fundamental problem. In contrast to ‘normal’ countries where freedom of expression is guaranteed by institutions such as parliament, civil society, the media itself and, above all, by the consensus of the population, in Russia freedom of speech rested on the goodwill of just one man – Yeltsin – who, for some reason, believed it to be a valuable thing. As Alexander Yakovlev testified, ‘Not once did he complain about a single programme, although he had plenty of reasons to do so… His tolerance towards criticism… went beyond any measure.’³⁰

Whether Yeltsin needed to be unequivocally supported or unequivocally criticized simply because it was ‘healthier’ for democracy was at the heart of the debate which unravelled among the Russian intelligentsia as soon as Yeltsin became Russia’s president.

Back in October 1991, in a heated exchange with a scholar of the Renaissance, Leonid Batkin, in the pages of the Literary Gazette, Marietta Chudakova, scholar and Yeltsin supporter, argued against those who thought it was the job of the intellectual to attack any government. ‘There are plenty of reasons to be disappointed [in the government] but I insist that it is the democratically oriented journalists and publicists who are shaping this disappointment, putting it into talented formulations, without much thought about the aims and consequences.’

Of course Yeltsin and his government made plenty of mistakes – how could they not – but one must not lose sight of the historic circumstances in which they were acting, Chudakova argued:

The paradox was that programmes such as Kukly and the media more generally took an easy swipe at Yeltsin and helped to drive down his rating, which, by the end of 1995, was in single digits, but they also owed their existence to him. Journalists were not only protected, but empowered by Yeltsin who saw them as his natural allies against nationalists and communists, retained a Soviet-era relationship with the intelligentsia that allowed it to bite a feeding hand and considered it his role to patronize it. When television talked about his health or poked fun at him, Yeltsin preferred to switch it off, rather than call its owners. Never before or after did journalists in Russia have such a high status and command as much power as they did in the 1990s.

But if Russia had freedom of speech and private property in the 1990s, it was not because there was an inbuilt tradition or craving for it, but because Yeltsin allowed it. Malashenko recalled asking American officials why they supported Yeltsin almost unconditionally instead of paying more attention to democratic institutions. ‘Yeltsin is your only democratic institution’ came the answer. Malashenko said: ‘I knew this could not last. If Yeltsin was the only guarantor of our freedom, then we would be finished sooner or later.’³²

Fighting for the President

In 1996 the Russian liberal media rallied behind Yeltsin when he faced presidential elections, challenged by the communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. The war in Chechnya, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, and the continuing economic slump had brought Yeltsin’s rating close to zero. Yeltsin was also suffering from serious heart problems and to many, including Gaidar, he did not seem fit to fight – either physically or spiritually. Gaidar wrote Yeltsin a letter, arguing he should not run at all. The problem was, as Gaidar soon realized, there was nobody else who could. The communists were riding high, exploiting economic hardship, accusing Yeltsin of acting against the interests of Russian people and promising to restore equality and Russia’s status as a superpower and to kick out (Jewish) tycoons. In practice, Zyuganov’s victory would mean the end of all the economic reforms and freedoms that Yeltsin had fought for so fiercely since 1991. He decided to run.

One of the biggest threats, however, was not even that the communists would come to power, for it was highly unlikely that Yeltsin would have ceded this power to them, but that the party of war led by Korzhakov would persuade Yeltsin to postpone or cancel the elections altogether and use force instead, as he had done in October 1993. At the very least this would have deprived Yeltsin of legitimacy, isolated him from the West and made him completely reliant on Korzhakov and the security men who would quickly put an end to any reforms.

In charge of Yeltsin’s official election campaign was Oleg Soskovets, the first deputy prime minister and a friend of Korzhakov, who presented Yeltsin with his low rating as proof positive that the only way to defeat the communists was to ban them. The reformers needed Yeltsin to win – openly and fairly.

The Russian business tycoons who observed Zyuganov schmoozing and hobnobbing with the Western elite in Davos, trying to present himself there as a social democrat rather than as the Stalinist and anti-Semite that he was at home, agreed to throw their energy and media resources behind Yeltsin. A fight against the communists was a proxy fight for Yeltsin against a war party inside the Kremlin. Yet, far from paying for Yeltsin’s victory, the oligarchs saw it as a way of making money.

The idea of forming a coalition of the seven largest business tycoons belonged to Boris Berezovsky – the archetypal Russian oligarch who epitomized the 1990s with all the opportunities, ruthlessness, colour, individualism and utter lack of morals. A mathematician by background, Berezovsky specialized in the theory of decision-making and in optimization, using applied mathematics to model how choices are made. He also applied models to his life and to the country, as though it were a giant chessboard where he moved the pieces. He ‘optimized’ the hangovers of the Soviet Union and the inadequacies of the emerging market economy.

Berezovsky thrived on uncertainty and crisis, surviving several assassination attempts, and expanded his influence. Unlike other oligarchs who wished to own their assets and be able to pass them on, Berezovsky did not formally own much of what he controlled. He operated not through share registers, but through people he appointed as managers of his key enterprises, gaining control over cash flow. Berezovsky saw money not as a goal in itself, but as a by-product of his main activity: scheming and playing politics.

He fashioned himself (and often persuaded others to see him) as the chief manipulator of Russian politics: not the first politician, but the man who manipulates the first politician – an image he cherished and poeticized. He cultivated myths about his influence and power and exploited them to obtain real power, money and influence. A man of demonic energy, he was always in ten places at once, always plotting and on the move. The process was as pleasing to him as the result. Like an alchemist, he turned personal connections into money and money into influence. He spoke fast, quietly and articulately. As a Jew, he was a gift to anti-Semites.

Having made his first fortune by selling cars, he worked his way into Yeltsin’s circle after the collapse of the Soviet Union, through the president’s ghost writer and future son-in-law. Berezovsky paid for the publication of Yeltsin’s memoirs and regularly delivered the royalties from sales in other countries – whether real or not, nobody knew. At the end of 1994 – just as Russia headed into war with Chechnya – he persuaded Yeltsin and his family to hand him effective control over Channel One, promising to turn it to their service. He then convinced the Kremlin to sell him and his partners Sibneft, an oil company, at a knockdown price, in order to finance Channel One, which he used as a blunt and effective tool of propaganda. ‘I never saw the media as a business, but as a powerful instrument in a political struggle,’ he said in one television interview. He also deployed Channel One in his wars with business competitors, as did Gusinsky with NTV.

Until 1996 Gusinsky and Berezovsky were at loggerheads, fighting fiercely for the accounts of Aeroflot, the loss-making national carrier. Gusinsky believed (for good reason) that it was Berezovsky who had bad-mouthed him to Korzhakov and Yeltsin and who put up Korzhakov to raid his office in the winter of 1994. In 1996, faced with the threat of Zyuganov’s victory or cancelled elections, the two men put their feud aside and joined resources for Yeltsin’s re-election. They decided to hire Chubais, who had been fired from the government a couple of months earlier, largely thanks to Korzhakov, to lead Yeltsin’s campaign. Chubais, who had the reputation of a highly effective manager, accepted their offer with great enthusiasm: ‘I was planning to fight for Yeltsin anyway and was certainly ready to join forces with them.’³³

In fact, Chubais had already tied the knot between the oligarchs and the Kremlin. Business tycoons had a strong incentive for bringing Yeltsin to victory. A few months earlier Chubais had endorsed an audacious scheme devised by one of the oligarchs, Vladimir Potanin, that would transfer control over Russia’s natural resources to a select group of tycoons in exchange for their political support. It was known as the ‘loans-for-shares’ privatization and was the worst example of insider trading and outright sham that the world had ever seen; and it has haunted Russian capitalism ever since. According to this scheme, tycoons would lend money to the cash-strapped government and in exchange be allowed to manage the state’s shares. The loans would run out in the autumn of 1996 – after the election. At that point, in theory, the government could repay the oligarchs and get the shares back to be sold in an open auction. But this was just a smokescreen for a quiet transfer of shares to the hand-picked oligarchs. In practice, the government had neither the money nor the intention to buy the shares back. Foreigners would be excluded and the oligarchs’ banks that managed the shares would auction them to themselves.

Worse still, not only were the auctions fixed, but the money with which the tycoons had bought the most lucrative assets had come from the state itself. The state, or its agency, would deposit its money in one of the tycoons’ banks which would then use this money to bid for a company, while its workers’ wages and payments to suppliers would be delayed for months. The deal was a political pact between the oligarchs and Yeltsin’s government since the second part of the deal – the actual exchange of loans for shares – depended on Yeltsin’s victory. ‘It was a small price to pay for averting a communist revanche,’ Chubais said.³⁴ In fact, the loans-for-shares scheme was so unfair that it undermined its main purpose of reforming Russia into a normal, civilized country.

What is more, the deal was hardly necessary. The government did not owe any favours to tycoons. The risk of losing their wealth and influence – if not their freedom – in case of Yeltsin’s defeat was enough of an incentive for them to rally behind Yeltsin.

The biggest help provided by the oligarchs was not money, but ideas. The oligarchs put together a rival campaign headquarters that was headed by Chubais and included Yeltsin’s own daughter Tatyana Dyachenko and her husband Valentin Yumashev, a former journalist and Yeltsin’s ghost writer. Igor Malashenko was seconded from NTV to the Kremlin to lead the media campaign. The team told Yeltsin that despite his dismal 5 per cent rating he could still win the election, if he entrusted the campaign to them. Yeltsin was suspicious. Faced with the prospect of losing power to people whom he had literally shelled out of the White House three years earlier, Yeltsin felt the risks were too high to experiment with ‘election games’ run by private businessmen and their brainy men.

This is what Korzhakov told him: ‘You will only lose time with all these election games, and then what?’ Like any Russian politician in a moment of crisis, Yeltsin naturally leaned towards the security services. ‘Comparing two strategies offered to me by two teams different in their mentality and approach, I felt I could not wait until the election results in June. I had to act now!’ he wrote in his memoirs.³⁵

Yeltsin told his aides to draft a decree banning the Communist Party, dissolving parliament and postponing elections for two years. The idea horrified Chubais’s team. Yeltsin’s aides leaked his secret plans to Kiselev, who torpedoed them by breaking the news on Itogi. Dyachenko persuaded Yeltsin to hear out Chubais, who told him the situation was completely different from 1993, and dissolving parliament would be equal to a coup. Yeltsin shouted a lot but succumbed to the pressure. ‘I reversed a decision I had almost made,’ he recalled in his memoirs.³⁶

A day or two later, Dyachenko brought Malashenko before her father. Malashenko felt confident that Yeltsin could win the elections honestly as long as he ran a proper campaign. This confidence was based on a simple assumption that however bitter people might feel about Yeltsin himself, the majority of Russians did not wish to return to the communist past which Zyuganov represented.

‘I told him that there was a big gap between his low rating and the anti-communist sentiment which could be turned into votes, if he campaigned,’ Malashenko said. Yeltsin seemed relieved. ‘It was as though I had told him something that he had thought about himself and wanted to hear from someone else. He was clearly tired, but his eyes suddenly lit up. He got everything I told him extremely quickly and he engaged. It was like a game of ping-pong.’³⁷ Sensing the scent of a genuine political fight, Yeltsin sprang back to life. Gaidar, who came to see Yeltsin around the same time, could barely recognize him. ‘He was crisp, focused, energetic and quickly grasped the essence of his interlocutor’s thoughts and asked the right questions. It was as though the past five years were erased and we were back in October 1991, at our first meeting.’³⁸

Malashenko had never run an election campaign in his life. All he knew – from his time at the US and Canada Institute – was how it was done in America and he built the campaign with the vigour and aggression suitable for an American presidential candidate. During this time he formally remained the head of NTV. To step down from NTV or to get a formal secondment would have been hypocritical: in the Russia of the 1990s nobody would have believed in this separation.

Malashenko told Yeltsin that he needed to generate news every day which television could report. Yeltsin’s first trip to Krasnodar – a communist stronghold – was a disaster. The president and his entourage walked down an empty street that had been cleared by his security and waved at the crowd of people that had been cordoned off. When Yeltsin returned to Moscow, Malashenko and Chubais put two photographs in front of him. One showed Yeltsin in 1991 in the midst of a jubilant crowd – a true people’s president. The other one was of his visit to Krasnodar where he looked like a Soviet-era boss. ‘Yeltsin got it. The staged Soviet-style visits stopped straight away and he started to work,’ Malashenko recalled.³⁹

Within a few weeks Yeltsin had shed nearly 10 kg (22 pounds) and stopped drinking. He regained his charisma and sparkle. He criss-crossed the country holding American-style election rallies. He went down mines in Vorkuta, a horrific Gulag town in the north whose coal miners went unpaid for months; in a crisp white shirt he danced the twist, in sweltering heat, in the southern town of Rostov, swaying his hips and flapping his elbows. Over the three months of the election campaign Yeltsin flew to twenty-six regions across nine time zones.

The main strategy of Yeltsin’s campaign was to mobilize the anti-communist votes, presenting the election as a final and decisive battle between the Soviet communist regime and anti-Soviet democratic reforms. The media’s job was to stoke and exploit the fears of a communist comeback. The threat was somewhat exaggerated, not least because the communists did not seem that desperate to gain real power in the country, but it provided the best consolidation ground for Yeltsin’s electorate.

An agitprop-style propaganda sheet headed Ne dai Bog (God Forbid) illustrated the spirit of the campaign. It was published by Vladimir Yakovlev, the founder of Kommersant; 10 million copies were distributed for free across provincial Russia. It played on the common fears and memories of empty shelves and long queues in shops. It drew parallels between Zyuganov and Hitler; it ran interviews with famous artists who spoke of their fears of bloodshed and ruin in the case of a communist victory. The paper’s budget (apparently $8 million) and the source of money were a closely guarded secret. But while newspapers were small weaponry, television was the heavy artillery.

To mobilize the young voters who normally did not vote, Yeltsin’s media campaigners came up with the slogan ‘Vote or Lose’, adapted from Bill Clinton’s ‘Choose or Lose’. What the voters stood to lose was illustrated by videos and animated cartoons. ‘If your fridge is empty, all television channels show the same programme and you receive only one newspaper, then the “happy tomorrow” is here,’ a voice warned in one such cartoon. An even more important slogan was ‘Vote with Your Heart’ and was aimed at older and more reliable Russian voters. With melancholic music in the background, election advertisements showed ordinary old Russian men and women calmly talking about their families and their experiences of living under the communists, of repressions and collectivization, of their reluctance to go back to the Soviet era and their hopes for Yeltsin. ‘If the communists come to power, they will take my land – just like before,’ a Russian farmer said. ‘Let Yeltsin finish the good things that he has started,’ a woman in a headscarf insisted. Whatever the motives, Yeltsin’s campaign appealed to the sensibility and the best instincts in Russian people.

It began with a summary of Yeltsin’s heroic political career, followed by extensive coverage of his campaign. Yeltsin was shown visiting the ancient city of Yaroslavl’, promising to give its cash-strapped citizens ‘everything and to take back nothing’. He was shown in the newly restored Cathedral of Christ the Saviour near the Kremlin, ‘ruined under the communists and restored under Yeltsin’. Gennady Zyuganov, Yeltsin’s main communist rival, was depicted hobnobbing with the oligarchs in Davos or in international airport VIP lounges.

TV critic Irina Petrovskaya lamented NTV’s metamorphosis. ‘NTV, my sorrow and my pain! Where did its objectivity and even-handedness go? What happened to its European correctness? Evgeny Kiselev resembled in his manners and his tone political commentators of [Soviet] Central Television.’ She saw far enough into the future to pose the key question of that fraught time: ‘If they manage [to get Yeltsin elected], will television be able to return to those democratic principles? Will the new (old) power allow it? Or will it turn a temporary love affair with the media into a compulsory admiration?’⁴⁰

Yet, while some media executives saw Yeltsin’s campaign purely as a money-making opportunity, most journalists who participated in the election campaign did so because they too had much to lose. The return of the communists or the victory of Korzhakov’s clan would have spelled the end to free journalism and its special status in Yeltsin’s Russia. As Kiselev said, ‘Yes, we were biased, but we genuinely believed – and still believe – that Yeltsin’s victory would save the country and that Zyuganov would throw it back. We were defending ourselves. When a house is in flames you don’t worry about spoiling books and carpets by throwing water on them.’⁴¹

Judging by NTV’s own standards in previous years, the Yeltsin coverage was clearly biased. By the standards of Russian television in the late 2000s, when it became nothing but propaganda, it was an example of restraint and moderation. Even more crucially, Malashenko and his journalists campaigned not just for Yeltsin per se, but for a Yeltsin who would end the war in Chechnya, carry on with reforms and bring Russia closer to the West. NTV continued its highly critical coverage of Chechnya. ‘Every time NTV showed something about Chechnya – they looked at me in the Kremlin as though I was a traitor,’ Malashenko recalled. ‘But I kept telling them: if you want it to look different on the screen – do something about Chechnya itself – don’t try to doctor the picture.’⁴²

On 31 March, Yeltsin went on television and announced he was ready for peace talks and promised a ‘political solution to the crisis’. A few weeks later, on 21 April, Dudaev was killed and Yeltsin flew to Chechnya to meet the elders and to thank the soldiers for their service. ‘Peace in Chechnya has been restored,’ Yeltsin declared, effectively admitting that the army was unable to end the insurgency. Pressing his pen and paper against the side of an APC, Yeltsin theatrically signed an order to decommission soldiers. Opinion polls showed Yeltsin’s rating climbing steadily while Zyuganov’s figures were either flat or falling. Yeltsin was clearly ahead of Zyuganov in Moscow and St Petersburg and in other large cities. He was overwhelmingly supported by the educated, the well-paid and the young. This was NTV’s prime audience.

But apart from mobilizing the general public, television also communicated the ‘party line’ to all regional bosses who controlled election registers. Although many of them were natural communist supporters, they took their instructions from the state media. By the end of spring 1996, Malashenko’s team was clearly winning over Korzhakov’s group inside the Kremlin. On the eve of the first round of elections, Kiselev published an article in the weekly news magazine Itogi – the namesake of his television programme and part of Gusinsky’s media empire. ‘Yeltsin will win, despite the shameful [fact] that an ex-KGB bodyguard with the rank of a major has become the number-two man in the country… Korzhakov and his men won’t forget and forgive those who pushed them aside. And they won’t forget us journalists for the way we covered this campaign.’⁴³

On 16 June, in the first round of elections, Yeltsin got 35 per cent of the votes, Zyuganov 32 per cent. Another 15 per cent went to Alexander Lebed – a gravel-voiced and charismatic army general, a sparring partner promoted by Yeltsin’s team to split the communist vote. The calculation was that in the second round Lebed’s votes would go to Yeltsin.

A few days later the battle between Malashenko’s and Chubais’s analytical group and Korzhakov’s group broke into the open. Korzhakov’s people arrested two men from Chubais’s team, one of whom was the author of the slogan ‘Vote or Lose’, who were carrying a cardboard box with $500,000 in cash out of the White House. The cash had been earlier taken out from the ministry of finance: state money was being used to pay for Yeltsin’s campaign, including the ‘God Forbid’ news-sheet. Korzhakov knew about this. In fact, he was supposed to provide security for transporting the money, but instead set a trap.

Gusinsky, Malashenko and Chubais were at Berezovsky’s lavish ‘House of Receptions’ in central Moscow when the news came. They were furious. This was a clear set-up by Korzhakov designed to foil the second round of elections and reassert control over Yeltsin. While Chubais was unsuccessfully trying to raise Yeltsin from his bed in the middle of the night and Berezovsky was summoning Dyachenko on the phone, Malashenko mobilized his journalists. He called Kiselev, told him the news, and asked him to go on air immediately. At two o’clock in the morning, NTV interrupted its night programming with an ‘emergency’ news bulletin. The country, Kiselev told the audience, was on the brink of a political catastrophe and an attempted coup by Korzhakov, Barsukov and Soskovets. An hour later, Lebed also went on air to say that ‘any mutiny will be crushed and crushed with extreme severity’. Television declared Yeltsin’s chiefs of security traitors while they still held their positions.

Two hours later Korzhakov blinked and the two men detained with the box were released. In the morning Chubais went to see Yeltsin to tell him that Korzhakov had just jeopardized Yeltsin’s campaign for the sake of his own position. Chubais also showed Yeltsin a blackmail letter that Korzhakov had sent to Kiselev a few days earlier. In his letter Korzhakov addressed Kiselev as a ‘colleague’, implying Kiselev’s affiliation with the KGB. ‘Why such contempt for our joint profession, colleague… Be sensible…’ Attached to the letter was a copy of Kiselev’s article in Itogi magazine and a facsimile of the first page of a KGB personal file with Kiselev’s photograph and his secret name, Alekseev, that identified him as an agent. The letter was signed with the military-style ‘on my honour, Alexander Korzhakov’. ‘He has no honour,’ Yeltsin grumbled, picked up the phone and told Korzhakov he was fired. Having seen the proof of Malashenko’s and Chubais’ work in the first round of elections, Yeltsin no longer needed Korzhakov.

Yet, the tussle and the exertion of the campaign took their toll on Yeltsin. Less than two weeks before the second round, he suffered his fifth heart attack. That day he was supposed to record his last election broadcast to the nation. He was clearly unfit for the job. Yeltsin’s family kept the news secret, even from members of his election team. After a few days, Malashenko decided the recording could wait no longer. He realized Yeltsin was too weak to go to the Kremlin, so the recording had to be done at his country residence. But to make it look as though he was speaking from the Kremlin, Malashenko ordered that Yeltsin’s office furniture and wooden panelling be moved to the country.

When Malashenko arrived at the recording, he saw Yeltsin sitting at a table with the Kremlin wooden panelling behind his back, looking straight ahead, his face frozen, almost unable to move. Chernomyrdin sat next to him, but Yeltsin did not see him. ‘Yeltsin was using all his energy for sitting up straight,’ Malashenko recalled.⁴⁴ Yeltsin spoke slowly and often inaudibly, leaving words and sentences unfinished. It was a sorry sight. The tape had to be heavily doctored, retouched and edited to make Yeltsin look less wooden and sick. ‘Reality’ was not something that occurred in real life, but instead was something that television portrayed, and which therefore could be edited and improved. It turned the genuine historic figure that Yeltsin was into a television character.

As Malashenko said, ‘I would rather have elected Yeltsin’s corpse than Zyuganov as Russia’s president.’⁴⁵ Although Malashenko never told his journalists about what had actually happened to Yeltsin, rumours about Yeltsin’s heart attack, or even stroke, spread through Moscow. Journalists knew Yeltsin was gravely ill. Yet none of the TV channels, including NTV, said anything about the president’s health. On 3 July – the day of the second round – Yeltsin appeared on television at a polling station set up near his country residence. He could barely slot his ballot paper into the box. The two doctors in white coats behind his back were edited out of the picture. Yeltsin was elected with 53.8 per cent of the vote – a result that had seemed impossible only a few months earlier.

Yeltsin’s presidential inauguration a few weeks later was conspicuously short. He could hardly walk. He managed to take a few steps towards a microphone and said thirty-three words in total. It was clear that Yeltsin was only half alive. The central idea of defeating the communists through elections rather than by force, noble in its intentions and effective in its results, did not alter the fact that behind Yeltsin’s victory was not a broad coalition of democratic forces and parties but a narrow alliance of oligarchs and media managers. The actual democratic movement that brought Yeltsin to power in 1991 was virtually extinct. The main democratic parties, including Russian Democratic Choice, led by Yegor Gaidar, were weak and at best played the role of a chorus, rather than protagonists in the 1996 drama. As Gaidar wrote, ‘Given Zyuganov versus Yeltsin, we, as the party of democracy, were simply obliged to back Yeltsin.’⁴⁶

Yeltsin’s victory, therefore, was not a triumph for democratic institutions, the rule of law and property rights. Rather it was the triumph of those who had invested in and stood to benefit most from it – the tycoons and media chiefs. As Kirill Rogov, a political essayist and a founder of one of the country’s first internet news sites, noted, control over the media and its technology allowed the oligarchs to reach a goal which had little to do with public good.

The 1996 elections and the loans-for-shares privatization turned business tycoons into oligarchs and journalists into spiritual leaders. Berezovsky boasted about it in an interview with the Financial Times. He spoke on behalf of the seven bankers who had participated in the Davos pact to have Yeltsin re-elected. ‘We hired Chubais and invested huge sums of money to ensure Yeltsin’s election. Now we have the right to occupy government posts and enjoy the fruits of our victory.’⁴⁷ With Yeltsin only semi-functional, the oligarchs felt they would be the ones ruling Russia.

‘Berezovsky’s logic was very simple: if we are the richest, we must be the smartest. And if we are the smartest and the richest then we should be ruling Russia,’ said Chubais.⁴⁸ They nominated Potanin, the author of the loans-for-shares scheme, to be Russia’s deputy prime minister. Within a few months, Berezovsky was appointed the deputy secretary of the Security Council. However, the main tool of power in the hands of the oligarchs was not their official jobs, but the media and, in particular, television. Yeltsin’s election persuaded the oligarchs that control over the media equalled political power. ‘At some point I realized that the thing we created had become too powerful and I was trailing behind,’ said Malashenko.⁴⁹ It certainly was not ‘normal’ television as Malashenko had initially designed it.

Gusinsky showered his journalists with bonuses and privileges, giving them free credit and buying them flats and cars. Paid well above their peers in other media outlets from the very beginning, they were incorporated into the oligarchic clan. They dined in Moscow’s most expensive restaurants. Kiselev, who had earned the nickname barin (‘landlord’, a master), received a free house – as did Malashenko and Dobrodeev – in Chigasovo, a fenced country settlement built by Gusinsky. It was known as ‘Russian Switzerland’.

In the opening credits to Itogi, Kiselev walked through the Kremlin. A kaleidoscope of pictures and fragments of phrases were flashed onto the screen: Thatcher, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Nixon. The last snatched phrase was spoken by the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church: ‘a spiritual image of Russia’, he was heard saying as Kiselev swaggered across Red Square. The scene was recorded before the election, but after the election it gained a new meaning.

‘Kiselev in his Itogi programme is preaching, rather than broadcasting,’ critic Irina Petrovskaya wrote less than a year after the election. ‘He is speaking, not even on behalf of the presidential team, but as one of its fully accepted members.’⁵⁰ Itogi shaped the political process more than it reflected it. Kiselev could get almost any information he wanted. ‘It became very difficult for Kiselev to distance himself from the Kremlin,’ Malashenko admitted.⁵¹ Kiselev turned from being a political commentator into a political figure, whose rating was followed by newspapers along with other politicians.

In recognition of Malashenko’s role in the election campaign, Yeltsin asked him to be his chief of staff – one of the most important posts in the Kremlin. But Malashenko did something that was unprecedented: he turned Yeltsin down – a decision he would regret for the rest of his life. He did not do it out of false modesty or even humility. On the contrary, Malashenko believed that being in charge of a private television channel was far more important than being in charge of one of the Kremlin’s towers, as Yeltsin’s election campaign had just proved.

Having defeated the communists and demolished the party of war in the Kremlin, Malashenko and Gusinsky felt invincible. The victory of liberalism in Russia seemed complete and final – whoever would come after Yeltsin. ‘I did not see a political task. Now I understand that the central question in Russian political history is one of succession. If, back in 1996, I realized that Yeltsin’s succession would determine Russia’s future direction, perhaps I would have acted differently. But at the time this did not occur to me,’ Malashenko said years later.⁵²

There was another reason for his refusal, however. Having observed Gusinsky and Berezovsky during the election campaign, having fought on their side against the ‘statists’, he knew that if he accepted Yeltsin’s offer, they would treat him as ‘their’ man in the Kremlin, a tool of their influence rather than a source of power. The only way he could be his own master would be to declare a war on the oligarchs – something that he was neither willing nor able to do.

Yet, for all the brashness and the questionable origins of their wealth, he saw the oligarchs generally, and Gusinsky in particular, as private businessmen whose individualism and initiative could keep state power in check, something that Malashenko strongly believed in. An extreme individualist and misanthrope, Malashenko, the operator of one of the most important mass media channels in the country, had a low opinion of the masses. Liberalism and democracy were not synonyms to him, but antonyms. Fascinated by Spanish history, he fully subscribed to the ideas of Ortega y Gasset, who argued that democracy is no guarantee of liberalism and of individual rights and that any state – democratic or despotic – will seek to extend its powers and therefore needs to be countered with alternative sources of power that can be mustered only by private barons.

In the corner of Malashenko’s office at NTV stood a suit of genuine Toledo armour. His motto, displayed on his computer screensaver, was a quote from Ortega: ‘These towers were erected to protect an individual from the state. Gentlemen, long live freedom!’ The most important one was a television tower.

After seventy years of Soviet socialism, feudalism seemed like a step forward and the oligarchs were a lesser evil than those who had sacrificed millions of lives in the name of a strong state. With their taste for castles and private armies, the oligarchs seemed a good fit for the role of feudal barons.

As it soon turned out, Malashenko had miscalculated. His idea that the oligarchs would defend private liberties and counter the power of the state suffered a fiasco. A few years later, the oligarchy of the 1990s brought a KGB statist to the presidential post. The baronial identities that the oligarchs tried upon themselves were fake, but they behaved as though they owned the country, treating the rest of the population with contempt and arrogance. Their lack of historic perspective and above all responsibility meant that they used their money and power not to install rules and build institutions but to enlarge their fiefdoms and fight wars with one another and with the state.

The Bankers’ War

The first war between the oligarchs broke out in 1997 – less than a year after the elections. That war consumed not only the oligarchs, but also the government of young reformers appointed by Yeltsin after the election. The 1996 election assured the oligarchs that the future belonged to them and they began to turn this future into money and assets.

As a reward for his services, Gusinsky was given a full licence for one of the main channels, Channel 4, for a symbolic price and with no tender. This transformed NTV from a temporary ‘experiment’ into a permanent channel. But Gusinsky’s ambitions were now far greater. He decided to launch a satellite channel – along with the satellite itself – that would make his television omnipresent and autonomous of the state. It was the stuff of a James Bond movie. After relentless schmoozing, he got approval from Russia’s military and space industry chiefs and persuaded America’s State Department to give its blessing. He commissioned Hughes Space & Communications to build the satellite with the backing of America’s Export-Import bank.

To finance his new venture, he sold 30 per cent of NTV to Gazprom, Russia’s natural gas monopoly, run by the jovial, red-faced Soviet industry man, Rem Vyakhirev, who saw NTV as a deterrent against predators, including Berezovsky who had set his eyes on Gazprom. ‘NTV was like a gun hanging on the wall. If anyone attacked Vyakhirev, he could use it against them,’ said Gusinsky.⁵³ Gazprom also provided Gusinsky with a $40 million loan on extremely lenient terms.

Half in jest, Malashenko, highly sceptical of the whole venture, advised Gusinsky to privatize an oil firm or some other natural resource company to pay for this indulgence. But Gusinsky had other plans. He was eyeing Svyazinvest – a telephone communications company that consisted of dozens of regional providers which jointly controlled 22 million crackling telephone lines. Gusinsky’s grand vision was to consolidate all these communication assets in the country into one vast private holding that could then be floated on the New York Stock Exchange.

Before the 1996 elections, Gusinsky was the only Russian oligarch who did not participate in the privatization of state assets. Now Gusinsky was certain that Svyazinvest belonged to him by right. Media and communications were his fiefdom and fellow oligarchs, including Berezovsky, agreed and encouraged him. ‘Some even tried to persuade me that I should get it for free,’ said Gusinsky.⁵⁴ It seemed only fair: other oligarchs had already got their spoils, so why shouldn’t he?

He felt all the more entitled to it since he had spent six months wining and dining military generals and security services chiefs to get their agreement to allow private owners, including foreigners, into telecoms – a zone of strategic military importance since Soviet times. ‘The amount of alcohol which I had to drink with them over those six months inflicted serious damage to my liver.’⁵⁵ Gusinsky then went to Chubais, who had been appointed a deputy prime minister after the 1996 presidential election, to agree the terms of the auction. Foreigners would be allowed in and no state money was to be used in the bidding process.[2] ‘We agreed that it would be an honest auction that would draw a line under the loans-for-shares privatization. This was an absolute consensus,’ recalled Gusinsky.⁵⁶

Gusinsky’s understanding of an ‘honest’ auction had one important caveat, however: all other oligarchs who had participated in previous privatizations were supposed to stay away from Svyazinvest, allowing him to win the auction ‘honestly’, although he was prepared to pay real money for it. The oligarchs decided that Chubais was on their side.

Chubais had his own political agenda, however. He saw Svyazinvest as a chance to assert power over the oligarchs who considered him ‘their’ man. ‘I had a very simple picture of the world. If you want to beat someone, you need to consolidate resources. In 1996 I consolidated with the oligarchs against the communists.’⁵⁷ Now the main political task had shifted. The new target was the oligarchs. ‘If it was not Svyazinvest, it would have been something else,’ said Chubais.

The problem was that in his affront to the oligarchs, Chubais ‘consolidated’ resources with one of their kind – Vladimir Potanin – who devised the loans-for-shares scheme and who also served as a government minister while handling the government’s money: his private bank held the account of the state’s Customs Agency which maintained a balance of about $1 billion.

When the government announced that the auction for 25 per cent + 1 share of Svyazinvest would be open to all bidders, Potanin, who had left the government shortly before the auction, said he would participate. ‘I thought we had agreed that Potanin was not allowed to take part,’ Gusinsky recalled, ‘but suddenly Chubais told me there was no such deal.’⁵⁸ From Gusinsky’s point of view, this was a brazen breach of agreement.

Chubais’s pledge to make the auction fair was either hypocrisy, Gusinsky decided, or part of a secret deal with Potanin. ‘Chubais had upset the balance by pumping Potanin with [customs accounts] money,’ said Malashenko.⁵⁹ The situation was made worse by Gusinsky’s personal relationship with Chubais. He had been enchanted by the charismatic Chubais and did not even mind when other people told him so. Now he felt betrayed.

Berezovsky was there to console him. Although he had no obvious commercial interest in Svyazinvest, he inserted himself into the conflict and sided with Gusinsky against Chubais. Any war was positive for him. Like Chubais, he saw the auction as a battle for political control. Its outcome would determine his own status as Russia’s chief oligarch, a man who could rule Russia from behind the scenes. The conflict between Chubais and Berezovsky was least of all about democracy: neither side believed that ordinary people should be trusted with important decisions. In a poor country like Russia, democracy would always lead to populism and ultimately to authoritarianism. And only the rule of the few – who had resources and intellectual power – could launch the country on the right path. The whole question was who would be the ruling minority.

Chubais subscribed to the idea that the top priority was to build a market economy that would make the country richer, which would then create the right conditions for democracy. He never had to worry too much about the political base for their reforms – Yeltsin took care of that. ‘Our market approach was completely unsuitable for building a democracy. But we believed that a market economy and the creation of the middle class would result in a democracy,’ Chubais reflected later.⁶⁰ The oligarchs and the loans-for-shares privatizations were a necessary evil to avert a communist comeback and ensure the continuity of reforms. The auction of Svyazinvest would therefore be a necessary correction.

Two days before the auction, Berezovsky, Gusinsky and Potanin flew on Gusinsky’s private Gulfstream to the south of France where Chubais was on holiday. They told him that they had come to an agreement: Gusinsky would get Svyazinvest and Potanin would get the next asset to be sold by the state. Chubais dithered for a moment but refused to cave in. To him, it was not about who got what in a privatization, but who gets to set the rules. Berezovsky felt the same way. ‘You can’t just break the system over your knee. You are igniting a war,’ he told Chubais.⁶¹

On 25 July 1997, Potanin, backed by the money of international financier George Soros, won the auction by offering $2 billion, a record amount of money by the standards of Russian privatization, but only slightly more than Gusinsky. The next day a media war broke out. The first shot was fired by Berezovsky’s Channel One. The man who delivered it was Sergei Dorenko, a good-looking, shamelessly cynical but effective anchor with a deep, penetrating voice and an overt lack of scruples. Dorenko accused Potanin of planning to siphon profits out of Svyazinvest. He and George Soros, Dorenko said, were spekulianty (speculators), effectively black marketers, ‘people with a scandalous, tarnished-to-doubtful reputation’, who had benefited from a sweetheart deal arranged by Alfred Kokh, the man who had been in charge of conducting the auction on the government’s behalf.

Both Malashenko and Kiselev were on holiday abroad when the ‘bankers’ war’ broke out. Gusinsky summoned them back to Moscow. Malashenko, who was no longer running NTV but oversaw all of the television projects, including the satellite one, argued strongly against getting NTV involved. ‘I could see that Gusinsky had every reason to be furious – they did screw him over – but at the same time I was against waging any wars or fighting any vendetta. I thought we just needed to cut our losses and move on,’ said Malashenko.⁶² But this was not Gusinsky’s style. He was not an oligarch for nothing. Just as he could not cave in to gangsters, he could not submit to the government. ‘There was an informal block on saying anything negative about the young reformers of the new Yeltsin’s government. All we had to do was to remove it,’ Gusinsky said.⁶³

Gusinsky’s first target was Kokh. Through his own contacts in Switzerland, Gusinsky dug up information that Kokh had received a ‘book advance’ of $100,000 – a vast sum of money by the standards of most ordinary Russians – from a mysterious Swiss company, Servina, which, on closer inspection, appeared to have links to Potanin. Kokh had to resign.

A week into the war, Chubais gathered the oligarchs in his office, hoping to put pressure on Gusinsky and Berezovsky to stop fighting. Those who had no interests in the auction, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky, were called to arbitrate and ruled that Gusinsky should have got Svyazinvest. Gusinsky offered to match Potanin’s price. Chubais, however, refused to reconsider the result of the auction. ‘He was certainly breaking an informal agreement,’ said Khodorkovsky.⁶⁴ At the same time Chubais told Yeltsin, ‘We need to sock them in the teeth for once in our lives! We won’t achieve anything if we don’t do this.’⁶⁵ But if Chubais wanted to fight, so did Berezovsky and Gusinsky. Buoyed by the support of his peers, Gusinsky doubled his effort.

As the war got more intense, Yeltsin grew increasingly nervous and gathered the oligarchs in the Kremlin. On the face of it, the meeting went well. But as Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs, ‘Despite their assurances, I sensed that these men had not really become my allies. After the meeting there was an unfamiliar silence in the room… It was as if I were dealing with people of a different race, people made not of steel but of some kind of cosmic metal… There was no area for compromise.’⁶⁶

Two weeks later, Chubais and his fellow deputy prime minister, Boris Nemtsov, persuaded Yeltsin to fire Berezovsky as the deputy secretary of the Security Council. This achieved nothing: Yeltsin took away Berezovsky’s title, but left him with the main source of his power – Channel One. A few days later Gusinsky and Berezovsky fired back at Chubais with such force that it knocked out the entire government. On 12 November 1997, Gusinsky’s radio station, Echo Moskvy, reported that Chubais and five of his deputies had received $90,000 each in book advance fees from a publisher owned directly by Potanin.

The story was immediately picked up and amplified manifold by both NTV and Channel One. ‘The government no longer has to worry about its [moral] authority. It has none,’ Dorenko stated bombastically.⁶⁷ Then, as though by magic, Dorenko’s sources in the prosecutor’s office started to leak documents, bank transfer details, contracts. There was little doubt that this was the fruit of Gusinsky’s efforts. To any ordinary viewer, it seemed that the young reformers, who preached to the oligarchs and the country about honesty and fair competition, were at it as well.

Chubais first dismissed the whole story as slander, then, after being given a dressing-down by Yeltsin, admitted that the fee was, perhaps, too large. A few days later Chubais offered his resignation. He was stripped of his post as finance minister, though he formally remained in the government. Gusinsky, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, justified himself by saying that what NTV told its viewers about the book scandal was true: ‘We did not lie, we did not make up the story. It was simply that we allowed it to be aired’. The story was dug out and cynically used by the oligarchs to destroy Chubais. As Chubais later admitted, the book was conceived to cover the transfer of money left over from Yeltsin’s election campaign to his team as a reward for their service. Effectively, it was no better or worse than the ‘box money’. Both Gusinsky and Berezovsky knew this.

One person who did know about it, but who was also turned into a target, was Boris Nemtsov, a young, bright and charismatic reformer who had moved to Moscow in the spring of 1997 from Nizhniy Novgorod, an old Russian merchants’ town on the Volga where he had served as governor. Yeltsin groomed Nemtsov – a brainy former physicist with a vast frame, curly black hair and oozing charm – as his successor and even introduced him to world leaders as such. In many ways Nemtsov was part of the Perestroika-era dream of Russia as a liberal, Western-oriented, dignified country driven by energetic, well-educated and decent people. Yeltsin first met Nemtsov in 1990 when the thirty-one-year-old democrat was elected to Russia’s first parliament. Nemtsov shunned communist ideology not because it was communist, but because it was ideology. Instead of ideology, he had values and ideas. He stood by Yeltsin in August 1991 and in October 1993 – despite criticizing Yeltsin’s decision to dissolve the parliament.

Nemtsov and Chubais – the two deputy prime ministers – were the core of Yeltsin’s government of young reformers who, after the communist defeat in 1996, were supposed to finally launch the country on a path of reforms. Nemtsov reflected the optimism of the 1990s, when everything seemed possible for those who had energy and brains – and he had both. Unlike most people of his generation he also had integrity and an inherent understanding of right and wrong. Stealing, betraying, killing were wrong. Thinking, loving, living were good. Of all the people who served in the Russian government, Nemtsov was the most scrupulously honest and untainted by connections with oligarchs. In fact, it was Nemtsov who coined the word ‘oligarchs’ and took them on. In January 1998, Nemtsov organized a public debate called ‘Russia’s Future: Oligarchy or Freedom?’ ‘I had the idea of a normal European Russia and the oligarchs did not fit into it. They had privatized most of the state institutions – including the police, security services and the courts. So my first thought was that we should “re-nationalize” the state, take away their special passes to the Kremlin and their special blue flashing lights, which allowed them to break traffic rules, remove the system of banks entitled to state money,’ said Nemtsov.⁶⁸

The privatization of Svyazinvest was expected to highlight Nemtsov’s independence from the influence of the oligarchs and turn it into his political capital. But if the oligarchs did not fit into Nemtsov’s picture of Russia, neither did he fit into theirs. Although he clearly had nothing to do with the book scandal, he was an obvious target. To attack Nemtsov, Dorenko hired prostitutes who, for a modest price of about $200, would say that Nemtsov used their services but forgot to pay. ‘I am a [TV] killer and they wrote a contract out on you,’ Dorenko apparently told Nemtsov a few years later when they bumped into each other at an airport.⁶⁹ (Dorenko said the prostitutes’ tape was simply given to him and he did not think it necessary to verify their story.)

NTV peddled Nemtsov’s gaffes, including his appearance in white chinos at an official ceremony greeting the President of Azerbaijan. Kiselev tracked Nemtsov’s rating, which he himself helped to drive down, until it reached single digits. He then gleefully placed a large graphic cross over Nemtsov’s face and ‘sent’ his portrait into a dustbin.

In fact, the talk about anyone’s electoral rating a year after the presidential elections was meaningless. But as Maxim Sokolov sarcastically wrote at the time, television channels thrived on election campaigns just as a military industrial complex thrives on a war. ‘A war guarantees demand for arms. Election campaigns create the same demand for information weapons.’⁷⁰ By constantly hyping up the subject of rating, NTV was reminding the politicians of its powers.

The ‘revelations’ were addressed to one spectator – Yeltsin – and were supposed to persuade him to sack the government of young reformers with little idea of who would replace them. Yeltsin took NTV’s attack on his reformers, and Nemtsov in particular, to heart. A couple of weeks after the Svyazinvest auction, Yeltsin called Nemstov in. ‘I am tired of defending you,’ he said. Nemtsov stayed in the government for another year, but he was weakened and demoralized and in the end handed in his resignation.

What started as a war between bankers had turned into a major political crisis.

Chubais rightly likened the scandal stirred up by television in 1997 to ‘exploding an atomic bomb’. The abbreviation NTV now stood not for ‘normal’ or ‘nezavisimoe’ (independent), but for ‘nuclear’ television. The bankers’ war left no winners, destroyed everything in its range and left the field polluted with radiation for years to come. The point of ultimate victory and triumph, which NTV and Gusinsky reached in 1996, marked the beginning of a decline. Surviving victory turned out to be a far greater challenge than achieving it.

The irony was that the oligarchs who sided with Yeltsin against the communists and nationalists managed to do what the parliament in 1993 failed to achieve: the oligarchy destroyed the government of liberal reformers and discredited the idea of liberal media. Yet, unlike in 1993 and 1996, the information war of 1997 contained no ideology or even an idea about the country’s future. But it did contaminate television and NTV in particular.

Powerful media magnates behaved not like the elite they claimed to be, but like small-time co-operators with sophisticated weapons in their hands. They dressed like a Westernized elite, spoke like one, sent their children to Western schools, but they lacked the most important attribute of an elite – a sense of responsibility for, and historic consciousness of, their own country. They behaved like caricatures of capitalists in old Soviet journals. Having helped Yeltsin to win in 1996, they did not use the chance to make Russia better. Nor did they care about public good, or the well-being of the Russian people. ‘We did not match the historic task which was in front of us,’ Malashenko admitted.⁷¹ The same could be said of Chubais, though.

Giddy with their own wealth and power, the oligarchs did not realize that, along with Chubais and Nemtsov, they were also destroying their own futures and the future of the country. Arrogance and narrow-mindedness on both sides of the conflict got the better of common sense. The ultimate irony was that the asset, which the oligarchs fought for so furiously, turned out to be worthless. Having sold 25 per cent of the firm, the government did not privatize it further and Potanin never got real control over the company. George Soros called it the worst investment he had ever made.

The breakout of the ‘bankers’ war’ coincided with a dramatic event in the life of NTV which had an equally lasting consequence on the country’s narrative. On 10 May, Elena Masyuk, the channel’s intrepid war reporter, and two members of her crew were kidnapped in Chechnya, which had received de facto independence as a result of the 1996 peace accord aimed at improving Yeltsin’s chances for re-election and was allowed to hold its own presidential elections.

Chechnya’s new president, Aslan Maskhadov, was a moderate but ineffective former military man, who could barely control his own field commanders. Chechnya turned into a black hole, sucking in money allocated by the Kremlin, siphoning off oil from a pipeline that went through Chechnya, and kidnapping journalists and aid workers for ransom.

Masyuk was not the first journalist to be kidnapped in Chechnya, but of all Russian television reporters, she was arguably the most sympathetic towards the Chechen independence cause. She also had the best access to its field commanders, including Shamil Basayev. In 1995, days after Basayev had led the attack on the hospital in Buddenovsk and was then allowed to ‘vanish’ in Chechnya as part of the deal for freeing the hostages, the Kremlin claimed that he had gone abroad. Masyuk managed to find and interview him on camera, embarrassing the Russian security services. Her reporting, much of it from the Chechen side, tested the limits of objectivity and Malashenko effectively banned her from travelling to Chechnya. This did not stop Oleg Dobrodeev, who had assumed day-to-day control of NTV, from sending Masyuk to interview one of the field commanders who had taken responsibility for an explosion at a railway station a few weeks earlier.

In July 1997, in the midst of NTV’s frenzied attempts to free its journalists, Yeltsin held a dinner for those who had worked in his election team. Yeltsin talked about the great successes over the past year – both in the economy and in settling for peace in Chechnya. Yeltsin’s forced optimism could barely conceal his worries. Then Malashenko asked to speak.

He told Yeltsin that the situation in Chechnya was not as radiant as the president had painted and that sooner or later Russia would face a choice: either to start another war or to capitulate, in which case Chechnya would rule Russia, because it had a will and Russia did not. The government, he asserted, could not provide safety for its own people. He spoke for ten or fifteen minutes. ‘I don’t know what came over me, but it just burst out. It was wrong, of course – one cannot speak for that long, and in that way, to the president.’⁷²

After Malashenko’s monologue, silence fell over the dining table. ‘Yeltsin said nothing. He just continued to eat in complete silence. After a long pause Yeltsin started to tell us again how everything was getting better in the country, how salaries and pensions were being paid on time.’

When Yeltsin finished, Malashenko spoke again: ‘Forgive me, Boris Nikolaevich, but I just raised a subject which I consider to be of extreme importance. You may disagree with me and tell me that I am completely wrong, but you can’t just ignore it.’ At that point Yeltsin became white with anger. Malashenko later said: ‘I suddenly remembered the story I heard at university explaining why a bear is so dangerous. It is because a bear’s facial muscles are weak, so he always looks as though he is smiling. There is no way to tell when he is turning angry, but by the time he does, it is usually too late.’ Barely able to control his temper, Yeltsin turned to Malashenko: ‘I speak. You speak. But we will not have a discussion.’⁷³ The dinner ended in awkward silence with everyone staring at their plates.

Shortly afterwards, Gusinsky paid the ransom of $1.5 million through Berezovsky’s business partner, and on 17 August 1997, after three months in captivity, Masyuk was released – to coincide with a visit by Aslan Maskhadov to Moscow. Two days later, Malashenko, Dobrodeev and Kiselev gave a press conference at the Slavyankaya Hotel, where NTV usually celebrated its birthday. Malashenko announced that NTV had paid a ransom and pointed a finger at Maskhadov and his government. ‘We have every reason to assert that Maskhadov is well aware of the kidnapping business in Chechnya which is conducted by his lieutenants, including his vice-president Vakha Arsanov…’ Then, after a pause, Malashenko added: ‘I don’t know whether Yeltsin realized that [when he met with Maskhadov] he was talking to their main captor: I am convinced that only the captor could dovetail his visit to Moscow with the release of the journalist.’⁷⁴ Malashenko concluded that the state was incapable of performing its constitutional duties and defending its own citizens.

Masyuk spoke about her experience in captivity where she had been guarded by drug-inhaling Chechens. ‘Sometimes we had an urge to kill them. There were situations when we could have simply stretched out our arms [to reach the weapons] and pulled the trigger… Today there is nothing for journalists to do in Chechnya. Let them sit there with no journalists. I don’t judge the whole of the Chechen people, but there are people I hate,’ she said angrily.⁷⁵

The day after the press conference, Yeltsin publicly answered Malashenko. At a meeting of his Security Council, he said the peace process was taking place in Chechnya and some ill-informed people like Malashenko, who knew nothing about Chechnya, were trying to blacken it. Yeltsin was thinking about his own succession and was desperately eager to close the Chechen question and move on – hence his fury with Malashenko’s attempt to stir up the subject. Talks with Maskhadov were necessary because, however weak the Chechnya president was, he provided the only alternative to the war that NTV berated Yeltsin for.

After Yeltsin’s angry comments, Berezovsky came up to Malashenko to cheer him up. ‘“Don’t worry, Igor”, he told me. “The fact is that now, after Masyuk, we can do what the hell we like with Chechnya.”’⁷⁶ Nobody incited the hatred towards Chechnya and criticized Yeltsin for his peace deal with Maskhadov more than Berezovsky’s Channel One, which put out a weekly programme presented by Nevzorov, who was hired by Berezovsky, called Dni (Days) – a reference to the ultra-national newspaper Den’ (Day), edited by Prokhanov. In the summer of 1996, Nevzorov’s programme showed Russian paratroopers brandishing the sun-cured ears of Chechen fighters, and mentioned crucifixions of federal soldiers that those fighters had performed.

In 1997 the disturbing images moved to the news slots. Soon after the release of Masyuk, NTV and Channel One showed gratuitous footage of public executions in Chechnya of people sentenced to death by the shariah law. ‘Now you see how the two convicted people are being led to a wall covered with black cloth,’ a good-looking Channel One female presenter explained calmly.⁷⁷ ‘The execution is being set up in a way traditional for some Eastern countries.’ Both channels showed the actual moment of shooting in their prime-time news. This was clearly different from reporting a war. The purpose of the video was not to inform the public but to incite its repulsion and outrage.

The confluence of these two events – the demolition of the government of young reformers and the shift in the public attitude towards Chechnya – made stabilization in the country all but impossible. But stability was the last thing that television needed. Instability allowed television to exercise influence and keep the audience entertained. A fast succession of political faces on television meant the audience did not get bored. Politics followed the rules of consumerism: Lebed was the flavour of the month one day, gone another. So was Nemtsov.

The year 1997 was supposed to herald the beginning of a new country. It did not. The problem was not just the behaviour of the media or the shallowness of the elite. The problem was the lack of a new project or vision of the future that could unite the country. The threat of a communist revanche that helped Yeltsin’s side to consolidate his electorate, had been used up in the 1996 elections. Communist leaders now seemed more interested in cashing in on their ‘threat’ than realizing it. The defeat of the communists revealed the lack of further purpose. Nobody in Russia had any sense of direction, true identity, or history – and nobody cared.

Old Songs about Important Things

Russia’s post-communist constitution stated that no ideology could be imposed by the state. Yet, after the 1996 elections, the vacuum of a unifying idea became self-evident. Yeltsin charged his aides to come up with an answer to ‘what national idea or national ideology is most important for Russia’. As Kommersant wrote in 1997:

A special group was put together and even produced a pamphlet on the subject, but it did not amount to much. The very way in which this search was conducted was slightly comical. Like a tsar from a Russian fairy tale, Yeltsin was instructed to ‘go I know not whither and fetch I know not what’. The only possible idea could be a nationalist one, but Yeltsin who saw Russia’s future as a Western-style democracy did not go in that direction.

The lack of a new big project or idea was also evident in the lack of any coherent style. So the media turned to history – not by way of a serious examination, but as a form of entertainment. Having thwarted the communists, the young and bright stars of the media looked at the past as a fashion accessory or an artefact; Soviet civilization – whatever the merits of its political regime and ideology – had left behind a vast reserve that could be tapped to fill a stylistic void.

A wave of nostalgia swept Russian popular culture and television. Old Soviet plays, songs and films attracted large audiences. The Soviet era was treated with ironic sentimentality as a source of sincerity and meaning. In fact, the first signs of this nostalgia began to emerge soon after the Soviet collapse. In the 1994 New Year’s Eve NTV television show, young and carefree journalists appeared on the screen sporting red Young Pioneer ties as a tribute to their own childhoods and singing a song from the classic Soviet comedy of 1956, Carnival Night. The show’s host was Leonid Parfenov – one of NTV’s brightest stars with an impeccable sense of style and period. He wore a dinner jacket and black tie and brought a technological novelty into the studio – a karaoke box. ‘It allows you to sing in your own voice to recorded music,’ Parfenov explained with a smile.

In contrast to Kiselev and Dobrodeev – golden Moscow youths with good connections – Parfenov, in his early thirties at the time, came from the small provincial town of Cherepovets, and conquered Moscow with his light and sincere touch. One of Parfenov’s first documentaries made for Central Television was called Deti XX s’ezda’ (The Children of the 20th Congress) and was dedicated to the shestidesiatniki. Standing on the Sparrow Hills above Moscow, Parfenov spoke to the camera: ‘We need to understand their rise, their drama, maybe even their tragedy and their second wind. Because without them, we would not be here and without their bitter experience – we can do nothing. Nothing. That is it.’ Parfenov posessed an acute sense of his own roots, Soviet history and its aesthetics.

The casual name of Parfenov’s programme on NTV, Namedni (an obsolescent form of ‘recently’ in Russian), implied the past and, in 1996, Parfenov turned to the stylistically coherent Soviet period and its popular culture, relaunching Namedni as a series of programmes about the past thirty years of Russian history. He defined historic periods not so much by political events, but by their sound, smell, rhythm and tone, mixing high and popular culture. Parfenov used montage and inversions liberally, and occasionally ‘mixed’ himself into historic documentary footage. There he was shooting ducks with Khrushchev, chatting with Hollywood actor Tom Hanks, lighting Fidel Castro’s cigar, kissing Marilyn Monroe. Behind Parfenov’s light-hearted project stood a serious perspective on Russia’s reconciliation with its own past and on turning history from a political minefield into an aesthetic object, providing people with a much-needed sense of continuity and stability.

Parfenov was not the only person trying to make a connection with the past. In 1995, Parfenov’s friend Konstantin Ernst, who had just been appointed the ‘chief producer of Channel One’, launched an advertising campaign called ‘The Russia Project’, which consisted of a series of one-and-a-half-minute films in which famous Soviet actors played ordinary people, war veterans, bus drivers, cosmonauts, or alcoholics. The purpose was to promote simple feelings: love, friendship, memory, kindness. In one episode, an old man walks through a Metro station and hears the sound of a wartime march; he stops and remembers his youth and his love when he was a young soldier. Each episode ended on a tag-line: ‘We remember’ or ‘It is my city’ or ‘Home is always better’.

This was a precursor to a much more resonant project that Ernst and Parfenov produced in December 1995. It was called Starye pesni o glavnom (Old Songs about Important Things). In it, Russian pop stars, dressed in 1930s fashion, performed popular songs of that decade in a pastiche show inspired by the Soviet socialist musicals and paintings such as the 1937 Celebration in a Collective Farm. It worked like a karaoke machine. ‘I had a very acute postmodernist feeling that everything has already been said, that it just needed to be revived. We couldn’t just waste it. Yes, these songs were written in the Stalinist years, but they were good songs,’ said Parfenov.⁷⁹ To make the film, Parfenov and Ernst resurrected an old pavilion at Mosfilm Studios (Moscow’s equivalent of London’s Ealing Studios) and dusted off its old props, trucks and costumes. Yet Old Songs was shot using the best Kodak film and ended up costing $3 million – a vast sum of money by Russian standards at the time. It was sleek and modern.

The film appealed equally to the sense of nostalgia among older Soviet people – many of whom had voted for the communists – and to a younger audience that could barely remember Soviet culture, but danced to Soviet songs in expensive Moscow nightclubs, bought Soviet memorabilia in trendy flea markets and put on old Soviet clothes for fancy-dress parties. None of the participants could imagine that within three years the Kremlin would revive the most important old song of all – the Soviet national anthem – which would signal the start of restoration, or that a fancy-dress party would soon turn into a neo-Soviet parade of state nationalism.

However, in 1997, the young, urban NTV audience saw Parfenov’s Old Songs as proof that Russia could never return to the Soviet system and ideological wars. Parfenov’s programmes were saturated with the feeling of warmth that people experience when visiting the home where they grew up, picking up and smiling at their old toys or records. ‘We had parted with the Soviet regime, life around us was very different. We could sit in front of a Samsung TV, drink Absolut vodka, decorate our flats in a “European” style, but the soul demanded some harmony. What other songs could we sing?’ said Parfenov.⁸⁰ Neither he nor Ernst had any political agenda when they made Old Songs: they made it for fun and their own pleasure, but they accurately sensed the public appetite.

It was also a natural reaction to several years of overdosing on popular Western culture which had swept over Russian television after the Soviet collapse and to a relentless bashing of anything Soviet under the slogan ‘We are the worst and useless’. It was only to be expected that, a few years later, an inferiority complex would engender feelings of wounded pride. As Parfenov told the New York Times in 1995, ‘It’s about admitting that there were things that were good… that there is nothing to be ashamed of, and that we don’t have any other history. What else can we reflect? Why should we struggle with ourselves?⁸¹ (Five years later Vladimir Putin would repeat the same words almost verbatim.) Parfenov’s work provided a sense of continuity and soothed the trauma of fractured history. In that sense his programmes acted like a tranquillizer, removing symptoms of anxiety.

Later, when nostalgia for the Soviet past morphed into a restoration of Soviet political practices, liberal critics pointed to Parfenov’s project as the original sin of stirring up nostalgia in the first place. This was hardly fair. The revival of old Soviet instincts was caused not by Old Songs, but by the lack of immunity against those instincts and the absence of a nation-building project and institutions.

One politician who tried to remake the past and turn Old Songs into a new ideology was Yuri Luzhkov, the all-powerful mayor of Moscow whose presidential ambitions were manifested in the reconstruction of the late-nineteenth-century Cathedral of Christ the Saviour that had been blown up by Stalin in 1931.[3] At the same time as Parfenov’s Namedni, Luzhkov celebrated the 850th anniversary of Moscow’s foundation. The date itself was chosen rather randomly, since nobody knew precisely when Moscow was founded, but it marked the fiftieth anniversary of the last lavish celebration in 1947.

The celebrations made use of all periods of Russian history as long as they contributed to Russia’s glory. Russian princes beheaded by the tsars, the tsars shot dead by the communists, the communists overthrown by Yeltsin – they all coexisted harmoniously and rejoiced triumphantly in Luzhkov’s extravaganza. Soviet and pre-Soviet icons were bundled together and fused into a peculiar new ideology of nationalism and patriotism.

As Andrei Zorin, a historian of state ideologies, wrote at the time in an essay, ‘Are We Having Fun Yet?’, history was being replaced by mythology.⁸² A quotation from an old Stalinist song ‘Moscow – you are my favourite’ decorated banners stretched across the city’s main streets. Television channels churned out Soviet retro films and songs about the good old days. A statue to Peter the Great, who moved the Russian capital to St Petersburg, was placed in the centre of Moscow – a tribute to Luzhkov ‘as a great reformer’, according to its maker Zurab Tsereteli. Historic conflicts were not reconciled but obliterated. The unifying idea was consumerism, legitimated by the history of the Russian Empire and by the Russian Orthodox Church.

One of the most elegant squares in the city – between the Kremlin and the old Moscow University – the site of mass political rallies in the late 1980s and early 1990s – was turned into an underground shopping centre and an overground amusement park. Its globed glass roofs rose up from the ground like bubbles from the earth. A few hundred metres away, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, reconstructed with lavish donations from the oligarchs, gleamed with its gilded cupolas. The purpose of this remake was not to atone for the past sins of the regime, but, on the contrary, ‘to create an illusion that the demotion never happened. We have to believe that all these buildings were always present, that nothing bad was ever done to them.’⁸³

The idea of a collective repentance vanished. A serious examination of the Soviet past would have raised the question nobody wished to be asked, let alone answer: who was responsible for the Soviet experiment and the suffering it brought? The only honest answer would be ‘everyone’. Several Russian artists who wrestled with that question inevitably arrived at the grim conclusion that Stalinism was an act of self-destruction rather than an external force.

But Moscow was having too much fun for such dark matters. The Russian stock market was booming, money was flowing into the country, attracted by crazily high interest rates; Moscow restaurants were full. The fact that much of the country was still suffering from chronic wage arrears, that poverty was reaching its post-Soviet peak and that the majority of the population was barely getting by, hardly registered in Moscow.

Meltdown

While Moscow was revelling and the oligarchs savouring their victory over the government of young reformers, thousands of miles to the east in Asia a major financial crisis on the scale of the Great Depression was unfolding and investors began to withdraw money from emerging markets. The Russian government, however, was too demoralized by the bankers’ war and the oligarchs too euphoric to think about the financial tsunami heading Russia’s way. Gusinsky was preparing to float his company for $1.2 billion on the New York Stock Exchange to pay for the new satellite he was planning to launch.

Meanwhile, Russia’s economy was in a sorry state. The country was running a large budget deficit; the oligarchs used every loophole to avoid paying taxes. To finance itself, the government had been issuing short-term high-yielding bonds. By the spring of 1998 the interest rate on those bonds was exceeding 50 per cent. To repay bondholders the government was issuing more bonds with even higher yields. The oligarchs and foreign speculators were all piling in. Effectively, it was a debt pyramid of vast proportions and, as with all pyramids, it was only a matter of time before it started crashing.

Politics was hardly more stable. In early 1998 Yeltsin sacked Chernomyrdin, who had faithfully served him as prime minister since 1993. The most popular explanation was that Yeltsin had grown suspicious of Chernomyrdin’s presidential ambitions. The opposite explanation, supported by the oligarchs and Yeltsin himself, was that Chernomyrdin had exhausted his potential, was unelectable as Yeltsin’s successor and therefore had to be disposed of. The oligarchs, along with Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko and her husband Valentin Yumashev, held counsel about who should replace Chernomyrdin.

At one such meeting, Berezovsky suggested Malashenko. Everyone seemed to like the idea, apart from Malashenko himself. Furiously, he turned to Berezovsky: ‘And do you know what my first decision will be? I will kick you out of the country the very next day.’ ‘Why is that?’ Berezovsky asked, taking it as a joke. ‘Because outside this building, virtually, stands the whole country demanding for you to be kicked out.’ Berezovsky was taken aback. ‘I was not joking,’ Malashenko said years later. ‘If I were to act as a politician I would have had to maximize power, which is what Putin did a few years later. But this is precisely why I did not want to do it – I just did not like the idea of a country like that.’⁸⁴

After the ‘bankers’ war’, Yeltsin, too, realized that the oligarchs were getting too powerful and he was looking for a man who would be efficient, economically literate but also distant from the oligarchs – a new face altogether, untainted by previous scandals. Yeltsin’s choice for Chernomyrdin’s replacement was Sergei Kiriyenko, a baby-faced, smiling, thirty-five-year-old former banker from Nizhniy Novgorod – a protégé of Nemtsov’s, quickly dubbed ‘Kinder Surprise’. But while Kiriyenko may have been a good technocrat to serve as a government minister in calm times, he was appointed when, in the words of Gaidar, ‘a mine had not only been planted, but its fuse had also been lit’.⁸⁵ The idea of Kiriyenko being able to stand up to the oligarchs was wishful thinking as the oligarchs were keen to prove.

In May 1998, the miners from the Kuzbas region – unpaid for months – went on strike. Some blocked railways. A few hundred came to Moscow, banging their helmets on the ground in front of the White House and refusing to leave. Miners’ strikes had happened before, but this one was clearly stoked and egged on by television, which showed it with great sympathy as the main event in the country, thus sustaining it over weeks and mobilizing other miners to join in. As Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs, the strike became an excuse for attacking Kiriyenko’s government. When Yeltsin asked television executives to stop this information attack, they pretended to be indignant. ‘Not to notice that half of the country is cut off by the miners’ strikes, to pretend that it is not happening and accuse the media – that is something we’ve seen before,’ said Dobrodeev.⁸⁶ This was the height of cynicism.

Meanwhile Channel One was entertaining its audience with a game show that captured the crazy spirit of those pre-crisis days. It was called Zolotaia likhoradka (Gold Rush). The audience was ushered into the studio, resembling a dimly lit vault, by a dwarf in a golden cloak. The host, pretending to be Satan, and demonically laughing, asked the audience general knowledge questions and selected a finalist – usually some middle-aged, balding man with bags under his eyes. If the finalist answered the questions correctly, he was offered a slab of gold and showered with banknotes. If not, a suitcase of gold melted away in front of his eyes. ‘What a remarkably nasty thing to do: tempting people with money they have not earned. How tactless, in a country which officially has no money, to play for gold and to throw banknotes into the air on the screen,’ Petrovskaya, the TV critic, wrote.⁸⁷ Within weeks, the entire country was to observe its savings, along with Russia’s gold reserves, melt away.

On 17 August 1998 the Russian government, unable to repay or roll over its debt with a yield of 150 per cent, declared itself bankrupt. It simultaneously defaulted on its rouble-denominated debt and devalued its currency. Countries sometimes default on their local debts in order not to devalue the currency, and sometimes they devalue their currency in order to repay their debt. Russia did both. To protect the oligarchs, the government also declared an official moratorium on their payments to foreign investors, allowing Russian banks not to repay $16 billion worth of debt owned to foreigners.

Less than a week after the default, Kiriyenko and Nemtsov were gone. The day Yeltsin counter-signed their resignation, they walked out of the White House with a bottle of vodka and went over to the striking miners to drink it with them. Three months after the crisis, in November 1998, Gusinsky watched his American satellite blast off from Cape Canaveral. It was the first-ever American satellite ordered by a private Russian client. Gusinsky swelled with pride. There was one problem: his potential viewers – the nascent middle class – were no longer ready to subscribe to it. People cut back on anything that was not essential, including Gusinsky’s satellite channel. Television advertising plummeted.

Gusinsky’s plans to float the company on the New York Stock Exchange were scrapped. Foreign investors also had little appetite for Russian assets. Yet Gusinsky was still full of enthusiasm. He turned to his friend Rem Vyakhirev, the head of Gazprom, and they agreed on a loan of $260 million. A year later, Gusinsky took another loan of a similar size – also guaranteed by Gazprom. At the time Gusinsky could barely imagine that he was putting a noose around his neck. Whatever the events that were taking place in the country, he believed that his future was protected by his media machine.

The long-lasting impact of the crisis, however, went beyond economics. The economy – as it happened – started to grow only a year later, buoyed by the weak currency that made Russian exports more competitive, and the middle class got back on its feet. The main impact was political. It was not just the government of liberal reformers that was blown up by the crisis, but their entire model of turning Russia into a ‘normal’ country. Their hope that Russia’s transformation into a functioning market democracy could be achieved by monetarism and privatization turned out as ephemeral as the Perestroika generation’s idea that democracy and freedom of speech would automatically bring prosperity.

There was a bitter irony in this turn of fortunes. Seven years earlier, in 1991, the ideologues of the Russian liberal reforms, the generation of Kommersant and NTV, had declared their parents – those who had initiated Perestroika and believed in socialism with a human face – bankrupt both morally and financially. Now they were in the same position.

Having failed to build their own political foundation, the reformers and the oligarchs alike relied on Yeltsin for political cover. Now he was in a precarious position both physically and politically. Yeltsin never understood the workings of the market economy, but he had put his trust in the knowledge and ability of the Soviet-era meritocracy that controlled the economy and the media to deliver Russia into a better state. That trust was now gone. The question of succession and ‘continuity of power’, however, remained.

In Search of a Spy

In September 1998 NTV aired its first big project of the new television season. It was produced and presented by Leonid Parfenov and was dedicated to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the iconic Soviet television spy film – Semnadstat’ mgnovenii vesny (Seventeen Moments of Spring). The series’ main character is the Soviet spy Maxim Isaev who infiltrates the Nazi high command at the very end of the Second World War under the name of Max Otto von Stierlitz – a well-regarded SS Standartenführer. His task is to find out who in the German Reich is leading backdoor peace negotiations with America and to foil their attempt to undercut Stalin’s Soviet Union. Stierlitz learns about Himmler’s secret communications with Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA, and leaks the details to Hitler and reports it to Stalin, thus torpedoing America’s ‘treacherous’ plans.

The twelve-part television series was released in 1973 and became an instant hit gathering between 50 and 80 million viewers every night. No Russian film before or after has attracted such an audience. At 7.30 p.m. when the film was shown on Channel One, the streets of Soviet cities emptied out, the crime rate fell and electricity consumption surged. It was shown every year before and after the Soviet collapse.

Stierlitz was a cult figure who spawned an entire Soviet folklore – he was the subject of popular jokes and kids’ war games. Favourite lines from the film and its soulful theme tune were as popular as those from any James Bond film.

The Nazi officers were played by the most popular and best-loved Soviet actors. They were human and likeable and nobody more so than Stierlitz himself, who was played by the heart-throb Vyacheslav Tikhonov. Tall and handsome, with perfect cheekbones, a chiselled nose and piercing blue eyes, he was calm and unflappable. The sleek and shiny Nazi uniform, tailored in the Soviet defence ministry workshops, seemed to have been shaped on him. He was a perfect Russian ‘German’, more Aryan in his appearance and style than any of the ‘real’ Nazis in the film.[1]

The film was part of a propaganda campaign launched by Yuri Andropov, who became the head of the KGB in the late 1960s. Its aim was to improve the image of the KGB from a dark, secret police – a synonym of political repression – and to attract young, bright recruits into a ‘glamorous’ secret service. The novel by Yulian Semyonov, on which the film was based, was commissioned personally by Andropov to glorify Soviet secret agents serving abroad.

In his two-part stylized documentary about Seventeen Moments of Spring, Parfenov presented and partly enacted the story of the film’s creation. In a sober 1970s dark suit and tie, he walked into one of the KGB’s offices, ‘which was designed in such a way that it made a visitor look smaller and the owner of the office larger’, and sat behind the desk, with a portrait of Andropov on the wall and a row of telephones by his side. Parfenov picked up one phone which had a hammer and sickle in place of a dial, and ‘summoned’ Andropov’s deputy who handled the writer of the novel and consulted the makers of the film.

As TV critic Irina Petrovskaya wrote at the time:

Less than two months before Parfenov’s documentary came out, a new chief of the FSB – the post-Soviet successor to the KGB – had taken over Andropov’s old office. His name was Vladimir Putin, a former colonel who had served in Dresden in Eastern Germany in the 1980s. Putin was one of the ‘young and educated’ recruits who had been targeted by Andropov’s propaganda campaign. He was twenty-one years old, a law student in Leningrad, when Seventeen Moments of Spring was first released. Two years later, in 1975, he joined the service.

As fate would have it, Putin’s first appearance on the television screen was in ‘the character’ of Stierlitz. In 1992 the St Petersburg mayor’s office, where Putin served at the time, commissioned a documentary series about the city’s government. The only part of it that actually got made was about Putin – on his own initiative. Putin used the film to declare himself a former KGB operative. To make the film more entertaining, its director, Igor Shadkhan, set Putin up as a modern version of Stierlitz. ‘I decided to stage the last episode of the film where Stierlitz is driving a car,’ Shadkhan recalled.² Driving a Volga, Putin ‘re-enacted’ the last episode of the film in which Stierlitz drives his car back to Berlin. The famous theme tune from Seventeen Moments of Spring played in the background. Putin was a perfect fit.

The public longing for a real-life Stierlitz who could deal with any crisis calmly and efficiently was not a fanciful notion. In early 1999 Kommersant commissioned a public opinion survey asking which film character Russians would like to see as their next president. Stierlitz was runner-up to Second World War Marshal Zhukov, a real historic figure. Kommersant’s weekly supplement put Stierlitz on the cover with the caption ‘President-2000’. This was not, strictly speaking, a surprise. For all its history, the KGB had a mystique, an aura of knowledge and professionalism. Like secret agents anywhere else, KGB spies in Russia were seen as dashing, clever and protective of their motherland. In the public’s eye the KGB was a pragmatic, if also ruthless, force that supported economic modernization. After all, it had been Andropov who championed Gorbachev in the early 1980s.

Having lost faith in liberals, the country was searching for its Stierlitz. Yeltsin, too, looked towards the former and present members of the military or security services for a possible successor. Opinion pollsters told Yeltsin that his successor had to be young, ethnically Russian, a former member of the security services and non-drinking. Yeltsin, a man of great political instinct, agreed. ‘For some time now, I had been sensing the public need for a new quality in the state, for a steel backbone that would strengthen the whole government. We needed a man who was intellectual, democratic, and who could think anew, but who was firm in the military manner.’³ A year later such a person did appear, and was greeted with enthusiasm: Vladimir Putin. In September 1998 nobody had yet heard of him.

Goodbye America

In September 1998 Yeltsin appointed Evgeny Primakov, a sixty-nine-year-old foreign minister and veteran of Soviet politics, as Russia’s prime minister. It was more of a necessity than a wish. The oligarchs, including Berezovsky, who, a few months earlier, had helped to get Chernomyrdin fired, lobbied for his return, seeing him as a guarantee of continuity.

Yeltsin twice submitted Chernomyrdin’s nomination to the communist-dominated parliament and twice he was vetoed. It was a battle Yeltsin felt he could not win and in the end he was forced to nominate Primakov – a wily and experienced member of the Soviet nomenclatura, a candidate for the Politburo and an old spymaster who headed the first post-Soviet intelligence service. He was supposed to be a consensus figure, fulfilling the same role that Chernomyrdin performed in 1992: he would be loyal to Yeltsin, could lead a left-leaning government and satisfy communists in the parliament who could not possibly object to him as a liberal Westernizer.

Primakov was two years older than Yeltsin and had come into politics at the end of the Stalinist era. He started in state Soviet television, which often provided cover for ‘spooks’, worked at Pravda newspaper and specialized in foreign affairs which meant frequent trips abroad. His connections with the KGB were never formally declared, but always taken for granted. Primakov was an Arabist, a personal friend of Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat. But he had also worked with Gorbachev.

Primakov’s appointment had a therapeutic effect on the country, which had been shaken by the financial crisis. His slightly slurred speech and his Soviet manner were reassuring without being too threatening – at least not to ordinary people. He was measured and conservative and had an air of solidity and unhurried wisdom. Most people felt relieved – as though an old and steady hand was taking over the levers of power after a team of young and reckless pilots had nearly crashed the plane. ‘Don’t worry, the experiments and the turbulence are over,’ Primakov’s demeanour said. In public he spoke about a greater role of the state in the economy and played to the paternalistic sentiments in the country. At the same time he oversaw some budget cuts and took advice from American economists.

He took no revolutionary steps. In fact, his biggest achievement was that he hardly took any action at all, letting the economy run its own course, which soon turned into growth. Primakov’s popularity rating shot up – not because of what he did or did not do, but because of the image he projected of a statist.

In fact, Primakov was more concerned with the media than he was with the economy. He obsessively read newspapers and watched television programmes, often calling editors and owners to complain. In his memoirs, Yeltsin recalled how Primakov brought him a special dossier which contained newspaper cuttings that criticized his government, with words and sentences highlighted with a marker pen. Yeltsin, who had always tolerated all the mud that was thrown at him, found it odd. ‘Evgeny Maximovich, I am used to this. Every day newspapers write such things about me. But what can you do? Close newspapers?’⁴

Russian liberal journalists, those who had taken Yeltsin’s side in 1993 and who had set the narrative for much of the 1990s, saw Primakov as an alien figure. They took against him in a way that sometimes seemed almost irrational. They were put off by his Soviet manners more than his actions (or the lack of action). They considered him a Soviet-era dinosaur. The best he could offer Russia, they felt, was stagnation. At worst, he could take the country in the direction of Stalinism-lite. Primakov’s instincts were far from being liberal, but he was a pragmatic and rational politician with real knowledge of the country. Alexander Yakovlev felt that ‘democrats are wrong to be so antagonistic towards Primakov, calling him a conservative! He simply does not rush to his conclusions. He prefers not to say anything today that can be said tomorrow.’⁵

But it was also a question of power. Throughout the 1990s journalists had enjoyed a highly privileged position and status. Primakov, on the other hand, eschewed journalists whom he thought to be untrustworthy and antagonistic. As a statist, he naturally relied on the old-style Soviet nomenclatura: the security services, bureaucracy and diplomats. He instantly made the government less accessible to journalists and gave a dressing-down to television executives for distorting and blackening its image, telling them what and how they should report. Journalists found this more of a snub and a humiliation than a threat. They associated the loss of their dominance with Primakov. As Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs: ‘Willingly or not, Primakov consolidated anti-market and anti-liberal forces and infringed on the freedom of the press.’⁶ Primakov’s premiership also coincided with a shift in Russia’s attitude towards the West.

The biggest event of Primakov’s short term in office was the bombing of Yugoslavia by NATO forces. On 23 March 1999 – the eve of the NATO strikes – Primakov was in the air, on his way to Washington to negotiate financial aid for Russia, when he learned that the air-strike on Belgrade was imminent. In a powerful gesture, loaded with symbolism, Primakov ordered his plane to turn around over the Atlantic and fly back to Moscow.

The next morning Kommersant came out with a short front-page article which reflected the rage of most of its journalists. Its emotional pitch was not typical of Kommersant’s usual sarcastic and detached style. ‘RUSSIA HAS LOST $15 BILLION THANKS TO PRIMAKOV’ the headline screamed. The figure was derived from the sum of contracts and credit lines Primakov could have signed in America, but

Primakov’s U-turn was not just an expression of the government’s frustration with America’s policy towards Serbia and its disregard for Russia’s opposition to air-strikes. It captured something far more significant – a general change in attitude towards America and the West among the Russian general public. In 1988, when the Soviet era was drawing to a close, the Russian rock band Nautilus Pompilius had recorded a ‘Farewell Letter’ that captured Russia’s image of America as a promised land:

The idea of America as a utopia, literally a no-place, a dream, had long been engrained in Russian culture. In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, one of the characters, Svidrigailov, who is about to commit suicide, says to a guard: ‘When you are asked, you just say he was going, he said, to America.’ He then puts the revolver to his right temple and pulls the trigger. America was the other world.

For much of the 1990s America served as a model, an inspiration and an anchor. The 1998 crisis showed the futility of the dream. The bombing of Serbia crashed the dream itself. The West ceased to be an anchor. It turned out that there was no one happy post-Soviet space, that Russia was on its own. America turned into a scapegoat for all the troubles that the Russian people had experienced over the previous decade.

The outburst of anti-Americanism and nationalism was shrill. Massive rallies were staged outside the American Embassy in Moscow. Someone tried to fire at it from a grenade launcher, which luckily did not work, and then opened fire with automatics. A mob of football fans pelted the embassy with paint and eggs. Three men urinated on its door.

This did not so much reflect Russians’ concern for the ‘brotherly’ Slavic nation – most people had little knowledge about what was actually going on in Kosovo – but the need to take out the pent-up frustration, irritation and humiliation on traditional adversaries, America and NATO. It was as though the bombing of Serbia unleashed something that had been building up for years. It was a delayed reaction to the 1998 crisis, the bankers’ war or even deeper – to the Soviet collapse and the loss of Russia’s imperial status.

Some of the media went into a nationalistic overdrive. State television channels began to talk about American hawks and NATO aggressors. More surprising was the initial coverage by NTV. Its first news bulletins seemed anti-Western, made no mention of Kosovo refugees and drew parallels between NATO’s air-strikes and German bombings during the Second World War. ‘For the first time since 1941 there are German bombers with black crosses on their tails in the sky over Belgrade,’ an NTV news presenter said. The idea belonged to Oleg Dobrodeev who was in charge of news and current affairs. Both Gusinsky and Kiselev were shocked by the change of NTV’s tone that was as sudden as Primakov’s U-turn over the Atlantic.

When Kiselev confronted Dobrodeev a few days later, Dobrodeev was wound up and unapologetic. ‘He told me that I didn’t understand anything; that the situation in the country had changed, that public opinion was against NATO’s strikes and that we had to reflect that change or be left behind,’ Kiselev recalled.⁸ Dobrodeev’s outbursts of ‘statism’, said Kiselev, coincided with Primakov’s offer to move over to the government. He argued that if Malashenko was allowed to work for Yeltsin’s campaign, why should not he, Dobrodeev, be seconded to work for Primakov. Gusinsky, however, did not look favourably on the idea.

In the following Itogi programmes, Kiselev showed Kosovo refugees and reminded its audience of the ethnic cleansing which Kosovan Albanians had been subjected to. America might have lost a sense of reality and acted arrogantly, Itogi asserted, but this did not warrant the anti-American hysteria unleashed by Russia, which historically paid little attention to international norms. Using black-and-white footage from the 1950s and 1960s, Itogi reminded the audience how Soviet forces had pulled Eastern Germany into the socialist camp in 1953, how they had broken up the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and how they had invaded Prague in 1968. ‘The Soviet Union killed people where it wanted and how it wanted. Is America guilty of this? Of course it is. It is guilty that it lives better than us, that it has become richer than us and works harder than us, which makes it stronger than us. And we have spent all our energy looking for a third way – and we have found it in our boundless, vicious love for Serbia.’⁹

Yet, Dobrodeev, who had an unmistakable sense of the country’s direction, rightly assessed the shift in public mood. Russia was unable to match America, but it no longer wanted to hear that America was stronger, richer and better. Anti-Americanism would prove to be one of the most lasting and effective ideological narratives over the next decade and a half. America, as an unreal country, could be blamed for any trouble at home. A symbol of Russian hopes, it easily flipped into a symbol of their default. Utopia turned into an anti-Utopia.

Primakov’s U-turn over the Atlantic pushed his rating to new heights. In April 1999 he was the most popular politician in the country – while Yeltsin’s rating dropped to single digits, as a result of the crisis, disillusionment with the West and corruption scandals. Without any constitutional change, Russia was evolving into a parliamentary republic with a strong prime minister supported by the parliament. Primakov, as the head of the government, started to behave as an independent politician.

Even before the Balkan crisis in December 1998, Yeltsin, who had been in and out of hospital, had been sufficiently worried about losing levers of power to Primakov and his government for him to reaffirm his control over the power ministries, including the ministry of justice and the tax police. At the same time he met with the heads of television channels. ‘You can ask why the president is once again showing interest in the mass media,’ Yeltsin said. ‘It is because you are the fourth estate, you are siloviki,’ he said with a charismatic smile. ‘This is why you are under the president, under the president’s protection. This is super-important.’¹⁰

In January 1999, Channel One, which was effectively run by Berezovsky, launched a weekly Vremya programme presented by Sergei Dorenko. ‘We are witnessing a redistribution of power – the highest power in the country,’ Dorenko said alarmingly. ‘Primakov is trying to deprive Yeltsin of his right to sack him as prime minister… He is trying to take control over siloviki and the media, instead of dealing with the economy which is heading towards a new crisis.’ Primakov said he had no intention of introducing censorship, but Dorenko juxtaposed his comments with the old Soviet footage showing a Congress of the Communist Party, suggesting that this was where the country was heading.¹¹

Less than a week after the programme, Primakov attacked Berezovsky. Commenting on a decision by the Duma to amnesty nearly 100,000 prisoners, Primakov said Russia needed to free up some space in prisons so that it could jail people who had committed economic crimes. A few days later, firms linked to Berezovsky were raided by camouflaged police with guns and in skiing masks. Berezovksy was fired as the secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States and soon faced an arrest warrant in connection with siphoning money from Aeroflot. Primakov also tried to retake control over Channel One.

For Primakov, who had served as a candidate member to the Politburo and had started his career in television, Channel One and its iconic Vremya programme were main staples of the state power. The idea that the national channel had been hijacked by Berezovsky who turned it into a tool of personal influence was nonsense. Primakov offered Channel One a state subsidy of $100 million on the condition that Dorenko was removed from the air. Dorenko also came under investigation by the tax police.

Berezovsky, who was forced to flee the country, launched a counter-offensive on Primakov, portraying him as a force darker than the communists and stoking and exploiting the fears of the liberal media about Primakov’s style. ‘Communists want to bring back the communist system. Primakov wants to build the empire. From the first day [in office] he started fighting for control over the media, security services… He has succeeded in his fight for the security services. For ten years they were quietly lying low. When they saw one of their own men [in power], they started coming out of their hole,’ Berezovsky said.¹²

On 12 May 1999, Yeltsin sacked Primakov, invoking jubilation among liberal journalists. ‘It is the departure of the last big figure of the Soviet era and the fact that he was incapable of governing post-Soviet Russia speaks only about one fact: the country has changed and the point of return to the bright Soviet yesterday has passed,’ read an article in the pro-Western and liberal Itogi magazine – part of Gusinsky’s media empire.¹³ The media placed Primakov into the context of an old battle between the Soviet past and the Westernized future that shaped the 1996 elections. But unlike in 1996, this was not a battle of ideas or even directions. It was a battle for power and for survival within the Kremlin. It had little to do with the public good of the country, but everything to do with the interests of those who had been empowered and enriched by Yeltsin’s rule and who had much at stake in the question of his succession.

Operation ‘Successor’

Vlast’. The untranslatable Russian vlast’ is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘political power in the countries of the former Soviet Union’. In Russia and its former republics, vlast’ is inseparable from sobstvennost’ or ownership, property, assets. Lacking legal property rights, Russian ownership can be backed only by state power. So for the oligarchs who received their main assets as a result of the highly dubious loans-for-shares privatization, the continuity of vlast’ meant the preservation of sobstvennost’.

‘We were obsessed with the idea of vlast’,’ said Gleb Pavlovsky, who had been working for the Kremlin since 1996. ‘Preserving Yeltsin’s “rule” while letting him leave safely at the end of his second term was the horizon of our planning.’¹⁴ All this was done in the name of saving Yeltsin from a possible retribution and protecting his legacy. In fact the legacy of Yeltsin as Russia’s first democratically elected president who parted with communism and launched reforms was the last thing on the minds of those who planned his succession and in the end caused more damage to his legacy than anyone from the outside could have done. Yeltsin’s own safety was not under threat, but the safety of his entourage was.

Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko and her husband Valentin Yumashev had been implicated in several financial scandals, including alleged kickbacks for a contract to renovate the Kremlin. It was the subject of a probe by Yuri Skuratov, Russia’s prosecutor general, who threw dirt at Yeltsin’s family and was implicitly supported by Luzhkov. Luzhkov was an oligarch in his own right, he controlled one of the most profitable ‘corporations’ in Russia – Moscow itself. On the one hand, Luzhkov epitomized Russia’s regional feudalism. On the other hand, he considered his Moscow fiefdom a nucleus of a more centralized country. He could be a new prince Yuri Dolgoruky, the founder of Moscow. As Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs, ‘After the incredibly pompous and overblown 850th anniversary of Moscow, the mayor evidently became dizzy with success.’¹⁵

In the summer of 1999 Luzhkov teamed up with Primakov, whose sacking was opposed by 80 per cent of the population and whose rating jumped from 20 per cent to 32 per cent. Luzhkov quickly drew Primakov to his side. Luzhkov’s ‘Fatherland’ Party and Primakov’s ‘All Russia’ Party forged a coalition: ‘Fatherland–All Russia’. Their likely victory in the parliamentary elections in December 1999 could make one of them president and the other prime minister. In either case, a redistribution of assets, the sidelining of Yeltsin’s family and the banishment of rival oligarchs including Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich (his junior partner in 1999–2000) would be inevitable. Luzhkov openly called for the revising of the result of the privatization and Russia’s agreement with its former republics. ‘Sebastopol is a Russian city,’ he stated. ‘And will belong to Russia. It can be achieved by force. But I am an advocate of a peaceful solution.’¹⁶

Luzhkov’s mouthpiece was a well-equipped Moscow television channel, Central Television, which he controlled and which he turned against Yeltsin’s entourage. (One of its presenters was the little-known Dmitry Kiselev who would later turn into the most audacious of propagandists even by the Kremlin’s own standards.) Every day, it lobbed populist-loaded shells at the Kremlin. ‘The Yeltsin regime has sold the motherland to foreign capital… It created the system of corruption. It arranged for the “genocide of Russian people.” And it is to blame for the fall in the birth rate, the catastrophic state of science and education, medicine and culture. A Mafia-like family, a real gangster clan, has formed around the president,’ Luzhkov’s media trumpeted.¹⁷

Yeltsin’s clan, which apart from his daughter and her husband, also included Alexander Voloshin, Yeltsin’s chief of staff and Berezovsky’s former business associate, and Roman Abramovich, Berezovsky’s junior business partner, now needed their own, obedient Primakov. In the autumn of 1998 – shortly after Primakov’s appointment as prime minister – Pavlovsky wrote in a memo to the Kremlin: ‘Any new head of state will be a Primakov. Either we get onto this process or it will unfold without us.’¹⁸ In the late spring of 1999, the Kremlin ‘got onto this process’. While Berezovsky blamed Primakov for relying on the security services, the Kremlin engaged in the extraordinary exercise of substituting Primakov with a political ‘double’ – a loyal and obedient man of a similar background who could appeal to the same electorate.

The short list included Sergei Stepashin, the former interior minister, Nikolai Putin, the head of the FSB, and Nikolai Aksenenko, the minister of railways. In the end, the choice fell on Putin. ‘Putin and Primakov were two former intelligence officers, two representatives of the security services, and they occupied the same niche in the public mind,’ Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs.¹⁹

Yeltsin’s family had their own reasons to like Putin. He had faithfully served Anatoly Sobchak, the democratic mayor of St Petersburg, and when Sobchak got entangled in a corruption scandal and was effectively banned from leaving the country, Putin managed to smuggle him to a hospital in France. Yeltsin’s ‘family’, who heavily promoted Putin, calculated that if Putin had not given up Sobchak, he would stick to Yeltsin. Putin also proved his loyalty to Yeltsin’s family by helping to deal with Skuratov, the troublesome prosecutor general, who had been secretly videotaped in bed with prostitutes. Putin, who was put in charge of the inquest into the tape’s origins, confirmed its authenticity and is believed to have authorized that the footage be shown on television, which led to Skuratov’s dismissal.

Berezovsky had his own relationship with Putin. He had befriended Putin in the 1990s and invited him to go skiing in Switzerland. In the spring of 1999, when Berezovsky’s conflict with Primakov was at its peak, Putin came to a birthday party Berezovsky organized for his wife, even though he was not invited. ‘Primakov will never forgive you this gesture,’ Berezovsky told Putin. ‘Friendship is friendship,’ Putin apparently replied. Several other similar accounts of Putin’s remarks exist, but all of them point to Putin’s loyalty to friendship. Berezovsky, who had always exercised control and reaped benefits through people, rather than formal positions, believed that Putin was his man.

The media were to play a key role in this game of substitution, just as they played a key role in getting Yeltsin re-elected in 1996. The difference, however, was that Yeltsin was a genuine politician of historic proportions. Neither Malashenko nor Chubais, nor anyone else, ‘created’ Yeltsin. All they had to do was to galvanize him and persuade the majority of the country that he was the only one who could stop the communists from coming to power.

But Yeltsin’s victory in 1996 convinced his entourage that the trick, performed with the help of television, could be repeated without Yeltsin; that any candidate – however negligible – could be turned into a successor, given the right technology.

In 1999 politics was replaced by political technology, citizens by spectators, reality by television. ‘Media became a branch of state power,’ Pavlovsky said.²⁰ The idea that by means of television a group of ‘political technologists’ and media managers could create a president out of someone nobody ever heard of seemed incredible. This time, however, Gusinsky’s NTV, which had led the 1996 campaign, found itself on the wrong side of the Kremlin.

Gusinsky did not object to the principle of creating a presidential candidate as such. He objected to being treated as a branch of state power, rather than a power in its own right. In 1996 he was a partner who chose to back Yeltsin and got his dividends from it. Now he was told to fall into line or to get lost. It was partly a question of money and partly of kudos. Gusinsky demanded that NTV should receive the same $100m that was given by the government to Channel One. Instead, Alexander Voloshin, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, backed by Berezovsky and Abramovich, told him to get lost. Gusinsky, who was notorious for his bad temper, flew off the handle. Whether this spat was an accident or a deliberate provocation by rival oligarchs, is hard to say, but the result was a feud. Neither Gusinsky nor Malashenko, who had been offered the job of Yeltsin’s chief of staff, was prepared to put up with Voloshin’s insolence.

While Gusinsky was having his spat with Voloshin, Yumashev tried a softer approach with Malashenko. In June 1999 Dyachenko and Yumashev, who had a house in Gusinsky’s Chigasovo village, dropped in on Malashenko for tea, trying to persuade him to back Putin. To make up his mind, Malashenko asked his friend, Peter Aven, a former trade minister and a banker who knew Putin personally, to arrange a meeting with Putin. A casual dinner was held in Aven’s dacha which had once housed the famous Soviet writer Alexei Tolstoy. Putin arrived with his two daughters. Malashenko’s own daughter was on her way to London for the last term at her English boarding school. The dinner lasted nearly three hours and revealed little, apart from one small detail.

Towards the end of the dinner, Malashenko’s daughter called from Heathrow where she had just landed. The school car was not there to pick her up, so she was calling to see if she should wait or get a taxi, Malashenko’s wife told the dinner guests, and she had said her daughter should take a taxi. Suddenly, Putin intervened in the conversation. ‘You gave the wrong advice to your daughter. She was right to wait for the school car. You can’t be sure that the taxi she will get is a real taxi.’ Malashenko’s wife, who had arrived late and had hardly registered Putin, looked at him in surprise. London taxis, she explained, are not some gypsy cabs – they are black cabs with taxi signs and meters. ‘You can’t be sure that it would be a real taxi,’ Putin repeated calmly. ‘He was effectively saying that our daughter could be kidnapped,’ Malashenko recalled.

The conversation moved on. ‘Afterwards, my wife told me that this comment was a distilled Putin, a KGB officer. I laughed it off at first, told her she was exaggerating. But then I thought – she was right, because the KGB was not about repression at that time, it was all about control. Anything you control is safe. Anything you don’t control by definition represents a threat – it is in their mental set-up and a KGB officer is always a KGB officer.’²¹ Malashenko was no idealist. He had dealt with plenty of KGB people in his life. One of the KGB’s top people, Bobkov, was working for Media Most. He was not worried about terror, but he resented the very idea of the state’s exercising control over private lives through its security service.

Guarding the state as a dominant power was the KGB’s top proclaimed goal. It was not called the ‘Committee for State Security’ for nothing. It was the quintessence of that state, its main embodiment after the collapse of the Communist Party. As someone who believed in keeping the state in check, Malashenko did not like the idea of the KGB coming to power. A few days after that memorable dinner, Malashenko dropped by Yumashev’s dacha to tell him that he could not support Putin. ‘I told him that the KGB was the KGB for ever.’ That was, as Malashenko reflected, NTV’s last chance to jump on Putin’s train.

Instead, it came out with an Itogi programme that exposed Yeltsin’s ‘family’ as a narrow circle of people who made all the decisions in the country and manipulated the president himself. The story was illustrated with a diagram of ‘family’ members. This was a shot against Yeltsin’s ‘family’ and, by extension, Putin himself, their preferred choice as successor. The notion of the ‘family’ had hardly been used before, although some strange billboards had started to appear around Moscow – probably as part of Luzhkov’s anti-Yeltsin campaign. One such billboard carried a reference to the tycoon Roman Abramovich – widely rumoured to be ‘the family’s cashier’. The text on the billboard, surrounded by golden coins, read: ‘Roma looks after the family. The family looks after Roma.’

In the minds of the Kremlin’s political technologists, Gusinsky’s attack on the ‘family’ and that of Luzhkov had merged into one coordinated campaign. Yeltsin took the NTV programme as a stab in the back:

What shocked Yeltsin most were not the actual revelations, but the fact that this was done by people who knew him and his immediate family personally and who had spent time with them. He saw this as a personal betrayal of trust.

NTV’s journalists were barred from important Kremlin meetings. There was a strict and concerted decision that no Kremlin official should appear on NTV, said Pavlovsky, who was responsible for the media in Putin’s presidential campaign.²³ NTV was left with Primakov and Luzhkov. ‘We got marginalized,’ Kiselev recalled. Itogi magazine was paid a visit by the tax police.

Berezovsky, who championed Putin, exploited the situation to his own ends by persuading the Kremlin that NTV had switched sides and was working for Luzhkov and Primakov. This was not strictly speaking true. Gusinsky and Malashenko did not support Luzhkov. Gusinsky had fallen out with Luzhkov and it was Malashenko who had ruled him out as a possible prime minister in his conversation with Yeltsin back in September 1998. Nor did they see Primakov as ‘their’ man – at least not initially. In fact, their main weakness was that they did not have a candidate of their own and did not think this was important. As the owners of the country’s most influential television channel, they considered themselves to be the power to be reckoned with, whoever the president.

On 9 August, Yeltsin named Putin as prime minister and his ‘successor’ – the only man who could ‘consolidate’ the country. Berezovsky was in a celebratory mood. With Gusinsky out of the way, most probably with his help, he was the sole kingmaker – the most indispensable man in Russia, who controlled the main television channel. Despite Berezovsky’s public objection to Primakov as a security man, Putin’s background didn’t bother him in the least.

To the world outside the Kremlin walls, this seemed like one of Yeltsin’s eccentric antics. His previous prime minister, Sergei Stepashin, had lasted less than three months. Most people had never heard of Putin and would not have recognized him in a photograph if they had seen one. The majority did not even notice his appointment. His rating hardly registered in sociologists’ polls, falling into the margin of error – below 2 per cent. He rarely appeared in public or gave interviews. Meantime, Primakov’s rating was 32 per cent. Gusinsky had every reason to think that the odds of ‘defeating’ the family were in his favour.

But while the barons were getting agitated in anticipation of political battles for Yeltsin’s succession, forming alliances, getting ready for information wars and loading their media weapons with explosive revelations and compromising material, the rest of the country felt more and more alienated from politics. The majority did not feel responsible for the actions of their government and felt they had little influence on the direction of the country. ‘Nothing depends on us and everything is decided behind the stage’ – this was the most popular attitude of Russian voters.

According to Alexander Olson, a sociologist who worked for Yeltsin in the 1996 election and carried out work for Putin’s election campaign, the population recognized familiar political actors – such as Yeltsin, Luzhkov, or Primakov – but looked at politics as someone else’s game in which they were just spectators. This attitude to politics, instilled in the population by the media themselves, perfectly matched the format of television-watching. Nobody enjoyed staging television spectacles more than Berezovsky.

The rules of the game were different this time. In 1996, however biased the media was, Yeltsin was still ready to compete with Zyuganov. His little-known ‘successor’ had no chance of winning fairly against such heavyweights as Luzhkov and Primakov. To make Operation ‘Successor’ work, Luzhkov and Primakov had to be removed from the presidential race, to leave Putin the only real contender. To perform this task, Berezovsky turned to the man who was known in Russian television as the assassin: Sergei Dorenko.

The Gunman

Dorenko, the son of a military pilot, grew up in garrison towns, moving from one part of the country to another. He had a suitably colourful career for a showman. As a boy he had dreamt of a military career but ended up in television because of bad eyesight. He learned Spanish and Portuguese and served as a military interpreter in Angola during the civil war that pitched the Soviet Union against America. He had frequent contacts with the KGB, but said he was never formally recruited. ‘Whenever they talked to me – I would tell everyone else, so they did not think me reliable.’²⁴ In the early 1990s he moved freely between different channels and freelanced for the Spanish service of CNN, reporting on the shelling of the White House and the war in Chechnya. But in Dorenko’s own mind, his two careers – in the military and in television – merged into one. He called himself pulemetchik – a machine-gunner. The territory in which he felt most comfortable was war. Any war. Political or military.

Dorenko belonged to the same breed as Nevzorov. He was a perfect mercenary. Stylistically, he was the antithesis of Kiselev. Whereas Kiselev was a symbol of respectability and bourgeoisie, an icon of the middle class, Dorenko addressed a broader and less sophisticated audience. He had none of Kiselev’s deliberations. He was not asking his audience to think for itself – as Kiselev did – but told it what to think and to feel, skilfully manipulating its instincts and prejudices.

Berezovsky first ‘fell in love’ with Dorenko while recovering from an attempted assassination in 1994, when his Mercedes was blown up. From his hospital bed he watched Dorenko telling the audience that, although there was nothing wrong with oligarchs blowing each other up, it would be better if they found a special area for doing this, so that ordinary people would not get hurt.

Berezovsky then went to see Dorenko in his office. Dorenko said he was busy. Berezovsky waited for a while, was fed some watermelon by Dorenko’s assistant and left without seeing his ‘hero’. ‘Why should I’ve seen him? He was just an oligarch,’ Dorenko recalled.²⁵ Dorenko’s ‘stunt’ of not seeing Berezovsky only strengthened Berezovsky’s appreciation of Dorenko’s showmanship. When they finally met, in a Japanese restaurant in the monstrous Rossiya Hotel opposite the Kremlin, Berezovsky offered Dorenko the job of presenting the country’s main television news programme, Vremya. ‘In the middle of the conversation he ran to the Kremlin to clear my appointment with the administration.’²⁶

Berezovsky loved Dorenko’s style. ‘I am a big fan of Dorenko. I think he is an outstanding journalist… I watch him not as a political analyst – I don’t need to. I watch it as a brilliant show in which my point of view coincides with his. The form is particularly important to me. I can’t read books written in poor language. But I can read books about nothing that are written in brilliant language,’ Berezovsky said in an interview at the time.²⁷ Dorenko said Berezovsky would call him after every other programme. ‘He always started the conversation by saying, “You are a genius”. He then quoted lengthy passages from my own programme back to me.’²⁸

Dorenko was a Russian version of America’s Rush Limbaugh – a right-wing tyro who moved seamlessly between earnest lecture and political vaudeville. Presenting the Vremya programme in 1997–8, Dorenko transformed it into a show of damning revelations, a sermon turned inside out. It lowered the tone, agitated and inspired outrage and hatred, but most importantly it captivated the audience and removed taboos. He did not appeal to reason, like Kiselev did. He penetrated people’s minds through sensations, repeating evocative words and phrases, heavily rolling his ‘Rs’ when talking about ‘Russia’ or ‘betrayal’, modulating his voice in bemusement, juggling words and showing images that conjured up associations even if they had no direct relevance to the subject. Facts were irrelevant.

It was pure circus and mischief – the kind that Koroviev, a character from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, engages in as part of Satan’s band. Koroviev famously performs acts of ‘black magic’ in a variety show, uncovering adultery and greed among members of the public. Dorenko acted in much the same way, poking fun and terrorizing his victims whom he was hired to destroy. Asked how he would define his profession in those years, Dorenko replied: ‘Peresmeshnik’ – a mocking-bird, a jester, a fool.

In fact, said Dorenko, the ‘Sergei Dorenko’ that appeared on the screen was a creation, a fiction:

On stage, he was so shameless in his demagoguery, so cynical in his groundless, over-the-top allegations – that it was almost breathtaking. Like some fairground act it could prompt gasps of disbelief among critics and spectators: ‘How does he do it?’ or ‘How can he get away with it?’ The more ‘unbelievable’ and ‘outlandish’ Dorenko’s revelations were – the greater their entertainment value.

People believed what they saw, not because they were persuaded by factual evidence, but because it confirmed what they thought anyway: that everyone was a liar and a thief. ‘I did not “programme” anything. I simply whispered what people wanted to hear,’ said Dorenko.³⁰ Berezovsky courted and cultivated Dorenko for some time, recognizing in him an enormous television talent with few principles attached.

In August 1999, Berezovsky, who returned to Russia after a short self-exile, which Primakov had forced him into, was once again in hospital – this time with hepatitis. He summoned Dorenko, who turned up with a bag of tangerines. ‘He was lying in a palatial two-room ward. There were drips all over him and he told me we would “fuck” them all [Primakov and Luzhkov].’³¹ It was there that Berezovsky also first shared his plan to set up the Kremlin’s own Unity Party which was to provide Putin with loyalists in the parliamentary elections in December. ‘Its emblem is going to be a bear – can you draw a bear?’ he asked Dorenko.

Dorenko needed little persuading to attack Primakov and Luzhkov. A few months earlier he had been kicked out of his job at Channel One on Primakov’s instructions. Dorenko was also the subject of a tax investigation in Moscow, which he blamed on Luzhkov and Primakov. The investigation ended on the day that Primakov was fired as prime minister. The adrenaline of a battle excited him: ‘I told Borya [Berezovsky], the result will be this: they will hang you among the first five people on Red Square. And they will hang me among the next ten. And we will both be hanging in Red Square. “So?” asked Berezovsky. “So, let’s have a good smoke and go for it – with God’s help.”’³²

Dorenko’s new programme started to come out in September on Sunday evenings – the same time slot as Kiselev’s Itogi. Like Kiselev, Dorenko was now wearing glasses – to appear more respectable and authoritative. He made fifteen programmes and called them ‘fifteen silver bullets’. Watched in sequence, these fifteen ‘analytical’ shows worked like a soap opera which used documentary footage, but in such a way that it turned into fiction. It had a set of villains and heroes and a loose plot peppered with conspiracy, murder stories, sex, intrigue and titillating images. Like any soap opera, it was shown at the same time every week and combined the repetition of situations, familiarity with the main characters and new twists in the plot. As Boris Dubin, a sociologist, wrote at the time, the repetition created a calming sense of order while new twists provided the entertainment.

Appropriately, the opening titles of Dorenko’s series consisted of industrial cog-wheels and the sounds of grinding metal and hammering. Primakov and Luzhkov – the main characters of the show – were ground into mincemeat by Dorenko’s television machine. The machine was primitive, crude and extremely effective. The themes and even some formulations were fed to Dorenko by Putin’s election campaign staff, but the presentation was self-inspired. Primakov was to be portrayed as ‘old’, ‘weak’ and ‘Soviet’; Luzhkov as one of the oligarchs with bloodied hands and connections to the North Caucasus Mafia. Dorenko cultivated the image of Luzhkov as a comic inversion of a Godfather figure: a short, bald and plump man under the heel of his wife, Yelena Baturina, Russia’s richest oligarchess.

In one programme, Dorenko alleged that Luzhkov’s family was receiving money from a Swiss firm, Mabetex, which was involved in a scandalous renovation of the Kremlin. He showed bank transfers for hundreds of millions of dollars from its German sister firm into various offshore bank accounts held by a man with the same family name as Luzhkov’s wife. As it happened, the man was of no relation to Baturina and Dorenko never even spoke to him. But none of this mattered to Dorenko. Luzhkov – hardly an example of integrity – was forced to justify and defend himself and his wife, but the more he spoke, the deeper he dug himself into a hole.

‘My wife has a brother, but his name is Viktor and not Andrei, and he is her only business partner,’ Luzhkov tried to explain in exasperation. ‘Sorry, we have to stop the mayor here before he says something that he would later regret,’ Dorenko said with a mischievous sparkle in his eyes. ‘We never said that Andrei was the only business partner of his wife. Anyway, if Luzhkov were a real man, he would not involve his wife in it. This is not our Sicilian way. You and I, Yuri Mikhailovich,’ Dorenko addressed the absent Luzhkov, ‘we are two Dons: Don Sergio and Don Georgio. We must not involve your wife. You see, Don Georgio, I am still trying to defend your honour.’ For the rest of the programme, Dorenko referred to Luzhkov as only a ‘member of his wife’s family’.³³

He also accused Luzhkov of killing an American businessman, Paul Tatum, who was gunned down three years earlier in a murky dispute over the Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel in central Moscow.

The main point of Dorenko’s show, however, was to ridicule Luzhkov and turn him into a laughing stock. ‘I have a feeling that Luzhkov will soon be hunted by the law-enforcement agencies and will be put on the Interpol list. But our programme will come to his rescue. Let me make an official statement,’ Dorenko said with a deadpan expression on his face. ‘I will personally run away with Luzhkov. We will try to cross the border between Argentina and Paraguay – incognito. I don’t need to disguise myself – nobody knows me anyway. But the member of his wife’s family will have to change his appearance. We will dress him up as a man. Here are the options…’ Dorenko then showed Luzhkov with a Fidel Castro beard and in a Che Guevara beret. And ‘since none of those suited Luzhkov’, he portrayed him with Monica Lewinsky’s hair – ‘in case he has to hide in America’. It was political assassination.³⁵

Dorenko’s treatment of Primakov was equally mesmerizing. In one of his most memorable programmes, he first accused Primakov of organizing an assassination attempt on Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgia’s president, then – without much of a link – he showed bloody surgery being performed on someone in a Russian hospital. This, he said, was the kind of operation that Primakov was supposed to undergo in Switzerland. All Primakov had, in fact, was a standard hip replacement, but Dorenko turned it into a lengthy and graphic report in an operation theatre. It was not even Primakov’s leg that was being cut up on television – but that hardly mattered.

For the appetizer, Dorenko told the audience, whose average income was $200 a month and most of whom had to put up with decrepit Soviet hospitals, that Primakov’s treatment in an elite hospital in Berne could cost $45,000. ‘Nobody here asks about the origins of the money. If any of you is planning to have the same operation the hospital will accept these tens of thousands of dollars in any convertible currency…’ Then, for the main course, Dorenko produced gory details of the surgery itself and the risks it carried. ‘First the doctors remove the top of the hip. As you can see it is fragile and easily crumbles. Then they replace it with an artificial joint. Part of this artificial hip is joined to the pelvic bone by screws. Then, as you can see, doctors widen the hollow space inside the hip bone and connect the second part of the artificial hip which is then fixed with cement.’

The camera showed a bloodied leg and surgeons drilling and banging on the bone with a hammer, while casually discussing the latest football results. Bang, bang, bang. ‘This operation makes quite a morbid impression on a lay spectator,’ Dorenko’s correspondent told the audience, ‘but the drill and the hammer are absolutely necessary for such surgery.’ As a final nail, Dorenko argued that if one of Primakov’s hips had given way, the other one would have to be replaced soon as well. The second operation, however, might wait until after the presidential elections, which meant Primakov would be masking problems with his health. ‘But once he becomes president, he can leisurely take care of his health – for the next four years.’ Dorenko’s programme left no doubts: Primakov was as old and unfit as Yeltsin. ‘Since Primakov wants to be our leader, a full analogy with Yeltsin is completely justified,’ Dorenko concluded cheerfully.³⁶ With Yeltsin’s rating deteriorating along with his health, such an ‘analogy’ was more damaging to Primakov’s political form than any surgery.

Primakov was so outraged by this demagoguery that he felt compelled to call and complain to Kiselev, Dorenko’s rival at Itogi. Kiselev was on air and Primakov’s call was put straight through to the studio. ‘I am glad you are still on air, I have a chance to respond to the programme I just watched,’ Primakov said. ‘Do you mean our programme?’ Kiselev asked, pleased with such a high-profile response. ‘I mean Dorenko’s programme – known for its “truthfulness, benevolence and integrity”,’ Primakov said. Kiselev was taken aback by this tactlessness, but Primakov continued: ‘He said I was gravely ill and awaiting a serious operation. I want to reassure everyone that this is untrue… And also did you see that episode with Shevardnadze?’ ‘Unfortunately, I have not,’ said Kiselev, live, ‘I was myself on air.’ ‘Never mind,’ sighed Primakov. If Dorenko did not finish off Primakov, Primakov did so himself. The call made him look ridiculous and weak.

If anyone was watching Kiselev’s Itogi, it was certainly time to switch over to Dorenko’s show. Kiselev, with his slow, deliberating manner, was no match for Dorenko’s circus. It was like using a sword against a machine gun.

When he was not destroying Primakov and Luzhkov, Dorenko was interviewing and extolling Putin in every other programme, presenting him as the only alternative for the post of the president. At the beginning of Dorenko’s anti-Luzhkov and anti-Primakov campaign, Primakov’s rating was 32 per cent. Fifteen programmes later, it had fallen to just 8 per cent. Luzhkov’s rating fell from 16 per cent to 2 per cent. Putin’s rating rose from 2 per cent to 36 per cent.

Berezovsky praised Putin for providing the ‘continuity of power’ that would enable him, Berezovsky, ‘to fulfil himself in Russia’. What attracted him to Putin, he said, was Putin’s pledge not to reopen the question of privatization. ‘Many people are unhappy about how property has been distributed. Even the billionaires are unhappy, because they think that a neighbour-billionaire got more than his peer. But Putin understands that any redistribution of property will result in real bloodshed.’ He likened the situation with Putin to the 1996 elections when the oligarchs put their differences aside and agreed to support Yeltsin. ‘Today there is a clear understanding that Putin is a man who should be supported by society, including the oligarchs.’³⁷

Chubais, Berezovsky’s old nemesis, agreed, stating on NTV’s Itogi: ‘If elections were held today, there is no other candidate other than Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. There is no point in anyone else putting himself forward.’ The impression was partly created by the media: Pavlovsky planted the idea of ‘Putin’s majority’ in the media – even when Putin’s rating was below 50 per cent. But one thing was clear: Putin, who had no political programme, clear ideology, or political party, hit key expectations and responded to frustrations which had been building up in Russia for some time. Kiselev on Itogi stopped showing Putin’s rating altogether. Olson recalled Kiselev telling him: ‘I don’t understand these figures. And what I don’t understand cannot be.’³⁸ Kiselev was not the only one, however, who found Putin’s rating incomprehensible. How could this unremarkable man with no charisma, unmemorable features and a weak voice be seriously seen as a successor to Yeltsin?

But it was precisely the contrast with Yeltsin that made Putin ‘sellable’ to the Russian public. The popular support for Yeltsin, boosted by the threat of the communist victory in 1996, started to decline as soon as that threat was removed and was completely undermined by the 1998 crisis. Nearly half of the country felt that Yeltsin’s years in power had brought nothing good to the country; what they had brought was economic crisis, inflation and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Only a quarter of Russians credited him with freedoms and democracy. The majority wanted him to go.

The trick was to transform Yeltsin’s negative rating into Putin’s positive one. In order to do so, Putin had to be portrayed at once as Yeltsin’s opponent but also as someone who was anointed by him. ‘Our aim was first to mobilize the remaining Yeltsin electorate and then the anti-Yeltsin electorate which was split between several parties. Putin was in an ideal position – he was already in power, which always appeals to Russian voters – but also looked opposite to Yeltsin,’ Pavlovsky explained.³⁹

He provided both ‘continuity’ and ‘contrast’. Yeltsin was old, ailing and increasingly divorced from reality. Putin was young, sharp and energetic. Yeltsin had a large frame, a swollen face and grey hair. Putin was short, had chiselled features and thin hair. Putin could fly a military jet, pose on a warship, fight on a judo mat. He spoke clearly, calmly and decisively. After Yeltsin, who was quintessentially Russian – emotional, a drinker, impulsive – Putin seemed almost un-Russian. He was secretive, restrained, sober, unemotional and almost pedantic. In opinion-focus groups people described him as Germanic, a true Aryan character – an ideal Stierlitz.

The fact that Putin seemed to have come from nowhere, had no political ‘baggage’, was not associated with Perestroika or the communists, worked in his favour. Even in April 2000, when he was already elected as president, two-thirds of the Russian population said they knew little about Putin, despite his round-the-clock presence on the television screen. He could be ascribed any qualities. Putin was a man with no features, a perfect spy.

The close association between Putin and Yeltsin’s family was the only line of attack left to our opponents, said Pavlovsky. The most effective way to free Putin from this association was for Yeltsin himself to resign early. This was a crucial part of the Putin ‘succession’ plan and Yeltsin agreed to it. However, he decided to wait until the December parliamentary elections to make sure that the pro-Putin Unity Party did well. The party itself was a purely artificial creation. It had no political agenda other than Putin himself. The job of the Kremlin spin-doctors was to link Putin with the Unity Party.

The party’s fortunes were sealed the moment when Putin ‘casually’ appeared next to the party leader, Sergei Shoigu. The ‘appearance’, which lasted only a few seconds on the television screen, was carefully staged by his media managers, according to Pavlovsky, as was Putin’s ‘off-the-cuff’ response to the question of ‘whom he was planning to vote for in the parliamentary elections’. As a state official with no party affiliation, Putin said he was not supporting anyone, but, as an individual, he was planning to vote for Unity.

On Itogi, Kiselev protested that ‘as a private person’ Putin should speak in a ‘banya [bathhouse] or in a kitchen’ rather than on television. But Putin’s endorsement fitted in with the logic of a television game show and was worth more than any political programme or statement. ‘Putin asked the audience to support him in his pursuit of power. In the popular imagination he was a [television] hero who was getting ever closer to his ultimate goal but might not succeed unless the “audience” gave him a baseball bat to club his enemies with,’ Pavlovsky explained.⁴⁰

The ‘audience’, used to this format – in which they pressed buttons or dialled a number in support of one character or another – obliged. In the December general elections, the Unity Party, which had been created only a few months earlier, won nearly 24 per cent of the votes. As the sociologist Yuri Levada wrote, ‘In Soviet days the only party in the country declared itself in power. Now the state power declared itself the only right party in the country.’⁴¹ Luzhkov’s and Primakov’s Fatherland–All Russia alliance was in third place with just 13 per cent. Within a year it would merge with Putin’s Unity Party to form United Russia. Both Primakov and Luzhkov agreed not to stand in the presidential elections.

Yet to say that Putin’s popularity was the result of media games or that Gusinsky’s NTV lost out because it was less effective than Berezovsky’s Channel One would be as untrue as to deny it. Victories have many parents. The oligarchs’ idea that a few men could decide on the future president actually worked. But while the oligarchs, the media and political technologists fought battles, claimed victories and engaged in cunning projects, thinking they were the prime players, real events were taking place in the country which were outside their control but not beyond their ability to exploit in their own interests. As a politician, Putin may have been a media invention, but the events that turned him into a president were not.

A day before Putin’s appointment as prime minister, a group of Chechen rebels led by Shamil Basayev staged an incursion into neighbouring Dagestan as part of his grand plan to create a Caucasus emirate. After an exchange of fire between Russian troops and Chechen rebels, Putin, with Yeltsin’s blessing, ordered a military invasion of Chechnya, thus starting the second war in five years. As Putin said on 8 September, ‘Russia is defending itself. We were attacked. And we must cast away all syndromes, including the syndrome of guilt.’

That night Moscow was shaken by the first in a series of explosions in residential apartment blocks which killed over 300 people and spread terror throughout the country. Nobody ever claimed responsibility for the bombings.

Malashenko was on his way to an airport in Spain to fly back to Moscow when he learned about the explosion.

The bombings, he understood, would give Putin and the security services complete carte blanche in restoring the state. In 1994 NTV was able to counter it. This time, public opinion was against them.

Malashenko’s fears were fully borne out. The apartment explosions were a turning point both towards Putin and also towards the war in Chechnya. Its impact on people’s minds was similar to the bombing of the New York Twin Towers two years later. Until that moment Chechnya was seen as a black hole, a lawless territory where people got kidnapped and killed by bearded terrorists. Only four days earlier, a similar explosion had ripped through a residential block in the small town of Buynaksk in Dagestan, killing sixty-four people, twenty-three of whom were children. But even that was ‘somewhere over there’, behind the television screen.

On 9 September, shortly after midnight, the ‘television screen’ got shattered. Millions of people momentarily experienced the same emotion of fear and danger in their own lives. This was not something happening on television. It was happening to them. They came out of their houses, organizing watch groups to stand guard and look for suspicious clues. Conspiracy theories started to circulate almost immediately.

This was prompted by the discovery of bags with explosives in Ryazan’, a city south of Moscow. The residents who spotted the bags called the police, who initially confirmed they contained an explosive. The Russian interior minister told the parliament that a terrorist attack had been foiled. Then, half an hour later, the head of the FSB said this was, in fact, a civil defence exercise and the suspicious bags contained sugar not hexogen, a white crystalline explosive. Many people smelled a rat. Perhaps the FSB was behind the previous bombing and had just botched this one, or maybe the terrorists were assisted by Berezovsky who wanted to boost Putin’s rating. Warranted or not, the desperate search for conspiracies revealed one thing: people were prepared and willing to think that everything happening in the country was orchestrated by someone behind the stage. NTV hosted a discussion about the Ryazan’ incident, which irked the Kremlin. Yet, however warranted or not the conspiracy theories were, they did not change the fact that the explosions were real.

Putin was away in New Zealand when the first explosion ripped through a block of flats. When he came back, a few days later, he appeared on television, making a statement, looking shell-shocked. This, said Olson, who was measuring Putin’s rating every week, was the moment when people first ‘saw and recognized Putin’. When he came to pay his respects to the victims, he said what everyone felt: ‘Incredible. Unbelievable. Inhuman cruelty.’ The explosions, he said, were a threat to the existence of the Russian state. ‘We have to use force, there is no other way.’

It was not what Putin said and what he did. It was the way he looked and sounded that allowed people to identify themselves with him. His appearance resonated with the feelings of millions of people, causing something of a ‘short circuit’ moment, according to Olsen. Suddenly, Putin, a bland, ‘accidental’ man, the joker in a pack of cards, turned into an ace. He was a ‘hero’ that people did not even know existed before. People turned to Putin as their only hope, a man who was capable of defending them whatever it took. He was offering to take responsibility and deal with a problem which they were unwilling and unable to deal with. A few weeks later Putin delivered the words which became his hallmark for years to come: ‘We will pursue them everywhere. If it is in the airport, then in the airport. If we catch them in the toilet, we’ll wipe them out in the shit-hole. That is it. Subject closed.’

Putin was different from other politicians; in fact, he did not behave or talk like a politician at all – he talked like an ordinary man, like the guy next door. ‘The meaning of Putin’s words was not just that we are going to be tough, but also “who are these Chechens for us to be afraid of”’ Pavlovsky explained.⁴³ In his streetwise talk and his readiness to fight against Chechens who terrorized the country, he matched a character from one of the most important post-Soviet films. It was called Brat (Brother) and told the story of a young, open-faced, charismatic Russian, Danila Bagrov, who after serving his two-year conscription in Chechnya, returns to a criminalized St Petersburg. His older brother, a small-time gangster, asks Danila to help him eliminate competitors – ethnic Chechens – who control street-market trade in the city. Danila turns into a hitman who administers justice like Robin Hood, helping the poor and homeless along the way and eliminating the ‘dirt’ from the streets.

In one of the opening scenes of the first Brat movie, Danila confronts two swarthy, heavily accented men – obviously from the Caucasus – who cockily refuse to pay a fine for riding on a trolley-bus without a ticket. Danila takes out a gun and points it at the crotch of one of the loudmouths. ‘Don’t shoot, brother,’ says the terrified Caucasian man. ‘I am not a brother to you, you black-arsed shit,’ Danila replies. He then takes his wallet, pays the fine, drops it on the floor and tells them to run. Danila was Russia’s first real hero – strong, charismatic, sincere, simple and organic.

The film was released in 1997 – the same year as Elena Masyuk, the NTV journalist, was kidnapped in Chechnya. It was a huge success, mainly because it captured the shift in the mood towards Chechnya and the first, almost unconscious, signs of rising nationalist resentment towards the outside world. When, in the spring of 1999, Putin’s spin-doctors surveyed the attitude of the Russian public towards different fictional characters, Danila from Brat was up there along with Stierlitz.

Like Danila, Putin came from ‘nowhere’ into this ugly and cruel world to protect his ‘brothers’.[2] Just like Brat, Putin effectively licensed and justified the use of extra-judicial force. Like Danila he was a strong and positive character unconstrained by political correctness and Western convention. Dorenko, in his programmes, also appealed to the image of Putin as a ‘brother’, contrasting him with Primakov. ‘I was whispering to the audience: “Look, we have a father, Primakov, who while he may mean well, is too ill and can’t fight, but we have a brother, a bro, who is strong, decisive and will defend us.”’⁴⁴

Dorenko, who regularly travelled to Chechnya with the Russian army, had a message for Putin, whom he interviewed every couple of weeks. ‘Every time I saw him we talked about Chechnya: “The army wants more, more fighting, heavier, more aggressive, please, let’s advance deeper into Chechnya,” I told him. And every time Putin’s eyes lit up. “Are you prepared to say it on air?” he asked. “Me – I am screaming about it every week!” I told him. Bomb it, burn it with napalm along with the people, destroy, kill. We had to press a button and destroy it.’⁴⁵

The button in Dorenko’s hands belonged to television and he used it to the same effect. He was among the first reporters into Grozny when the Russian military finally took it over after levelling it to the ground. Dressed in black, he reported from the central square of Chechnya’s capital, with Russian APCs driving around in the background. He leaned over military maps as the commander of the Russian forces explained his army’s disposition and showed the minefields where hundreds of Chechen soldiers had met their death. He interviewed Russian soldiers who told him that Chechen fighters should not be allowed to return to their cities. Those who had stopped the war in 1996 were traitors. Putin, who allowed them to finish the job, was obviously a hero.

On Itogi, Kiselev tried to say something about an ‘excess’ of force and human rights abuses in Chechnya, about the criticism from the West – as though the West still mattered. His words drowned in the general support for the war. The coverage of the second Chechen war could barely have been more different from the first one. One practical reason was that journalists were barred from entering what the Kremlin described as a ‘counter-terrorist zone’ without special permission from the Russian security services. Whereas in the first war much of the reporting had been done from the Chechen side, the only footage emerging from Chechnya in the second war was from the Russian army side. While in the first war even soldiers, interviewed on camera, had talked about the senseless violence they themselves had perpetrated, in the second war soldiers talked about ‘Russian unity’. ‘It is our land. Our core is our vlast [state power],’ one soldier told an NTV correspondent.

A minority made up of old Soviet intelligentsia types and human rights activists opposed it. Grigory Yavlinsky, the leader of the liberal Yabloko Party, called for negotiations with Maskhadov, the Chechen president. But most of those who were still called young liberal reformers were firmly on Putin’s side. As Chubais said in response to Yavlinsky: ‘The war in Chechnya is the rebirth of the Russian army; it reinforces faith in the army and any politician who thinks otherwise… is a traitor.’⁴⁶

Gusinsky and Malashenko, who were against the war, could barely control their own television. Malashenko recalls watching video footage on NTV which showed the beheading of a Russian hostage by Chechen fighters. ‘The image had enormous power and I called Dobrodeev to ask him why he had decided to show it without even warning us. He told me that Rushailo [the interior minister] asked him to do it. It was clear that Dobrodeev engaged in war propaganda.’⁴⁷ Dobrodeev understood the change of mood and not only ‘jumped aside’ from the approaching avalanche, but decided to ride its wave.

Shortly after the beginning of the war, Dobrodeev gave an interview entitled ‘The Army: These Are Our Brothers and Sons’ to Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), an army newspaper, saying, ‘When in real time the defence ministry generals are giving you information, you don’t have to ask anyone for anything else…’ The army and the media, he asserted, are doing one job and anyone who tried to create an impression that there is a wall between us – is wrong. ‘It is clear that Russia will soon enter a new stage of its development. We cannot live like we lived before,’ he said.⁴⁸ A few months later, Dobrodeev left NTV, which he had helped to set up, and was appointed the head of the state television. It was from this high and comfortable chair that Dobrodeev observed Putin destroy NTV and expel its founders. The time of the pro-Western individualists who had put themselves above the state was coming to an end.

On New Year’s Eve 1999 Boris Yeltsin, by way of the traditional televised seasonal greeting to the nation, announced that he was stepping down as president and was passing the reins of power to Vladimir Putin. ‘Russia has to enter the new millennium with new politicians, with new faces, with clever, strong and energetic people. And we, who were in power for many years, we must leave. I am leaving… Russia will never go to its past. Russia will always move only forward. And I must not stand in the way of history.’

It was an emotional and moving speech. Yeltsin asked to be pardoned by those who ‘believed that we could, in one big swing, in one thrust, jump from a grey, totalitarian past into a bright, rich and civilized future. I believed this myself… It seemed one thrust and we would do it. We did not… I’ve done all I could. A new generation is coming to replace me – a generation of those who can do more and better.’

Yeltsin’s speech was followed, without as much as a pause, by Putin’s greeting. ‘Today I am entrusted with acting as the head of state… There will be no vacuum of power in the country – not for one minute. Any attempt to move outside the constitution will be decisively put down.’

A few hours earlier, Yeltsin had left the Kremlin for the last time. Handing over a case with nuclear codes and the pen with which he had signed his resignation and Putin’s appointment, he told Putin: ‘Take care… Take care of Russia.’ Television showed the two men standing shoulder to shoulder in Yeltsin’s office – a tall, towering figure with grey hair on his way out, a slim, short one on his way in.

The transfer of power seemed seamless. The ritual was unmistakably staged – the New Year’s address by the leader of the country had greater symbolic value than any election. Putin was the president. The actual presidential election three months later only confirmed the fact. Putin’s appointment represented continuity but also a visual contrast. By the time the country watched Yeltsin’s successor make his New Year’s statement, Putin was already in Chechnya. Celebratory programmes that night were interrupted by images of Putin in a parka, flanked by men in military uniforms, handing out awards to Russian soldiers. ‘This [war] is not just about restoring the honour and dignity of the country. It is about putting an end to the disintegration of Russia,’ Putin said.

In contrast to Yeltsin, who for better or worse saw Russia as a nation, Putin saw it first and foremost as a state and himself as its guardian, gosudarstvennik or statist. Two days before Putin was formally entrusted with Russia, Putin published his manifesto ‘Russia on the Threshold of the New Millennium’, that hailed the state as a key driver of Russia’s success and a force of consolidation. Russia did not need state ideology, the manifesto argued. Its ideology, its national idea, was the state. Personal rights of freedom were all well and good, but they could not provide the strength and security of the state. Russia, he asserted, would never become a second edition of Britain or America where liberal values had deep historic traditions. Russia had its own traditional, core values. These were patriotism, collectivism and derzhavnost – a tradition of being a great geopolitical state power that commands the attention of other countries – and gosudarstvennichestvo, the primacy of the state.

It is tempting to project our knowledge of the current state of Russia and Putin onto the early years of Putin’s presidency; to describe Russia’s descent into a nationalistic corporatist state as part of a premeditated plan. In fact, few people paid attention to Putin’s statement at the time. Even fewer were alarmed by it.

Putin’s millennium message, drafted by Pavlovsky, reflected not just what Putin thought but also what people wanted to hear from him. An opinion poll conducted in January 2000 found that 55 per cent of the Russian population expected Putin to return Russia to the status of a great and respected derzhava and that only 8 per cent expected him to bring Russia closer to the West.² As a man with a KGB background, Putin was clearly a statist, but he was also free of any ideology and in the minds of most Russians this did not contradict the idea of capitalism. Quite the opposite.

Many Russian liberals perceived Putin as an authoritarian modernizer who would restore the functioning of the state and economy. The media saw Putin as a blank sheet onto which they could write their own narrative. The corridor of opportunities, which was quite wide, was to be narrowed by those who were in charge of that narrative. The educated, well-off, Westernized middle class saw him as a centre-right, economically liberal president – a Russian version of Augusto Pinochet.

Five days after Putin’s formal election as president, Peter Aven, the head of Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private bank, and a long-term acquaintance of Putin’s, evoked Pinochet as a model in an interview with the Guardian. ‘I’m a supporter of Pinochet not as a person but as a politician who produced results for his country. He was not corrupt. He supported his team of economists for ten years. You need strength for that. I see that parallel here. There are similarities in the situation.’³ If the president had to use authoritarian means to further reforms, so be it, Aven argued. Putin’s KGB past did not worry Russian liberal journalists much. Stigmatizing Putin because of his former intelligence work seemed like a form of social discrimination. Those who did object to Putin on the basis of his KGB past were considered marginal dissidents, intelligentsia, or demshiza or demskitz – a pejorative shortening of ‘democratic schizophrenics’.

The Union of Right Forces, a liberal economic party led by Gaidar, Nemtsov, Chubais and businesswoman Irina Khakamada, and which received a respectable 8.5 per cent in the parliamentary elections in 1999, campaigned under the slogan ‘Putin to the Kremlin, Kiriyenko to Parliament’. Nemtsov, who voted against supporting Putin, was overruled. The night after the December parliamentary elections of 1999, Putin attended a post-election party held by the Union of Right Forces and raised a toast ‘to our common victory’.

The next day, Putin gathered the leaders of all the winning factions in his office and joined in a toast to Stalin raised by the communist leader, Gennady Zyuganov, on the occasion of the 120th anniversary of the tyrant’s birth. Putin, whose grandfather had been a cook in Stalin’s court, did not cringe. To Putin, Stalin was not a symbol of repression, but the ultimate expression of state power. Putin was neither a Stalinist nor a liberal. As a man who had been trained to be a spy, he was nondescript and had skills for mimicry. He could assume whatever personality best suited the situation to win the trust and sympathy of his interlocutor. His ability to perform and to blend in made people who talked to him feel that he shared their views.

As someone who had observed Soviet economic failure, who, as a KGB officer in Dresden, understood the advantages of the capitalist West Germany over the socialist East Germany (the GDR) and was exposed to business as a deputy mayor in St Petersburg in charge of foreign trade, Putin had few illusions about the planned economy. His early economic programme, including a low flat-rate income tax system, was arguably more liberal than anything Russia had had in the past. His economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, was a convinced libertarian and his Finance Minister, Alexei Kudrin, a member of Chubais’s and Gaidar’s circle. Putin did not set out to dismantle capitalism – far from it.

The first years of Putin’s rule filled the Russian middle class with optimism, even exuberance. The oil price started to rise; Russian economic growth surged at 10 per cent; disposable incomes were growing even faster. The central and simple message of Putin’s rule was: we will give you security, stability and a sense of pride, shops full of goods and the ability to travel abroad without bothering you with ideology. It was the dream of the late 1980s come true. All that the Kremlin asked in return was for people to mind their own business and stay out of politics – something that they gladly did. Lifestyle changes were more interesting than politics. The first IKEA store had just opened in Moscow and middle-class Russians, like everyone else in Europe, were too busy assembling their Scandinavian-style homes to care about politics.

Suddenly there were coffee shops where people could sip cappuccinos while reading Vedomosti – a Russian business daily part-owned by the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. There were new Western-style cinemas, home-grown musicals, skating rinks and fitness clubs. To guide people through the new lifestyle opportunities there was a new glossy weekly called Afisha (Playbill). It was conceived as Russia’s equivalent of Time Out but, as ever in Russia, it was more than that. In the same way that Kommersant had ‘programmed’ the ‘new Russians’ and NTV had shaped the tastes and values of the middle class and self-reliant businessmen, Afisha drafted the image of a young, educated, urban and Europeanized class of people – the children of the intelligentsia, who shunned the very word along with the preoccupations of their parents.

As Ilya Tsentsiper, one of the founders and first editors of Afisha, said, his readers were somewhere in between a creative media class and young urban professionals – yuppies. Afisha described Moscow as a European capital city – no different from, say, Berlin or Madrid. ‘In many ways Afisha itself was a confirmation that Moscow was the same [European] city as others,’ Tsentsiper argued. ‘All this coincided with Putin’s era – everyone around us started to get richer and some different narrative emerged after the years of chaos and uncertainty. People started to think about their long-term future. People started to have children and dogs and all this “live fast, die young” lost its attractions. On the ruins of an empire a new life started to grow, full of extraordinary energy.’⁴ Soon Afisha started to publish guidebooks for mobile, English-speaking and independent travellers. The readers of Afisha and Vedomosti and the voters of the Union of Right Forces considered themselves liberals, but they wished for the state to provide their liberties, comforts and stability.

Essential to the narrative of ‘stabilization’ was the portrayal of the 1990s as an era of total chaos and banditry. The irony was that this image was formed as much by the television of the 2000s as it was by the reality of the Yeltsin era. In May 2000, NTV aired one of its most popular soap operas called Banditskii Peterburg (Gangsters’ Petersburg) about organized crime bosses, known in Russia as ‘crowned thieves-in-law’, contract killings and bent cops. It was a true carnival of banditry in which the only positive figure was a local journalist who tried to solve crimes but ended up getting people killed. Russia in the 1990s had certainly provided rich material for crime fiction – the Soviet collapse opened up opportunities for colourful gangsters – but it was the TV dramas of the 2000s that turned crime into the dominant characteristic of the 1990s. The fact that Putin was the flesh-and-blood of the 1990s and had served in the St Petersburg administration precisely at the time in which Gangsters’ Petersburg was set was negated by the narrative of stabilization.

One of Putin’s first symbolic steps as president was the restoration of the Soviet national anthem which was originally composed in 1938 – the height of Stalin’s great terror – as a hymn to the Bolshevik Party and later adopted as an anthem. Yeltsin abandoned it along with other Soviet symbols, replacing it with Mikhail Glinka’s wordless ‘Patriotic Song’. After meeting Russian sportsmen, who apparently complained that they could no longer sing along to the national anthem, Putin proposed bringing back the old tune, albeit with new lyrics that were promptly supplied by the author of two previous Soviet versions. To say that the Russians were longing for the restoration of the Soviet anthem was untrue. Most people did not care.

The act of restoring something that had been once abolished for ideological reasons carried its own meaning. Alexander Yakovlev saw it as a sign of disrespect for the country’s past, of a lack of ‘Christian feeling of repentance’. ‘For as long as I live I will neither sing nor stand up to this music. This is not my anthem. It is the anthem of a different country – different not just in name but in its substance. We are a new country, a free Russia, and we want to be free people.’⁵ In fact, neither Yeltsin nor Putin saw Russia as a new country, but as a continuation of the old one. But while Yeltsin and his ideologues searched for symbols of Russia’s statehood in the pre-Revolutionary era, rejecting the Soviet period as something ideologically alien, Putin made the next logical step: he incorporated the Soviet past into a narrative of Russia as a great state.

The liberals who rejected Soviet history and demanded repentance were cast as sectarians. ‘Perhaps I and the people [of Russia] are mistaken, but I want to address those who disagree with this decision [to restore the Soviet anthem]. I ask you not to dramatize events and not to build unbreachable barriers, not to burn bridges and not to split society once again,’ Putin told the Duma.⁶ Putin’s formulation, ‘I and the people’, was, in fact, more alarming than the anthem.

The revival of the old Soviet anthem, previously known as the hymn of the Bolshevik Party, coincided with the consecration of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which had been destroyed by the Bolsheviks and was restored by Luzhkov. The clash of symbols did not bother Putin. Both were symbols of Russian statehood. This is why, perhaps, one person who did not object to Putin’s decision was the Russian patriarch, Alexei II. The media-savvy middle class, the readers of Afisha, cringed, but saw in it the spirit of a postmodernist political game where nothing could or should be taken seriously, since everything was just an imitation, be it the cathedral or the anthem. The revival of the Soviet anthem did not signal a return to the Soviet Union, but it signalled the beginning of restoration as a historic trend that usually follows a revolution.

So, on the eve of the new millennium and the tenth anniversary of the Soviet collapse, the country clinked glasses to the tune of the Soviet anthem. It was also a powerful statement that Putin did not see freedom and post-Soviet political order as the essence of the new country called Russia, but only as a decoration that could be dismantled as easily as a theatrical set. As the astute columnist Kirill Rogov wrote at the time, like any symbolic act, the restoration of the Soviet anthem had practical consequences that were beyond the will of its authors. The symbol was first. The meaning came later.⁷

Unlike Yeltsin, Putin felt no alienation from the Soviet past. A year earlier he had unveiled a plaque and laid flowers to Yuri Andropov, who had been the head of the KGB at the time when Putin as a young man joined the organization. Andropov, who died only nineteen months after becoming the head of the Soviet Union, was seen as an enlightened and authoritarian modernizer. His short stint at the helm of the country contributed to a myth that he could have transformed the Soviet Union into a functioning economy, while keeping the country together, had he not died prematurely at the age of seventy.

It was not just the liberals who tried to wind back the tape of history and find the point where things had gone wrong – so did the siloviki who saw Putin’s promotion to the top post in the country as a chance to fulfil Andropov’s ideas.[1]

Like most people who served in the KGB, Putin had little respect for Gorbachev and saw him not as a man who gave Russia freedom, but as someone who had lost the country and the job as a result of his weakness. As Putin said many years later, a person who does not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union has no heart and one who wishes to restore it has no brain. Putin certainly had a brain. He did not try to restore the Soviet Union; he saw his mission in preventing further disintegration. And since it was Gorbachev’s liberalization of the media that had undermined the Soviet system, he had no intention of repeating that mistake.

‘Magic TV Comb’

Boris Nemtsov recalled visiting Putin in his office soon after his election as president. It was the same office Nemtsov had visited many times when Yeltsin was president. ‘We had a conversation and in the middle of it, Putin asked me if I minded watching the 3 p.m. news. It was odd. I looked around the familiar office. Nothing seemed to have changed there. Apart from one thing. The only object that had been on Yeltsin’s otherwise empty desk was his pen – it was the pen that he gave to Putin when he signed his own resignation. Putin’s desk was also empty, but the pen was gone. Instead, Putin had a TV remote control on his desk,’ said Nemtsov.⁸ (Nemtsov could hardly have imagined that he would fall victim to the hatred that this remote control of television would incite in Russia a decade and a half later.)

That remote control was to become one of Putin’s tools, the sceptre of his power. Unlike Yeltsin, who had rarely watched himself on television and simply turned off the channels he disliked, Putin developed an obsession with television. At the end of each day he watched how the different channels covered him. Having observed the role played by television in his own coming to power and the destruction of Primakov and Luzhkov, Putin knew that the power of the oligarchs lay in their control over the media and he did not wish to leave it in their hands.

In January 2000 NTV showed a scathing Kukly sketch based on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novella Klein Zaches, genannt Zinnober (1819) – the story of a small town that blindly takes an ugly dwarf Zaches for a beautiful youth, thanks to the magic spell cast by a fairy who has pity on Zaches. Whatever little Zaches does elicits adulation and he turns into a minister. In the end, one of the characters finds that Zaches’s magical power is contained in the three hairs on his head. The hairs are pulled out and Zaches loses the spell and drowns in a chamber pot. Kukly showed a puppet Yeltsin cradling a dwarf with Putin’s face. Berezovsky was cast as the ‘fairy’ who combs the dwarf’s hair with a ‘magic TV comb’, thus turning him in the eyes of all Russian officials into a wise and handsome president.

The Kukly skit was aired a few months before the presidential elections – just as the state television channels showed Putin, with great adulation, flying a military jet from his residence in Sochi to Grozny, posing on a submarine and inspecting a farm. The parody cut too close to the bone, particularly given Putin’s lack of height. According to Russian media reports, Putin took it personally.

A few weeks later, a Soviet-style letter was published in a small St Petersburg newspaper denouncing Kukly’s programme as a criminal act. ‘Kukly has evoked a feeling of deep outrage and indignation by misusing the freedom of speech,’ the letter said.⁹ One of the signatories was promptly appointed by Putin as his ‘trusted representative’ in the presidential campaign. Soon, prosecutors opened an investigation against Gusinsky and his Media Most group.

Viktor Shenderovich, the scriptwriter of Kukly, received a message – apparently from the Kremlin – saying that the attack on Media Most would stop if NTV fulfilled three conditions: changed its coverage of Chechnya; halted its criticism of the ‘family’; and removed ‘the first person’, that is, Putin, from Kukly. In response, Shenderovich publicized the message and made an even more provocative skit based on the Bible, in which Putin was portrayed as God. His puppet did not make an appearance, though: he was represented by a burning bush and a stormy cloud. Chief of Staff Voloshin was Moses conveying the Ten Commandments: ‘Don’t kill anyone, except people of Caucasus nationality in a shit-hole’ and ‘Don’t have any other gods apart from Him – at least for two terms’ and ‘Don’t steal unless it is federal property’. Asked how ‘He’ should be referred to, Voloshin said: ‘Just call him Lord God, abbreviated as GB.’ In Russian, GB stood for KGB.

If that was not enough, on 24 March, just two days before Putin was elected president, NTV aired a talk show called Nezavisimoe rassledovanie (Independent Investigation) that questioned the official version of the apartment block explosions in the autumn of 1999. It focused on the foiled apartment bombing in Ryazan. The programme’s host interviewed former and present FSB officers and tenants of the apartment block who had discovered the bags of a white substance that was first identified as hexogen, but which the FSB later claimed was sugar. While the programme did not prove anything definitively, it certainly raised the strong suspicion that the FSB was concealing the truth and had actually tried to blow up the apartments for real. Putin saw this as a deliberate and subversive attack timed for the elections.

On 11 May, only four days after Putin’s pompous inauguration, the offices of Media Most were raided by armed men in camouflage uniform and in black ski masks. There was little doubt that the raid had received a green light from Putin, who was shown that day on television talking about democracy and the freedom of speech to Ted Turner, the founder and owner of CNN. The raid reminded everyone of the winter of 1995 when Gusinsky’s security guards were made to lie face down on the snow by Korzhakov’s men. At the time, however, NTV was on the ascent and history was on its side. This time NTV was sailing against the wind.

On 13 June 2000 Gusinsky was arrested and put into one of Moscow’s oldest, flea-ridden jails without any clear charges and with no connection made to previous investigations. Malashenko was on holiday in Spain where Putin was about to begin his first post-election tour. Despite the Russian security services’ best efforts, Malashenko called a press conference in Madrid in a hotel across the street from the one where Putin was staying. ‘Today Russia got its first political prisoner,’ Malashenko announced to a room packed with journalists who were supposed to be covering Putin’s visit. ‘His name is Vladimir Alexandrovich Gusinsky.’ As Putin moved to Berlin, so did Malashenko. ‘I was sitting in Gusinsky’s small Challenger on the runway in Madrid and we had to wait to let the presidential jet take off.’¹⁰ The double-act continued: Putin talked about the investment climate in Russia, Malashenko about the politically motivated case against a private company.

Foreign journalists loved the drama that was unfolding in front of them. Instead of Putin, newspapers made a splash with Gusinsky. Putin said he knew nothing about the case. ‘I hope the prosecutor has sufficient reasons for this step,’ he said, adding that he could not get through to him on the phone. Everyone knew Putin was lying and Putin knew that they knew, but this was within the remits of his power: as a former spy, a modern-day Stierlitz, Putin had a licence to use decoy and deceit as his fighting tactic – especially in Berlin. NTV, on the other hand, fell back on its tactic of ‘explosive armour’, putting on a special edition of a popular talk show to discuss Gusinsky’s arrest. The most unexpected guest on the television progamme was Dorenko.

Coming from Dorenko who had extolled Putin, such a level of solidarity seemed odd. Putin was so put off by Dorenko’s appearance that he called him in for a chat a few days later. ‘We want you on our team,’ he told the ‘TV killer’. In answer, Dorenko said, ‘I am not part of anyone’s team. You and I have a relationship – let’s just keep it this way.’ But he also told Putin that by attacking Gusinsky he was sending the wrong signal to security men throughout the country. When Putin indicated that Dorenko could be handsomely rewarded for his services, Dorenko felt belittled. He recalled walking out of Putin’s office shouting on his mobile phone to Berezovsky: ‘What have you done, Borya? What the fuck have you done?’¹²

The reasons for the stand-off between NTV and the Kremlin went far deeper than the Kremlin’s dissatisfaction with NTV’s programmes. It was a fundamental conflict between individualists and private barons on the one hand and statists on the other. Television channels controlled by the oligarchs may not have been objective, but they were independent of the state. Whatever Gusinsky’s faults, he had used his brain and energy to create something from scratch. As Gaidar warned back in 1994, a bureaucrat is always a greater source of corruption than a businessman. ‘A businessman can enrich himself honestly. A bureaucrat can only enrich himself dishonestly. The carcass of a bureaucratic and punitive system can become a carcass of a mafia state – the only question is the goals of its actions.’¹³

In relation to Gusinsky, the state certainly behaved like a mafia. While Gusinsky was in jail, the Kremlin dispatched Press Minister Mikhail Lesin, a former seller of NTV’s airtime, to negotiate with Malashenko about the ‘ransom’ of his boss. The Kremlin’s condition for dropping charges and releasing Gusinsky was that he sold NTV to Gazprom, the state-controlled gas monopoly, for $300 million and a debt write-off. If he disagreed, he would share a cell with prisoners infected with AIDS and TB. Gusinsky agreed to sell and three days later walked out of jail on the further condition that he would not leave Moscow until he signed the deal.

After several weeks of intense talks, Gusinsky signed the sales contract, though not before secretly telling his American lawyers that he was acting under duress. Cunningly, Gusinsky also demanded that Lesin attach an appendix guaranteeing his freedom to the contract, which Lesin did, thus providing Gusinsky with crucial evidence of political pressure that was later used in the European Court of Human Rights. On 26 July 2000, a few days after his signing the papers, the prosecutors, without any explanation, dropped all charges against Gusinsky. The same day he and Malashenko boarded a plane and left Russia, hoping to return before too long. (Malashenko returned after nine years; Gusinsky is still waiting.)

The attack on Gusinsky reopened an old debate between ‘fathers and sons’. The old intelligentsia recognized the old Soviet methods in the actions of the Kremlin. Obshchaya gazeta, first printed during the August 1991 coup when the putsch leaders shut down all independent press, and revived by Yegor Yakovlev as a reincarnation of his old Moskovskie novosti, argued that Gusinsky was fighting not just for his business, but also for dignity and justice which had been trampled on by the Kremlin. The ‘children’ – those who had started Kommersant – responded with contempt and derision.

Alexander Timofeevsky, who assisted Putin in his election campaign, said a few weeks later: ‘What dictatorship, what terrors? I can’t see a single sign of terror. I see chimeras of the intelligentsia’s consciousness, but no terror.’ Timofeevsky, who praised Kommersant for modelling reality, now accused NTV of twisting it: ‘Gusinsky’s media did not describe reality, but created it and sold its creation.’ Timofeevsky ridiculed Gusinsky’s intelligentsia as ‘all those throbbing hearts that so love the small, distant but proud people of Chechnya’.¹⁴ In fact, the main reason Gusinsky’s NTV opposed the war in Chechnya both in 1994 and in 1999 was based on the premise that a state that kills its own people in Chechnya would break any laws.

Maxim Sokolov, who personified the values of liberalism in Kommersant, wrote on the day of Gusinsky’s departure: ‘Those who fight against the state and its deadly interference (much exaggerated in the case of freedom of speech) are right that there is nothing pleasant in such interference. They assume that the alternative to such interference is the individual, independent of the state both economically and spiritually.’¹⁵ But, Sokolov argued, Media Most had cynically used the notion of freedom of speech to defend its own right to interfere, dictate and regulate. So, in the end, Sokolov concluded, it is all a matter of taste. Timofeevsky and Sokolov, who so despised the Soviet era, acted in its finest tradition: denouncing someone who had been forced out of the country. This time it was not a question of ideology but of simple ethics.

Soon after Gusinsky’s departure, an NTV correspondent who worked in the Kremlin pool asked Putin about his relationship with the tycoon. ‘I can talk to him now, if you like. Do you have his number?’ Putin asked playfully. Seconds later, Putin was talking to Gusinsky in front of several other journalists. There was a rich history of ‘theatrical’ telephone calls made by the country’s leader to disgraced artists, starting with Stalin’s famous call to Mikhail Bulgakov, but unlike the playwright who was struggling to survive in Moscow, Gusinsky was sailing on his yacht in Spain. Putin agreed to meet with Gusinsky, implying he could return to Moscow after the summer holidays. It seemed like a good sign.

But August is a dangerous time in Russia and when the rest of the world goes quiet, things start happening: political coups, financial defaults, wars in the Caucasus. That year was no exception. On 12 August, two powerful explosions ripped through the Russian nuclear submarine the Kursk with 118 crew members on board. Most of the men died instantly, but 23 members of the crew managed to seal themselves off in a rear compartment of the vessel while it sank into sand 350 feet (106.5 m) below the sea’s surface.

The Russian military responded in a familiar way – it lied, tried to cover things up, and arrogantly refused foreign help. The navy, which at first said nothing at all, provided contradictory accounts. It claimed that it was communicating with the crew by knocking on the hull of the submarine, that it was providing the crew with oxygen through special tubes, that its rescue operation was obstructed by storms and a strong current – all of which later turned out to be untrue.

On the day of Russia’s worst ever submarine catastrophe, Putin went to Sochi on holiday. He decided not to interrupt his vacation and kept silent for four days. Stories about the suntanned Putin jet-skiing with his family and ‘scaring off fish’ clashed with the footage of the distraught relatives of the Kursk sailors. NTV questioned the official line and demanded answers to why the military was refusing offers of foreign rescue assistance. ‘When a country thinks about the lives of its soldiers and sailors, national pride does not usually suffer,’ NTV’s correspondent bitterly told the viewers. Channel One drew parallels between the Kremlin’s handling of the Kursk disaster with the shameful attempts to cover up the Chernobyl nuclear explosion in 1986. Putin was furious.

While the lies about Chernobyl in the end triggered the opening up of the media, the Kursk disaster had the opposite effect. Television journalists were barred from entering the garrison town, Vidyaevo, the base of the submarine crew. Even when Putin, dressed in black, came to Vidyaevo to meet the relatives on 22 August, only a handful of reporters was let into the hall. No recording equipment was allowed. The only television camera was placed behind soundproof glass in the top gallery. The sound was relayed separately into a television van and apparently edited by plain-clothed FSB specialists. A full record, secretly taped by one of Kommersant’s journalists, showed that Putin was more furious about the television coverage than he was about the attempts to cover up the incident. He saw the role of the media not in informing the audience, but in keeping things from it.

‘Television? They are lying! They are lying! They are lying!’ he fumed. He blamed the dire state of the army and the navy on the oligarchs. ‘There are people in television who shout louder than anyone today [about the state of the navy] and who over the past ten years have destroyed that same army and navy where people are dying today. And today they pose as the army’s biggest defenders in order to discredit and ruin it completely. They have stolen so much money that they are buying everyone and everything.’¹⁶

After his return from Vidyaevo, Putin met with the journalists from the Kremlin pool. ‘I don’t want to see or talk to Gusinsky. He does not respect agreements,’ Putin told Alexei Venediktov, the editor of Echo Moskvy radio station who acted as a go-between for Putin and Gusinsky.¹⁷ Putin saw NTV’s coverage of the Kursk as a clear sign that Gusinsky was reneging on his word and breaking their informal deal. In the same conversation with Venediktov, Putin explained the difference between enemies and traitors. Gusinsky, who had never been on his side, was an enemy. Berezovsky was a traitor.

The relationship between Putin and Berezovsky had began to sour a few months earlier, when Berezovsky had tried to advise his ‘protégé’ to negotiate a peace deal in Chechnya. Berezovsky also wrote Putin an open letter, which resembled (in its ambition rather than its content) Solzhenitsyn’s letter to the Soviet leaders and contained his advice on how to run Russia. The laws proposed by Putin, Berezovksy argued, infringed on the civil society and individual liberties that were the main achievement of Yeltsin’s years.

Berezovsky also wrote a private letter to the president, addressing him in a familiar way by his shortened first name, Volodya. ‘I told him he was an idiot to write to Putin like that,’ Dorenko recalled. ‘I said, “You don’t understand – Putin is a Russian tsar, not a European leader. In Russia a tsar is not a leader, a tsar is a high priest. You can’t write letters to a high priest. You need to crawl, kiss the carpet and kneel before the throne. Because he is not Volodya – he is the throne of the Russians, a mystical, ancient throne.”’¹⁸

According to Dorenko, in April 2000 Berezovsky went to talk to Putin and presented him with his four points on running Russia. First, Russia would need a proper president by 2004; second, it would need a proper party system – like in America; third, one of the leftist parties could be headed by Putin; fourth, the right-wing party would be headed by Berezovsky. ‘When Berezovsky told me all this, my hair stood on end. I asked what Putin had replied to him. “He told me – it was very interesting and that we should try,” Berezovsky said. “Borya, you are fucked! This is your end. You might as well buy yourself a strong rope,”’ Dorenko told Berezovsky in a tragically prophetic turn of phrase.¹⁹ Any reader of Machiavelli’s The Prince would have told Berezovsky the same – disposing of people who helped you on your way to power and who consider you to be indebted to them is rule number one.

‘I have read Machiavelli. But I have not discovered anything new for myself,’ Berezovsky said years later in his London exile. He had more time for Lenin: ‘Nobody had a better perception of what was possible. He had a unique sense of the moment and events.’ Berezovsky believed there was no limit to what was possible for him, but he misjudged both the moment and events.

The relationship between Putin and Berezovsky completely snapped after Channel One’s coverage of the Kursk. Not only did it blame Putin for carrying on with his holidays, but Dorenko openly called Putin a liar and accused him of ‘immorally’ paying off the widows of the submarine sailors. Coming from Dorenko, the word ‘immoral’ sounded like mockery, but Dorenko grew up in a garrison town and felt a strong affinity with the people in Vidyaevo. In his usual forceful and judgemental manner, Dorenko on his programme played extracts from Putin’s interview and dissected them with his own killer commentary: ‘What Putin says contradicts facts,’ he said. Like Nevzorov, Dorenko was a mercenary ‘whose cannon rotated in any direction’. But as a professional hit-man, he took pride in his work and worked off his contract to the end. He did not turn against Berezovsky even when it would have been expedient to do so.

That was Dorenko’s last programme. A few days later he was fired. Berezovsky was told that either he gave up his shares in Obshchestevnnoe Rossiiksoe Televidenie (Russian Public Broadcaster), as Channel One was formally known, or he would follow in Gusinsky’s footsteps. In his thorough book about the oligarchs, David Hoffman describes a conversation between Berezovsky and Putin. After reading a list of accusations which seemed to have come straight from Primakov, Berezovsky’s old nemesis, Putin told him: ‘I want to run ORT… I personally am going to run ORT.’ ‘This is ridiculous, at a minimum. And second, it is unrealizable,’ Berezovsky retorted. Putin told him, ‘ORT covers 98 per cent of Russian territory, of Russian households,’ and he left the room.²⁰ Unwilling to follow in Gusinsky’s footsteps, Berezovsky sold the shares in ORT to Roman Abramovich, his younger partner, and left the country. Years later he tried to sue Abramovich in the London courts, but lost. Soon after, he died, allegedly committing suicide.

At the beginning of September, Putin gave an interview to Larry King on CNN. Asked what had happened to the Kursk, Putin answered with a half-smile on his face: ‘It sank.’ In the same interview, he likened his former job at the KGB to that of a journalist. ‘Intelligence people are very close in their duties to the staff in mass media. They have the same purpose of gathering information, synthesizing it and presenting it for the consumption of decision-makers.’²¹ But this time he was the top decision-maker in the country. Controlling the flow of information was the prerequisite of his power.

Gusinsky had his own decisions to make. He held a meeting with his junior partners, including Malashenko and Kiselev, in London to decide whether to honour his deal to sell his shares in NTV. Everyone at that meeting had a sense of déjà vu. Five years earlier, also in London, the same group had met to decide whether or not to give in to pressure and sell NTV. At the time, Malashenko was the only one who said NTV should fight back. This time he was one of the few to argue for the sale of NTV. Kiselev, on the other hand, suggested that NTV should continue to fight back. Gusinsky sided with Kiselev and told Gazprom that he was pulling out of their agreement, that he had signed under pressure. The war was on and it was played out on the screen. Each side used its professional tools. The Kremlin used a mixture of pressure and bribery. The journalists used their cameras.

But while kicking Gusinsky out of the country and stripping him of assets was a fairly straightforward task, changing the ‘software’ of the channel and bringing to heel its ‘unique journalistic team’ was more delicate.

In January 2001, Tatyana Mitkova, a popular NTV presenter, was called in for questioning by prosecutors. Her colleagues went along, filming themselves. Svetlana Sorokina, the host of a popular talk show, looked straight into the camera, and appealed directly to Putin: ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, please listen to us, find time to meet with us. We are not the oligarchs, we are journalists, those who make NTV… but if tomorrow we all get summons to the prosecutors’ office, we will also consider it an answer.’²² The same day Sorokina received a friendly telephone call from Putin and an invitation to come to the Kremlin for talks along with ten other journalists, including Kiselev.

The ‘chat’ between Putin and a dozen NTV journalists went on for more than three hours. Putin was clearly well briefed and occasionally quoted from the documents supplied by the prosecutors. After listening to Putin for the first thirty minutes of the general discussion, Sorokina scribbled on a piece of a paper and passed it to her colleagues: ‘It is all useless.’ Putin clearly did not believe that the NTV journalists were speaking for themselves. As a professional KGB man, he believed in conspiracies – not people’s free will. ‘You are getting all your instructions from Gusinsky,’ he told Kiselev, looking straight in his eyes. ‘Don’t deny it. I know all about the hours and hours of conversations with Gusinsky,’ Putin said, effectively admitting that Kiselev’s phone was tapped.²³

On 4 April, Gazprom staged a corporate coup, replacing NTV’s management and forcing out Kiselev as general director of the channel. In crushing Gusinsky and NTV, the Kremlin skilfully relied on the television channel’s past by setting off its former ‘victims’ against it. It appointed Alfred Kokh, the former member of Chubais’s team who had been demolished by NTV in 1997, as the head of Gazprom’s media arm which was supposed to take over NTV. Boris Jordan, an American banker of Russian descent, who had helped raise money for Potanin’s winning bid for Svyazinvest, was appointed the general director instead of Kiselev.

While the Kremlin, working through its state television channels, tried to portray its attack on NTV as a business dispute, NTV tried to present it as a fight for freedom of speech and democracy. Neither was true – at least not entirely.

Gusinsky was indeed in a vulnerable position. He owed a total of nearly $500 million to Gazprom, stemming from two loans he had taken on to finance NTV Plus, the satellite television business. The loans could have been converted into Gazprom’s shares in Media Most but the Kremlin ordered Rem Vyakhirev, the Gazprom chairman, who had plenty of reasons to fear for his own past, to dump Gusinsky. But Gusinsky was also in a vulnerable position in terms of his ‘credit history’ with the Russian public. The enormous credit which NTV received in 1993 when it first came on air had been largely used up.

Few people in Russia, including those who defended it, were prepared to think about NTV as a standard-bearer for civil liberties and freedom of speech. NTV journalists tried to draw parallels between their protests and those that had unfolded in the Czech Republic a few months earlier, where journalists from public television had gone on strike against the appointment of new managers, prompting mass demonstrations across the whole country and enlisting the support of Vaclav Havel. But the parallels were not convincing.

Tempting as it may be to portray NTV journalists as altruistic defenders of freedom of speech, it would be as misleading as to present their opponents as stewards of justice and state interests. The Kremlin attacked NTV not for its faults, but because of its merits, yet in doing so it relied on its weaknesses. Many of the journalists, spoiled and compromised by their inflated status, and their own cynicism, which they saw as an asset during the times when they were in power, evoked moral values in their time of need.

NTV’s transformation into a protest movement seemed unnatural. Journalists flew an NTV flag out of the window at the Ostankino television centre. News programmes started coming out with the NTV green logo crossed out by the word ‘protest’ in red. The slogan ‘news is our profession’ turned into ‘protest is our profession’. NTV reduced its programming to news. The rest of the air time was filled with a live feed from inside NTV’s studios and offices. This was a Big Brother reality show before the format even appeared in Russia.

The sight of Kiselev, in a dapper black coat, addressing the crowd at a public rally in his usual respectable television manner, holding hands with other correspondents and waving along to a song, seemed odd. Parfenov cringed at this stylistic clash. He published an open letter to Kiselev in the Kommersant newspaper, offering his resignation. ‘I can no longer hear your preaching in the newsroom – these ten-minute-long outbursts of hatred – and I can’t just ignore them as long as I work here,’ he wrote.²⁴

The same day as his letter was published, Parfenov went to NTV’s studio to participate in the talk show Anthropology, which consisted entirely of NTV staff. ‘You are a traitor!’ NTV’s flamboyant night talk-show presenter, Dmitry Dibrov, shouted at him on air: ‘You have betrayed our battle for the freedom of speech! You have betrayed people who are working here!’ Ever ironic, Parfenov asked his fuming colleague: ‘Do you really think that the words “traitor”, “freedom of speech” and “battle” should be pronounced with three exclamation marks?’²⁵ Parfenov’s stand would have looked more principled had he not accepted a generous pay offer from NTV’s new owners.

In fact, the conflict with NTV was much more about the freedom of speech than people realized. After all, freedom did not automatically imply objectivity or even quality, but merely the right to say something different without the fear of persecution. What NTV provided was not objectivity, but pluralism. Had Russia had ten other powerful private news channels with the same reach as the state ones, the fate of NTV would have mattered less. But Russia had only two state or quasi-state channels whose finances were far murkier than NTV’s. By taking over NTV, the state was not just disposing of a defiant oligarch; it was disposing of competition.

The people who realized this were not NTV’s young audience, but the very same ‘relics’ of the Soviet intelligentsia who had seen it all before. A group of Russian intellectuals – poets, artists and journalists – published a letter in defence of NTV under the headline: ‘IT IS TIME TO GET WORRIED’. ‘The political motive of the persecution [of NTV] is clear: suppression of dissent in the country… Meantime, Russian society watches everything that is going on with cold detachment, creating the impression that defending freedom of speech is a private problem for NTV. This is a dangerous misconception. We have no doubt that the political consequences of NTV passing over to state control will affect everyone.’²⁶

The letter, both in its language and its arguments, firmly belonged to the tradition of the 1960s generation. It was signed, among others, by Yegor Yakovlev and published in Obshchaya gazeta, which he edited. A decade after its first emergency issues in August 1991, it printed 300,000 copies of another ‘emergency’ issue entirely dedicated to the takeover of NTV.[2]

In his own article, Yegor blasted Putin’s cynicism. ‘First of all Vladimir Putin is not a man of his word. He swore his sympathy for an independent media and he has blessed its crucifixion… There are many people of my profession – not to mention members of the Duma – who would prefer to stand aside. Believe me – I have witnessed this more than once: you think you are just washing your hands of something and then you end up to your ears in shit.’²⁷

The paper was distributed freely among some 20,000 people who came to protest against NTV’s takeover in Moscow and St Petersburg. The atmosphere of those demonstrations was reminiscent of the democratic marches of the late Perestroika years held in front of Moskovskie novosti.

The 1960s generation which NTV came to replace was the one that rushed to its defence, while its target audience – the young, smart, energetic, self-sufficient capitalist crowd – ‘kept their cool’ and watched the conflict over NTV as though it was a reality show. This is what NTV had taught them to do over the years. After all it was ‘normal television’ for a ‘normal country’ that propagated the idea of a calm, private, bourgeois life.

The television drama culminated in a showdown at 4 a.m. on 14 April 2001 and resembled a military takeover. The eighth floor of the Ostankino television centre, where NTV’s studios were based, was sealed off by tough private security men. Some members of Kiselev’s team were barred from entering the studios, but the cameras kept rolling, capturing Oleg Dobrodeev, one of the founders of NTV, and now head of state television, trying to calm down his former colleagues. Most refused to speak to him or shake his hand. After a sleepless night, the team of NTV journalists, including Sorokina and Shenderovich, walked out, taking with them their own photographic portraits that had hung in the corridors. They crossed the street and reported the night’s drama from a borrowed studio. NTV itself came out with the usual, calm morning bulletin. The takeover of NTV was just one of the news items.

One could end the narrative of NTV here, blaming its destruction purely on Putin and leaving the few last honest NTV journalists as noble knights fighting for their freedom, but the picture would be incomplete. ‘The unique journalistic team’ first took refuge at a small cable channel owned by Berezovsky and then migrated to TSN, a channel that was owned by the Kremlin-friendly oligarchs, including Roman Abramovich. Kiselev, who became its editor-in-chief, trod the line carefully this time. When the channel folded a few months later through a lack of financing nobody batted an eyelid. The ‘unique journalistic team’ expired with a whimper. The Kremlin broke NTV not just financially, but morally. The victory had been shockingly easy to achieve. Grilled by foreign journalists about the freedom of speech in Russia, Putin answered crudely: ‘A real man always tries. A real woman always resists.’²⁸ To extend the metaphor, many Russian television journalists did not resist the embraces of the new powers.

The attraction of highly paid jobs, celebrity status and influence turned out to be stronger than the desire for free expression. ‘Ten years ago Russian journalists thought they were the fourth estate, but they have now been told by the president that they are the world’s oldest profession,’ Petrovskaya said at the time.²⁹ Many of those who stormed out of NTV’s studios in 2001 soon flocked back, offering their services to the new powers and ultimately turned NTV into one of the most malicious channels even by the standards of state television.

It was NTV that in the 2010s harassed opposition leaders and foreign diplomats, slinging mud at liberals such as Boris Nemtsov. It was NTV’s Andrei Norkin – one of those who had stormed out of NTV’s studio in 2001 – who just hours after Nemtsov was killed in February 2015 hosted a twisted talk show that portrayed him as a source of all evil. But that was later.

Dolce Vita and Blood, Sweat and Tears

In 2001 the transition was not immediately visible. In fact, if anything, the channel became livelier, more entertaining and sleek. NTV continued its critical coverage of the Chechnya war and showed no more reverence for the Kremlin than any Western television channel did at the time. It even launched a talk show called Freedom of Speech. Parfenov returned to the channel, replacing Kiselev as its main political anchorman.

The protest rhetoric and moralizing vanished. Namedni replaced Kiselev’s Itogi as the main political programme of the week. Where Kiselev had preached, Parfenov informed and entertained. Where Kiselev had used meaningful pauses to underscore the gravity of his subject, Parfenov used half-squinting irony and sarcasm to show that no subject was too grave for a good pun.

The makers of Namedni put together a written set of rules which they referred to as the ‘bible’. The programme, it prescribed, should keep a balance between ‘dolce vita’ and ‘blood, sweat and tears’. It must not look too rich: ‘Yes, we are urban and well-to-do, but we also know how others live.’ However, the element of ‘dolce vita’ dominated and when Namedni’s correspondents travelled to the depths of Russia, it seemed like an exotic travelogue feature about the life of an indigenous population.

A dull business story about Putin and Silvio Berlusconi opening a new factory line of Italian washing machines in Russia was illustrated with the washing machine itself brought into the studio. Speaking to the camera next to the washing machine, Parfenov looked like he was advertising it (advertising became one of Parfenov’s main trades after he left television). The main object of Parfenov’s ‘advertisements’, however, was Russian liberalism and its middle-class lifestyle. And like any advertisement it made it look far more attractive than the reality. ‘We portrayed Russia as more liberal than it really was,’ he said later.³⁰

In his contract with NTV Parfenov’s official job description had been mistyped as ‘chief programmer’ (instead of ‘programme chief’) and in many ways Namedni did programme Russia as the liberal country he wished it to be – one where people don’t climb barricades and talk about politics but enjoy individual freedoms to consume and to travel. Liberalism, he used to say, was not in political slogans, but on the Internet, in coffee shops, in fashion boutiques, in trips abroad and pedestrianized streets. In this sense, Russia was certainly getting more liberal. NTV fitted perfectly into this picture, showcasing Russian capitalists, praising their initiative and individual talents.

This agenda matched that of the Kremlin. Boris Jordan’s appointment had been supposed to appease the Kremlin’s critics at home and abroad, and reassure Russia’s middle class that it had been right to keep its cool during the conflict. Regardless of what people thought of Gusinsky, public opinion was not ready for an overt clampdown on the media and the Kremlin did not try to force it. On the contrary, it used NTV as its calling card that was meant to prove its economic liberalism, safe in the knowledge that it had ultimate control over it.

The limits of the Kremlin’s licence started to show a year later, during a theatre siege in Moscow. On 23 October 2002 a group of Chechen terrorists took more than 900 people hostage during the performance of a musical called Nord-Ost. There was a macabre theatricality in the siege itself. When the first terrorist clad in military camouflage and a ski mask walked on stage, fired in the air and declared everyone hostages, the audience thought it was part of the show. That Chechen fighters who were part of a different reality could burst into the comfortable life of the Moscow middle class seemed incomprehensible.

As in 1995, during the hostage-taking in Budennovsk, terrorists demanded an immediate end to the war in Chechnya. But this time nobody was willing to put the lives of hostages above the interest of the state. While negotiations with the terrorists were still going on, Channel One, now firmly under Kremlin control, poured oil onto the flames. Its commentary programme showed the old footage of Chernomyrdin negotiating with Basayev. ‘For all these seven years we have been paying a price for Budennovsk, for the unprecedented shame of political negotiations with bandits and degenerates,’ the programme said. ‘We have no intention of telling the Russian government and security services how and what should be done, because we have no reason to doubt that they are doing everything right…’³¹ The camera cut to Putin.

At the end of day three of the siege, the Russian security services pumped a mysterious narcotic gas into the auditorium and stormed the building, killing all the terrorists and poisoning to death more than 120 hostages. The security services then released a video of the dead terrorists. It showed some still sitting in their chairs, others lying on the floor, their faces covered in blood. The camera zoomed in and paused on their dead, disfigured faces; it showed the leader of the terrorists lying dead on the floor in a corridor with a bottle of Hennessy which had been apparently planted next to him by a journalist from Russia Channel who had previously worked at NTV. Television was changing reality even after death. State television kept showing the explosives which the terrorists could have used. Its central message was – thank God (and the Kremlin) for a successful operation. In fact, the evacuation took more than four hours. By the time the ambulances reached the hospital, many hostages, including children, were dead. Doctors did not know what they were dealing with because the security services refused to name of the gas they had used, claiming it was a state secret.

NTV’s reporting stood out. It showed the crisis unfold in real time, providing blanket coverage that included the storming of the theatre. It was the only channel that was allowed – in fact, demanded – by the hostage-takers to film inside the theatre. It aired an interview with the defiant terrorists’ leader Movsar Barayev who, as NTV pointed out, had been reported as dead only two weeks earlier by the state news agencies. It showed the protests of the hostages’ relatives, demanding an end to the Chechnya war. It hired a lip-reader to transcribe the soundless video of Putin provided by the Kremlin press service. It questioned the official line: had everything possible been done to avoid the storming of the theatre and to save the lives of the hostages?

As the death toll of hostages climbed, Putin made a televised statement – asking forgiveness for not having been able to save everyone. The terrorists, he said, had no future, ‘but we have’. None of those who planned or executed the rescue operation was reprimanded. As in the Kursk disaster, he shifted the blame onto television, accusing NTV of endangering the lives of hostages by showing the preparations for the storming of the theatre. Putin summoned news executives to the Kremlin and angrily told them that ‘journalists should not ply their trade on the blood of their own citizens – if, of course, those who do this consider these citizens to be their own’. The remark was clearly addressed to NTV’s general director Boris Jordan, who was poignantly not invited to the meeting. A pragmatic investment banker, Jordan resigned with a handsome pay-off from Gazprom.

The head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, held regular meetings with media chiefs. ‘The meetings which we have had before have yielded results: we have a mutual understanding and a certain trust. At the end of the day we are doing one job: working for society, working for the state,’ he declared.³²

Parfenov stayed on at NTV for another couple of years. ‘I knew it was a matter of time before Namedni would get shut down. But I continued to chirrup for as long as I could,’ he said.³³ Parfenov’s ‘chirruping’ was entertaining and ultimately projected optimism. However serious or grim the subject matter was, his style was playful and ironic. When Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest tycoon and Putin’s opponent, was arrested in 2003, Parfenov called it ‘Khodorkost’ and invited a popular stand-up comedian to come on the programme to parody Putin’s angry speech in which he had told his ministers ‘to stop the hysteria and speculations and not to interfere in the case’. The comedian mimicked the speech and commented on Putin’s psychological state. Namedni called the item ‘Starting Hysteria’.

The last straw, perhaps, was Namedni’s coverage of Putin’s inauguration in 2004 that mixed images of the actual ceremony with scenes from The Barber of Siberia, a kitsch fiction film set in the time of Tsar Alexander III. Putin’s arrival at the Kremlin in a black limousine was mixed with the arrival of Alexander III on a white horse; when Putin addressed the Kremlin guards, he got a reply from Alexander III’s soldiers. Playfully, Namedni was putting across a serious message: Putin’s ceremony was a coronation of a new monarch, rather than the inauguration of a president.

Yet, however ‘clever’ this interchange between documentary and fiction was, it was a very postmodernist attitude to reality – not as something fixed, but as something that could be constructed and deconstructed, cut and pasted. Parfenov used the device to deliver a true message. But there was nothing to stop his followers from using it to deliver a fake one. It was all relative. In June 2004 Parfenov was sacked and Namedni was shut down. Parfenov’s ‘chirruping’ was out of tune with the new order that started to emerge in Putin’s second presidential term. The time for jokes and jokers was over. The events that were taking place in the country, including the arrest of Khodorkovsky, the destruction of the Yukos oil company and the occasional of acts of terror, were too serious and complex to be described through the wordplay and sarcasm that Parfenov had turned into his house style. Parfenov admitted that much, but not until six years later, when he delivered an explosive speech which was filled with sincere civic pathos.

He spoke at an elegant black-tie ceremony, where he received an award set up in memory of Vladislav Listyev, an iconic Russian journalist and showman, who was murdered in 1995. Standing in front of Russia’s powerful TV executives, Parfenov told them what he thought about the state of their industry. ‘Our television is getting more sophisticated at exciting, enticing, entertaining and making [the audience] laugh, but it can hardly be called a civic or public political institution.’ For a reporter on Russian state television, said a visibly nervous Parfenov, ‘top bureaucrats are not newsmakers, but his boss’s bosses’. This means that ‘journalists are not journalists at all but bureaucrats, following the logic of service and submission’.³⁴

In the past, Parfenov would have cringed at words such as ‘civic institution’. Now, he was delivering them with dead seriousness. The TV executives who had turned Russia’s state television channels into a mixture of entertainment and propaganda looked at Mr Parfenov with deadpan expressions on their faces. Among them were Dobrodeev, Parfenov’s long-time colleague at NTV, and Konstantin Ernst, his old-time friend and co-producer of Old Songs about Important Things, who was now in charge of Russia’s Channel One.

The Survivor

Ernst was no Soviet apparatchik. With his long, flowing hair, he was a Hollywood-crazy television journalist and producer who had stayed the course and arrived at the top, presiding over the country’s main national television channels that broadcast to its eleven time zones. Born in 1961, he was among the brightest and most ambitious members of the generation that was created both by the Soviet Union and by the reaction against it, who most despised the restrictions of that period and who benefited most from their removal. He was a blue-blood of the Soviet intellectual establishment; his father was a professor of biology and Ernst himself had a doctorate in biochemistry. His real passion was cinema, though, and like many talented and energetic people of his generation he was drawn to television. He started with the Vzglyad programme, which was at the forefront of Perestroika television, but soon launched his own programme called Matador.

The show had nothing to do with bullfighting: Ernst simply liked the sound of the word. He took his viewers into the world of Hollywood studios, film stars and the Cannes film festival. Its format was similar to Parfenov’s early, non-political Namedni. As Ernst said at the twentieth anniversary of Namedni, both Matador and Namedni tried to articulate a time that had not yet arrived. ‘We wanted this time [to look like our programmes] and to be ahead of it,’ he said.³⁵

In one memorable episode of Matador, Ernst told the story of the creation of Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now. Dressed in an US Air Force uniform for effect, Ernst seemed intoxicated by the energy of the scene where US helicopters bomb the Vietcong to the soundtrack of Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’. Francis Ford Coppola seemed a natural role model for the young Ernst.

In 1995, Berezovsky singled Ernst out for his determination and ambition, appointing him general producer of Channel One which went under the name of Ostankino or Public Russian Television (ORT) at the time. Ernst was not so much an ideologist, but an organizer and a producer of the channel. Entrusted with the largest channel in terms of its reach, he produced not just news and popular shows, but common experiences for the country. They were invariably sleek and watchable. Ernst’s first big hit as a producer was Old Songs about Important Things which seamlessly connected the Soviet past and Russia’s present.

Four years later, in September 1999 just as Putin was being promoted as Yeltsin’s successor, Ernst was appointed the head of Channel One. Under Ernst, the word ‘One’ referred not so much to the number of the television broadcasting frequency, but its position in the ratings and influence. While Putin restored the Soviet anthem as the country’s ‘most important song’, Ernst restored Vremya with its familiar Soviet-era tune as the most important prime-time news programme which articulated the country’s narrative. What he was most interested in, though, was not news, but fiction. In the late 1990s and early 2000s Ernst and Channel One became one of the biggest producers of film and TV serials.

As Lenin said, ‘of all the kinds of arts the most important for us is cinema’. Images could get through to people’s consciousness in a way that words could not. They could also sell in a way that words could not. The ability of a film to influence the minds of the audience in Russia was far greater than in America, simply because there was less noise in the marketplace. Ernst did not set out to sell an ideology – he did not really have one – but he used ideology to sell the films he produced.

After the 1998 devaluation of the rouble, import substitution became one of the main factors behind Russian economic growth. It was also the main factor behind the growth of the Russian film industry. In the same way as people swapped imported goods for domestic equivalents they substituted locally produced dramas for American soap operas. ‘Russia’ became a brand.

Few people sensed the demand for patriotism as acutely – and supplied it as profitably – as did Ernst. He used Russian patriotic slogans, in addition to the weight and resources of the state-controlled television channel, to promote films which were modelled on Hollywood blockbusters. In 2004 Ernst produced the most successful post-Soviet blockbuster called Nochnoi Dozor (Night Watch), a special effects-filled fantasy-thriller. Ernst sold the distribution rights for the film to 20th Century Fox and in the first four weeks the film collected more than $16 million, breaking box office records and in Russia even putting it ahead of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Based on a fantasy novel by Sergei Lukyanov, Night Watch was the Russian answer to The Matrix. It is set in contemporary Moscow where ordinary people have parallel other-worldly existences as vampires, shamans and witches. They are divided into ‘light ones’ and ‘dark ones’ and have been fighting with each other since life began.

The ‘light’ ones in the film are closely connected to their Soviet past, whereas the ‘dark’ ones clearly belong to the world of Russian capitalism. The two sides are fighting for the soul of a twelve-year-old boy – ‘the great other’ – who in the end chooses the dark. As the boy tells his estranged father, who is one of the ‘light ones’: ‘You are no better than the dark. You are even worse. You lie and only pretend to be good.’

In his interviews Ernst explained that the ‘dark’ ones, for all their aggression, do not equal evil and the ‘light’ do not equal good. ‘The “dark” are much freer, they let themselves be as they want to be. The “light” are more frustrated, they have too many duties, and feel responsible for a lot of people. The “dark” have eschewed constraints, they live for themselves, while the light look like neurotics who are trying to be good to everyone.’³⁶ Ernst identified himself with the dark ones.

He threw in the entire resources of Channel One, including its news programmes, to promote the film, which ensured its commercial success. The makers tried to load the film with extra meaning, which soon evaporated, but the precedent of a Hollywood-scale Russian blockbuster stayed. In an interview that Ernst gave after the film, he lamented the inability of Russians to live in the present moment. ‘Our people live either in the past or in the future,’ he said.³⁷ Ernst, who descended from an old German family that had settled in Russia, lived in the present and shaped it.

Ernst did not suffer from cognitive dissonance. News and fiction were not two separate parts of his life but harmoniously complemented and interacted with one another. Night Watch featured a scene from Channel One’s nine o’clock news programme Vremya with a cameo appearance by one of its smooth-talking presenters who informs his audience about an approaching cataclysm.

Vremya was an antidote to chaos and disorder – a source of stability and routine, a matrix. Every programme followed the same repeated pattern – like a lullaby – starting with Putin travelling around the country or receiving ministers in his office, followed by examples of Russian resurgence and ending with (bad) news from abroad. Unlike any other programme on the channel, Vremya was (and still is) broadcast uninterrupted by commercials.

Strictly speaking, Vremya did not report news. Instead, it created a virtual reality according to the hierarchy of the state with Putin at the top. As a state news programme, Vremya did not allow itself any scorn, irony or ridicule. The tone of the presenter was always stern and serious. Its aim was to assure viewers that they could sleep peacefully in the knowledge that the country was being governed and guarded by a wise and caring president who would make the right decisions; that criminals and terrorists would be punished and champions of labour rewarded. ‘Any stabilization makes news calmer. If news works like a constant nerve irritant – as it did in Russia in the 1990s – it is a sign of instability rather than of the freedom of speech,’ Ernst explained.³⁸

In fact, TV news did not reflect the country’s stabilization – it emanated an illusion of stability just as the violent crime dramas that flooded Russian television created an illusion of total lawlessness. Both news and soap operas were artefacts and they worked together to create a balance between dark and light as the plot of Night Watch would have it. While news was supposed to calm the audience, the violent crime dramas raised the level of adrenaline and aggression in the national bloodstream. As one high-powered Russian official and former FSB general explained, this deluge of graphic violence was not a response to high spectator demand, but a conscious policy formed in the high echelons of the Russian power structure, to create the impression that only the strong state portrayed in the news could protect the vulnerable population from the violence on the screen.

The question of what was good or bad for the audience was not decided by its tastes. ‘A doctor does not ask the patient under the knife what is good for him,’ Ernst said.³⁹ It was his and Dobrodeev’s job to prescribe and administer the medicine.

The Battle Between Light and Darkness

Night Watch was released in Russia in early July 2004. A few weeks later, on 1 September, real horror struck the country – a school in Beslan in North Ossetia, with over 1,000 children, was taken hostage by Chechen terrorists. It was the worst terrorist attack in Russia’s history, more cruel and deadly than any other. Throughout the crisis the Russian media reported official figures fed by the Kremlin which put the number of hostages at 354. This was almost certainly a deliberate falsehood that infuriated the terrorists so much that they started to deny the children water and barred them from going to the toilet, forcing them to drink their own urine. According to one surviving hostage, the terrorists were listening to the news on radios. When they heard the number, one of them said: ‘Russia says there are only 300 of you here. Maybe we should kill enough of you to get down to that number.’⁴⁰

After two days and three nights of negotiations, when independent Russian journalists and activists, including the courageous Anna Politkovskaya,[3] who commanded respect among Chechen fighters, were prevented from helping with negotiations, the security services began to storm the building.

On 3 September, at 1.03 p.m., two explosions were heard from the school’s gym where most of the hostages were being kept. As it later turned out, the explosions were caused by a thermobaric grenade fired by the Russian special forces. The terrorists started shooting the children, mayhem broke out and fighting began. Foreign networks such as CNN and the BBC broadcast the events live. In Russia, on the two state-controlled TV channels, normal programming continued. An hour later, they switched to what by then was turning into a massacre, but their coverage was confusing and brief. Channel One spent ten minutes on Beslan before returning to a Brazilian soap opera called Women in Love. Echo Moskvy, the city’s liberal radio station, kept its viewers up to date by watching events unfold on CNN.

Throughout the day, both state channels featured news bulletins on the hour, repeatedly reporting the official line: the authorities did not plan to storm the school; the terrorists had started the shooting; the siege was the work of an international terrorist organization whose numbers included ethnic Arabs and even an African (he later turned out to be Chechen).

Several hours into the clash, Russia Channel gave the impression that the fighting was over and that most of the hostages were now safe. Viewers saw children being carried by their parents and heard a relieved voice behind the camera saying: ‘They are alive, it is OK, they are alive, alive.’ As some were reunited with their parents, a correspondent commented: ‘There are tears here again, but this time these are tears of joy.’ A presenter gave figures of those taken to hospital, but carefully avoided giving estimates of the number of people killed. ‘According to the latest information,’ he said, ‘the fighting in the school is over. There are no dead or wounded there… we can’t give more exact figures of the injured… er… the precise figure of how many hostages were freed.’⁴¹

Then, at about 9 p.m., after more than 300 children and parents had died, and as the gunfight between the hostage-takers and special forces was still going on, viewers were treated to extraordinary programming. Russia Channel showed brave Russian soldiers fighting bearded Chechen bandits who were hiding in caves and shouting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ These were scenes from the military drama On My Honour! Channel One meanwhile showed Die Hard, a film in which Bruce Willis saves hostages in a New York high-rise. The actors on the screen seemed to be taking fictional revenge on behalf of those who in Beslan were still dying.

Dobrodeev and Ernst were the demiurges who created myths and explained reality. As Ernst said afterwards: ‘Our task number two is to inform the country about what is going on. Today, the main task of the television is to mobilize the country. Russia needs consolidation.’⁴² Unlike Soviet television, which was closely guarded by censors, Ernst mostly made his own decisions. ‘Nobody calls me and orders me to do anything,’ he insisted.⁴³ This was probably true. But even if it were not, he did not slavishly take instructions from the Kremlin, but willingly put his talent and imagination at its service.

‘I am a statist, a liberal statist,’ said Ernst a decade later.⁴⁴ Throughout his years as the head of Channel One he has put his energy into consolidating the nation around spectacular television projects and creating common experiences based on a narrative of the state, removing any need for doubt, reflection or repentance. Unlike Dobrodeev, who turned into a political apparatchik and the master of the Kremlin’s propaganda, Ernst considers himself an artist, a creator, or, to use television language, a producer of the country.

Like any good producer, he unmistakably sensed the demands of his audience and in the 2000s the country craved a show of resurgence. People whose incomes kept going up because of the increase in the price of oil, rather than because they had to work harder, had plenty of free time for entertainment and demanded a display of Russia’s greatness to explain and supplement their improving fortunes. In the mid-2000s, this demand was largely satisfied through sport, entertainment and parades.

In June 2008 the Russian football team won a quarter-final against the Netherlands in the European championship. Nearly 80 per cent of the country watched the match – a record rating in Russian television history. At night, Moscow erupted into a mass patriotic frenzy with cars hooting, flags waving and bikers parading – the same ones who would a few years later wave Russian flags in Crimea. At first glance, it seemed a copy of European football events, but while in Europe sport has long turned into a substitute for war, in Russia it was only a starter.

The victory was number one news on Russian television. Popular talk shows could not get enough of sport. ‘Russia – forward!’ became a national slogan. The celebration of victory coincided with an escalation of a propaganda campaign against Georgia which was portrayed as America’s proxy. A few weeks later Russian tanks and aeroplanes invaded Georgia. It was Russia’s first fully televised war, scripted as a copy of NATO’s action in Kosovo, and it produced a similar reaction to the one after the football match.

This was the ultimate show of Russia’s resurgence. Television channels were part of the military operation, waging an essential propaganda campaign, spreading disinformation and demonizing the country Russia was about to attack. The war started on 7 August 2008 – the day of the opening of the Summer Olympics in Beijing – with Georgian forces responding to fire coming from the Russian-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia with heavy artillery. According to the Russian propaganda, Georgia was a reckless and dangerous aggressor and Russia had an obligation, as a peacekeeper, to protect the victims. Russian television talked about genocide, 2,000 civilian deaths and tens of thousands of refugees. (The real figure of South Ossetians killed in the conflict was 133.)

Putin, in a light sports jacket, talking to South Ossetian women, performed the role of superman in a special effects drama staged by Ernst and Dobrodeev. He flew to the Russian side of the Caucasus mountain range straight from Beijing to hear hair-raising stories from refugees:

The rumours spread by Russian television – of Georgian troops targeting women and children and performing genocide – later proved to be untrue, but at the time they inspired ethnic cleansing of Georgian villages by South Ossetian irregulars. The main target for attack by Russian television, however, was not Georgia – which was an obvious enemy – but Russia’s own audience which was bombarded with anti-American propaganda.

Judging by the picture, Russia was fighting not against a tiny, poor country that used to be its vassal, but against a dangerous and powerful aggressor backed by the imperialist West. One Russian Duma deputy reflected the mood in a television interview: ‘Today, it is quite obvious who the parties in the conflict are. They are the US, the UK, Israel who participated in training the Georgian army, Ukraine who supplied it with weapons. We are facing a situation where there is NATO aggression against us.’⁴⁵

In the following few years, as America proposed the so-called ‘reset’ – a form of détente policy – and Dmitry Medvedev, who acted as Russian president, talked about modernization under the slogan ‘Russia – Forward!’, patriotic urges were satisfied by military parades and song contests. On 9 May 2009, fresh from watching the annual Second World War victory day parade, Putin went to inspect the readiness of the Eurovision Song Contest that was staged by Ernst and opened three days later. The two events occupied equally important places in Putin’s schedule and in the Kremlin’s narrative of resurgence. As Ernst said at the time, it was the ‘external political effect’ that mattered. The main ‘geopolitical show’ of Ernst’s television career was still to come.

Ernst was entrusted with staging one of the crowning moments of Vladimir Putin’s rule – the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics – a project that Putin cared about deeply and which was supposed to legitimize his return to power as Russia’s president in 2012. No expenses were spared for the Olympics – $50 billion was thrown at the project. A special arena was built for the opening and closing ceremonies; the world’s top technicians, designers, architects, riggers and musicians worked around the clock. The result was the most grandiose pageantry Russia had ever seen, a staggering display of the country’s comeback, staged with panache, style and imagination.

Ernst called the show Dreams about Russia. The ‘dreams’ defied the forces of gravitation as the show unfolded both on stage and in the air – the heavy sets were suspended and moved along rail tracks attached to the roof of the stadium. The sky was no limit. Seven islands – each representing a piece of the country – drifted through the air like clouds, accompanied by a song from the opera Prince Igor about a promised land of the free where ‘the sun shines so brightly’, where ‘roses bloom luxuriously’ and where ‘nightingales sing in the green forests and sweet grapes grow’. It was a captivating and grandiose utopia.

At the centre of the show’s narrative was a history of the empire and the state – not of its people. Rather than celebrating the diversity of the country’s population, as the Olympic rules prescribe, it celebrated unity under the state flag. A troika of horses made of white light floated through the sky; the colourful domes of St Basil’s Church (balloons filled with hot air) bounced joyfully along with jesters and acrobats in a medieval fayre; subtle engravings of Peter the Great’s construction of St Petersburg morphed into a choreographed display of the Russian imperial army; a captivating ball scene from War and Peace gave way to a constructivist study of the Bolshevik Revolution drowned in red light. A steam engine, suspended in mid-air, pulled along the wheels and clogs of Stalin’s industrialization. The scene was set to a tune called ‘Vremya Vpered’ (‘Time, Forward!’) which has long been used as the theme tune of the Vremya television programme. Time moved seamlessly on to the optimistic and humane 1960s filled with humour and nostalgia – as though inspired by Ernst’s and Parfenov’s project Old Songs about Important Things.

Ernst exceeded himself. No country had ever staged such a technically complex show in the air. He watched the opening in the command centre. At the sound of the final firework, Ernst jumped from his seat, shouting in English ‘We’ve done it!’ The country that Ernst had conjured up on the stage was not a place of Russian dolls and Cossack dances, but one of avant-garde artists, great ballet, Tolstoy, Nabokov and Gogol; a sophisticated European country proud of its culture and its history: ‘the country I want to live in,’ tweeted Ksenia Sobchak, a

‘I wanted to create a matrix that would indirectly affect the whole country,’ said Ernst.⁴⁶ This was the invention of Russia. It had the same mythological function as Stalin’s 1930s Exhibition of People’s Achievements (VDNKh) that served as a matrix of Soviet life. The exhibition, which turned into a permanent display of Soviet achievements, presented a model of a cornucopia and fertility in a country where farmers had been eliminated as a class. Live bulls were paraded on the site, supposedly to inseminate growth. It was no accident that a year after the Olympics opening ceremony, its sets were displayed at VDNKh.

Receiving the Man of the Year award in 2014 from the Russian edition of GQ, a men’s fashion and style magazine, Ernst said that his opening of the Olympics was the happiest and scariest moment of his life. ‘I got a chance to confess my love to the country in front of three billion people on earth and what is probably even more important, for two hours to bring my compatriots together in one emotion, even though many of them cannot be brought together in one emotion…’⁴⁷ The question is what kind of emotion.

For all its technological modernity and scenes of the avant-garde, Russia’s present was its past. There was no sign of Perestroika or the 1990s or the 2000s. It was as though the Soviet Union never collapsed. Ernst effectively stopped the story of the country in the early 1960s, the time of Krushchev’s Thaw and when Ernst was born. ‘The time after the war is the time we live in,’ Channel One commentators told their television audience.

As Grigory Revzin, an architecture critic and columnist, noted, the choice of Krushchev’s Thaw as the last ‘historic’ period reflected the spirit of the time when the ceremony was conceived – in the short period of Dmitry Medvedev’s presidential rule, which was perceived as a brief ‘thaw’ and which proposed ‘modernization’ as its main goal. Yet when the show opened the times had changed and its optimistic mood clashed with the tone of a military-style mobilization created by Ernst’s television news. Channel One rebranded itself as ‘First Olympic’, and dressed its presenters in the Russian team’s uniform. Any critic of the Olympics who dared to mention corruption during its construction was deemed an enemy. Every Russian medal was celebrated as though it was a military victory.

Parallel with the show in Sochi, another far more dramatic but no less colourful show was unfolding in Kiev. Thousands of people on Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) rose against a kleptocratic, dysfunctional and authoritarian post-Soviet order that was personified in Ukraine by the thuggish, corrupt president Viktor Yanukovych. People waved EU flags as a symbol of the dignified life they wished to have. Riot police tried to disband protesters who set up a camp in the square after Yanukovych dumped an agreement with the EU under pressure from Russia.

At night, faced with the very real prospect of being beaten up or killed, the people in Maidan came together in one emotion. On the illuminated stage, projected on a screen, protest leaders called for calm and defiance, priests read out prayers and Ruslana, a popular Ukrainian singer and the winner of the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest, led the national anthem: ‘Ukraine has not yet perished, nor her glory, nor her freedom.’ Thousands of Maidan protesters struck up the chorus line: ‘Souls and bodies we’ll lay down, all for our freedom.’ It looked like the birth of the nation.

By the time the Sochi Olympics had finished, blood had been spilled in Kiev. Riot police stormed Maidan. Officers threw percussion grenades taped up with nails and bolts at protesters, who responded with Molotov cocktails. Snipers shot protesters with live ammunition. The centre of Kiev went up in flames and Yanukovych flew to Sochi to consult Putin. The picture of Kiev’s inferno spoilt Putin’s spectacle in Sochi. He was furious. The revolution in Kiev, he was convinced, was staged by the West which wanted to undermine him and turn Ukraine away from his sphere of influence. ‘The Olympics’, Ernst said, ‘goes well beyond sport. It is geopolitics. We staged a good Olympics and it produced a strong counter-reaction. One day we will turn up all kinds of documents and write a true history of 2014.’⁴⁸

Three days after the closing ceremony of the Sochi Olympics – also staged by Ernst – Russian ‘polite green men’ in unmarked military uniforms staged a coup in Crimea. Russian naval vessels that guarded the coast around Sochi set course towards Sebastopol. The Kremlin began the annexation of Crimea and stirred a war in the east of Ukraine. Television was at the forefront of that attack and Ernst and Dobrodeev were commanding the information forces. It was a television show whose cost was no longer calculated in billions of dollars but in thousands of lives.