with Klebnikov seemed to overlook how investigative journalism often begins with information supplied by an insider. Then the real work begins: The reporter must seek corroboration, authenticate documents, test the credibility of sources, and broaden the story to include all sides. Klebnikov’s twenty-nine pages of endnotes are an impressive display of such footwork. Overall, the book was solid journalism, covering a vast amount of ground, with insider detail that gave the reader a “you are there” feeling.
Not that it is bulletproof. Valeri Streletsky, the publisher of the Russian-language edition, was in fact Korzhakov’s former deputy, and thus an interested party. Streletsky told me that Klebnikov brought him the English- language manuscript that was being published by Harcourt, the Florida-based house, and that he simply hired a translator for the Russian edition. He didn’t see anything unscrupulous about his role, and given that it was a straight translation of the English edition, I didn’t either. Still, it was reckless for Klebnikov to expose himself to this appearance of partiality.
The English-language edition occasionally suffers from disingenuous writing. It hints at a Berezovsky connection to certain murders, but presents no proof. For example, Klebnikov writes that many of Berezovsky’s business ventures “were marred by the assassination or accidental death of key players,” but “there is no evidence that Berezovsky was responsible for any of these deaths.” What was Klebnikov’s point, other than to plant in the reader’s mind the opposite message—that Berezovsky somehow was to blame? Klebnikov also overexerts himself in some instances to show cause and effect. For example, he intimates that Berezovsky caused the Second Chechen War by making ransom payments to Chechen kidnappers who then attacked Russia. Berezovsky’s aim, according to Klebnikov? To make Putin president. Without something more in the way of evidence, the scenario is strained and unconvincing.
Some colleagues grumbled that Klebnikov was simply reporting what “everyone knew” about Berezovsky and the other oligarchs. I wrote that off as bar-stool talk. While he misfired on some occasions, Klebnikov was practicing professional, tough, American-style journalism and was among the very few writers who penetrated Russia’s criminal underside.
Which raises yet another rap against him—that he was a romantic. Alexander Politkovsky, an investigative reporter and the estranged husband of Anna Politkovskaya, told me that Klebnikov “didn’t really understand what was going on in Russia in reality.” Oleg Panfilov, who runs a nonprofit Moscow office that teaches journalists how to protect themselves, said: “He was naive. He worshipped Russia, and understood nothing about Russia.”
Others whose advice I also respected made similar assertions—that Klebnikov’s reporting on Russia was flawed from the beginning because he was less knowledgeable than he thought. If so, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I had met numerous well-meaning but presumptuous second-and third-generation Americans who traced their ancestry to the former Soviet Union and came seeking to help the homeland. Their relatives in Russia and the neighboring republics often found these visitors to be condescending, and the Americans just as often were disappointed by the experience. In Armenia, some visiting kinfolk from America were told that the best thing they could do was stay home and send a check.
There was something to that advice.
I wondered how Berezovsky felt about having been the object of Klebnikov’s vilification. I dropped by his Mayfair, London, office on April 23, 2007, just hours after momentous news had arrived from Moscow—Boris Yeltsin had died at the age of seventy-six.
The billionaire, sporting a black silk shirt and striped white-and-gray slacks, was pacing and brooding. “Everything is topsy-turvy,” he said. Berezovsky, who had adulated Yeltsin, went on at length about the debt Russia owed this man who “helped millions of people to be released from slavery.”
He felt quite the opposite about Yeltsin’s ungrateful successor, Vladimir Putin, whom the billionaire aimed to bring down. If he couldn’t manage to oust him, he would at least make the autocratic Russian leader as miserable as he was.
Berezovsky had retreated to London about six years earlier, and the warfare between him and Putin had only worsened since then. Russia repeatedly sent prosecutors after him, hoping to extradite the onetime oligarch on a series of charges, including the alleged theft from a Russian manufacturer of two thousand cars worth some $13 million. But British courts refused to hand him over.
For his part, Berezovsky sank tens of millions of dollars into an anti-Putin crusade. He was the backer of
In 2004, Berezovsky financed Putin’s opponent when he was up for reelection, a veteran lawmaker named Ivan Rybkin (whose campaign went off the rails when he vanished for five days, then reappeared in an incoherent state that suggested he had been drugged). The same year, Berezovsky panicked Russia’s ruling class by spending $30 million to support the so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine. A Kremlin critic named Viktor Yushchenko emerged as president of the former Soviet republic after he was poisoned with dioxin, an unsolved assassination attempt that left his face disfigured. Popular opinion in Ukraine upended a rigged election and forced the rejection of a Moscow-backed candidate. Similar “street power” had unseated the president of neighboring Georgia only a year earlier, and Putin feared Russia—and he—could be next.
Berezovsky assembled a team of intellectuals and writers to help orchestrate the ouster of the Russian president. In this respect, he resembled an Old World patron of kept artists. His key allies in this endeavor were the former 1970s dissident Alex Goldfarb, the Boston-based political scholar Yuri Felshtinsky, and of course Alexander Litvinenko. These men churned out books, blog postings, and statements lambasting Putin. But Putin continued to rule, leaving Berezovsky to pout.
At its simplest, the ongoing struggle between Berezovsky and Putin was about one issue: Who would control Russia’s treasures? Berezovsky wanted the nation’s industrial might to be in private hands, with a large part reserved for him, naturally. Putin believed in state ownership, albeit with a generous helping set aside for his own favored oligarchs. Television was an excellent example of this. Once, the industry was controlled by media moguls such as Berezovsky, who acquired huge television holdings in the corrupt 1990s and made stations serve their political desires. Then the state wrested control, and television became the dutiful servant to Putin and the Kremlin.
As for Klebnikov, Berezovsky met with him once, for an interview in 1996. He described the
With that, Berezovsky was off to his next meeting. A Russian journalist wanted to talk about defecting to Britain. Could the billionaire help?
Klebnikov praised Putin for beginning to correct the errors made during “Russia’s flawed transition from Communism to a market economy in the 1990s,” which he labeled “one of the most mishandled reforms in history.” While much remained to be done, “the Russian marketplace is benefitting from the stability brought by the administration of President Vladimir Putin. Gone is the gangster free-for-all of the Yeltsin era. Putin has chosen a more measured pace of market liberalization, as well as more predictable rules.” Under Putin, the admiring editor wrote, “the country is finally creating a serious consumer market. Some of the oligarchs’ wealth, it seems, is starting to trickle down.” The May 2004 issue of
In July of that year, his wife, Musa, came to visit for a few days. They strolled Moscow together and dined with Mark Franchetti, the investigative reporter for the London
At one point, Musa asked Franchetti, “Is it safe here, or not safe?”
Franchetti, sensing that she was worried about her husband, didn’t know how to reply.
