Masters.
Forbes hired Klebnikov in 1989 at the age of twenty-six, soon after he completed his research for a doctorate in Russian studies. His intimate knowledge of life in the upper class dovetailed nicely with the magazine’s interests. He visited Institut Le Rosey, in Rolle, Switzerland, where he had taught tennis five years earlier, and wrote an unforgettable piece about this boarding school for the coddled rich, including the children of princes and kings. Klebnikov’s inquisitive mind was evident in a later investigative report on the wealth of Iran’s Rafsanjani family, whose patriarchs were among “a handful of clerics who call the shots behind the curtain and have gotten very rich in the process.” It was groundbreaking work.
Along the way, he traveled regularly to Russia and wrote stories lamenting what he saw as its decline into criminality under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. In December 1996, he made his biggest splash ever, with a story highly critical of Boris Berezovsky. The piece—headlined “Godfather of the Kremlin?”—suggested that the oligarch had become Russia’s greatest baron by consorting with gangsters and being complicit in murder. The latter charge led to a Berezovsky libel suit, which was resolved when Forbes publicly retracted the implication that the billionaire had played a role in anyone’s death.
The Berezovsky story had run without a byline, apparently out of concern for Klebnikov’s safety. But it did not take much guesswork in Moscow to determine the author’s identity, and death threats soon began to arrive. He continued to write about Russia, but with an armed bodyguard at his side whenever he visited the country.
Klebnikov heaped scorn on Yeltsin, soon to be succeeded by Putin. In a 1999 piece for Forbes, he accused the lame duck president of presiding over a “gangster state. Corrupt from top to bottom, it is ruled by a small group of political bosses and their crony capitalist friends. The gang feeds on state assets and protects itself with violence.” These virtual traitors were preventing the revival of his beloved Russia, Klebnikov believed.
But Berezovsky topped his list of scoundrels. In 2000, a Klebnikov biography of the oligarch was published under the title of Godfather of the Kremlin. The book drew heavily on the piece four years earlier in Forbes, although this time there was no question mark. Klebnikov ticked off Berezovsky’s alleged misdeeds on the path from small-time mathematician to wealthy kingmaker—a career, he wrote, that was “replete with bankrupt companies and violent deaths.” Klebnikov thought that Berezovsky was an object lesson in why foreigners during Yeltsin’s rule should have let Russia be Russia instead of trying to impose Western traditions. “If it is hard for westerners to understand how the introduction of democratic principles could have been so poisonous to Russian society, Berezovsky’s career holds one of the keys,” he wrote.
According to his editors, to understand Klebnikov one had to read Eastern Approaches, the 1951 memoir of Fitzroy Maclean. The classic account follows the swashbuckling Scot through hair-raising adventures as a British diplomat observing Stalin’s 1937 purge trial of Bukharin; as a clandestine traveler to Central Asia and Afghanistan; and particularly as Winston Churchill’s personal ambassador to Tito in the mountains of Croatia during World War II. I was lucky enough to meet Maclean in Georgia a few months before his death, in 1996, at the age of eighty-five. He dozed off a few times as we sat in his hotel room, discussing his hopes for Georgia’s young independence. But with a bejeweled Georgian sword on the nightstand and a pair of carved Scottish canes by his side, Maclean was still at heart a man of action.
This exceptional man inspired generations of diplomats and journalists, including me. But I never thought I was Maclean. Klebnikov apparently did. “Most journalists think of themselves as observers. But Paul thought of himself as a participant. Like Maclean, Klebnikov wasn’t only interested in recording what he saw. He really believed he could play a part in public affairs,” said James Michaels, the Forbes editor who hired him. William Baldwin, another of Klebnikov’s editors, said, “He had this messianic belief that he was going to be part of the transition from a gangster country to a civilized country.”
I couldn’t relate to this side of Klebnikov. I felt highly uncomfortable with the notion of injecting myself into the affairs of a foreign country. Not Klebnikov. He seemed to have acquired Lord Jim pretensions, exhibiting the vanity of a Westerner who imagined himself rescuing the natives. As to his bashing of Berezovsky, I had dealt with many such unappealing characters over the years, but I felt it was crossing a journalistic line to invest so much personal outrage in one’s reportage.
But that, of course, was precisely the point for Klebnikov. He was personally invested in the story. He did take offense at the perceived misconduct of those he wrote about, Berezovsky being a prime example.
The Russian edition of Godfather of the Kremlin became a nonfiction bestseller, with 110,000 copies sold. Klebnikov tried to repeat that success with a book based on fifteen hours of taped conversation with a well-known Chechen warlord named Khozh-Ahmed Nukhayev. The man had been a debonair law student in Moscow and then a mobster before becoming a Chechen guerilla fighter and finally an anti-Western Islamic fundamentalist. But the book, Conversation with a Barbarian, was a flop, selling only six thousand copies.
Still, Klebnikov’s writings about Berezovsky had impressed his editors. They offered him the editorship of his own magazine, a Russian-language version of Forbes, and he readily accepted. All these years, Klebnikov had been flying from the United States and elsewhere to Moscow to do his reporting, then returning home. Now he could live in the Russian capital.
The forty-year-old Klebnikov, handsome, with piercing hazel eyes and a shock of brown hair, plunged headlong into his new assignment. He threw a champagne party for the magazine’s launch, at the five-star Baltschug hotel on the Moscow River. And he set in motion an editorial project that was breathtaking by Russian standards—an American-style listing of the country’s wealthiest citizens. It would throw the spotlight on Russia’s profiteers and surely offend the gangster element that would be well represented on the list. Klebnikov’s brainstorm seemed impossible to execute. How could anyone assemble such a list in a country where personal wealth is hidden from view, largely stashed in offshore accounts under false names? Yet Klebnikov and his team somehow succeeded, and the resulting layout, “The Golden Hundred,” was an instant sensation. It appeared in the magazine’s second issue, in May 2004, and catapulted Forbes Russia into the top tier of the country’s business magazines.
One might expect Klebnikov’s editorial daring to have triggered threats of physical retaliation; death threats had been quick to follow publication of “Godfather of the Kremlin?” in the magazine’s U.S. edition. But I could find no record of any threats against Klebnikov while he edited Forbes Russia. This was somewhat puzzling. As Leonid Bershidsky, his publisher in Moscow at the time, observed, “He was doing investigative stories and was making enemies with every story.”
Klebnikov now moved about Moscow without bodyguards, outwardly confident that he was in no personal danger. He was heartened by Boris Berezovsky’s self-exile in London and the firm rule of Vladimir Putin, now president of Russia. A fresh breeze was blowing through the country, he thought. But the private Klebnikov seemed somewhat ambivalent about security conditions. His wife and their three children had remained in the United States; she didn’t want to live in Russia and Klebnikov had agreed to take the job for just a year. When a visitor asked why his family was not with him, he replied, “I don’t know if it is safe for my family.”
Bershidsky, technically Klebnikov’s boss at Forbes Russia, was employed by Newsweek when I first met him in Moscow in the early 1990s. I was writing for the magazine and he was a “fixer,” on call to translate and solve any problems encountered by its reporters. He had since become a notable success in the business world. He told me that Klebnikov’s managerial skills were lacking, but that his journalism was towering. Klebnikov, he said, could “spend a month on a project and dig out something that others wanted to but couldn’t for ten years.” The American editor dazzled on all fronts. “People gathered around to hear how he carried out interviews,” Bershidsky said.
But as I talked with other journalists in Moscow, I discovered that Klebnikov’s reputation was mixed. Again and again I was told that his main claim to fame—the book Godfather of the Kremlin— was based on documents and interviews provided by a single disgruntled former Berezovsky ally, Alexander Korzhakov, who had been Boris Yeltsin’s chief of security. Prevailing wisdom said it was a hatchet job.
I concluded that some of the criticism was sour grapes. From the endnotes, one can see that Korzhakov provided Klebnikov with a road map—the knowledge and documents that he needed to get started. But finding fault
