‘Are we going to get something to eat?’ I suggested. ‘Or are you going to rave on out here? I’m freezing.’
So we went into Yolki-Palki on the other side of the Bolshoi from Tverskaya. Finn always liked it there. The restaurant was dressed up in peasant decor with straw bales and wooden farm animals and checked tablecloths. Finn stopped talking about the elections for a moment.
‘This place has never been the same since the city banned the real animals,’ Finn said.
Back in the early nineties, when it first opened, the restaurant had real chickens and ducks that wandered about inside.
But then Finn was off again before we’d even ordered.
‘Putin is essentially the oligarchs’ choice,’ he said. ‘He’s reassured them somehow. Why do they believe him?’
‘Because it’s what they want to believe.’
Later we walked in the freezing night to the Kremlin and watched the black Mercedes and four-wheel-drive Porsches enter and leave the Kremlin with their windows blacked out, and I told him, one by one, which rich Russian baron had come to pay his respects to Putin.
‘They come like boyars to a medieval tsar,’ Finn said. ‘They pay their respects and hope to exert their influence.’
And in the course of those weeks up to Putin’s election victory in March, they all came: the oligarchs, the richest, most powerful men in Russia. Preceded, some said, by lavish gifts or suitcases of cash, they came to ensure that their choice for the elections was an ally. They were confident, powerful and richer than the rest of Russia put together.
But once he’d got their money and once their media outlets had ensured his victory, Putin was not the man they thought they’d voted for. To their dismay, having funded his rise to power, what they found was a president unlike the weakened, pliant Yeltsin.
While Putin had the decor of Yeltsin’s Kremlin bathroom changed from whimsical
When Boris Berezovsky confidently went off to his French chateau on the Cote d’Azur in the summer of 2000 to rest and recuperate after the successful but gruelling spring election campaign, he left his protege Stepanovich with a list of names to give to the newly elected Vladimir Putin of those he wanted to see in positions of power around the President. The list was Berezovsky’s hold on power.
But at the Forest, I watched my bosses and they laughed at the names on it. The Kingmaker had made a serious error.
By the end of the summer, Berezovsky’s television stations were confiscated by Putin and he, with Gusinsky, fled into exile-Berezovsky to London, Gusinsky to Tel Aviv.
‘I told you, didn’t I, Rabbit?’ Finn said triumphantly.
I don’t know what role Stepanovich had in the fall of Berezovsky, if he had a role at all. But we all saw that from then on he was very close to Putin and, later, Berezovsky cursed his protege’s betrayal. Stepanovich, who only a few years before served the drinks on Berezovsky’s private jet, had made a separate peace.
‘Watch what happens now,’ Finn said. ‘Berezovsky and Gusinsky are examples
It was true. With Berezovsky’s fall, the others quickly saw which way the wind now blew from the Kremlin and they bent their knees to the new chief and his KGB entourage.
Only the richest of them all, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, took a stand against Putin. He lasted until 2004, when his private jet was stormed by masked special forces on a Siberian runway. Tried in a kangaroo court, he was put away to rot in a Siberian uranium mine that still serves as a prison camp in our new democratic Russia. For disobeying the President’s instruction to stay out of politics, he received eight brutal years in Russia’s old gulag, with the promise of more to come.
Between Putin’s appointment to the presidency on New Year’s Eve and the March elections, on the other side of the Moskva River from the Kremlin, the British embassy prepared for a visit to Moscow by Tony Blair in February 2000, to endorse Putin as candidate.
‘Blair’s come smiling to Moscow,’ Finn said. ‘He’s been strolling in the grounds of Putin’s dacha, describing Putin to the lapdog press as a reformer, a man we can do business with. The little creep wants to be Margaret Thatcher and casts Putin as his Gorbachev.’
To return this endorsement of him, Putin graced Blair with the rich reward of making London the venue for his first official foreign visit after he was elected. In London, Putin was given the red-carpet treatment and dined with the Queen. The massacres of Chechens in Putin’s war there were brushed aside by Downing Street. Putin promised the hopeful world a ‘dictatorship of the law’.
But whose law, we asked ourselves in Russia, if not the law of the KGB?
During this time, Finn and I often met at the Baltschug Hotel on the river, a few doors away from the British embassy, and we enjoyed its fine view of the Kremlin over lunch or a drink or in bed. Despite me telling him archly that the Forest would gladly pay for our room, Finn somehow obtained these rooms at what he called ‘diplomatic rates’, and said he didn’t want our lovemaking being listened to.
‘I’m supposed to persuade you,’ I said.
‘Then you’ve failed.’
‘Thank God for that.’
We could never trust Finn’s apartment, nor mine, and to the irritation of Kerchenko, visiting random hotel rooms was the only way to keep our most private moments to ourselves.
At the Forest, General Kerchenko and my other case officers on Finn, Yuri and Sasha, ignored Finn’s talk about a plan which I had written up in my reports. They just seemed fixated by Finn’s disaffection with MI6 and the ridiculous notion that Finn was ready to come over to our side. But how could he defect, I tried to tell them, when there was no apparent ideological difference between the two sides?
I remember now that Finn had bought and then framed a collection of stamps which had been issued under Gorbachev and which featured the British spy and traitor, Kim Philby. It amused him enormously that Philby should be celebrated even in Gorbachev’s Russia, at the time when both sides in the Cold War were laying down their differences.
But when I told my controllers about the stamps, they failed to see the irony, preferring instead to believe that Finn admired Philby. And every time my reports informed them how Finn railed against Putin, they said it was cover. Kerchenko and Yuri, certainly, really believed he had begun to unburden himself in preparation to defect, that he was a crumbling figure.
Finn certainly gave a very fine impression of crumbling in those times, but I knew it was a feint. Finn didn’t crumble in public. He was a person who crawled away to be on his own if he had so much as a head cold.
Finn’s self-destructive behaviour began to undermine his position at the embassy very fast. At the Baltschug Hotel one afternoon in early summer two months after Putin’s election, over a bottle of extremely expensive champagne, Finn told me he had been sacked. It was an eerie conversation. I knew it wasn’t true and he knew I knew. We’d grown to know each other well in the intervening months and I could sense the guile in his claim. If he’d been sacked he would never have been allowed to meet me, or to go anywhere outside the embassy in Moscow. They’d have had him on a plane back to London before he could pick up his laundry. They’d have given him leave to get out of the country, and then sacked him back in London.
So I knew only that he knew he was going to be sacked. And that could only mean he had engineered it himself. I recalled our conversation at New Jerusalem and how Finn had asked me what I would do if we were separated. During our conversation I realised that even the British didn’t know they were going to sack him yet.
‘I’ve told them I can’t work for a government that backs Putin,’ Finn said to me.
He then went on to reel off a list of evidently rehearsed remarks about Putin; rehearsed for the benefit, I guessed, of his station head. They were mostly things I’d heard him say before, but this time he was using me to get his story right and I played along with him even though my mind was in confusion.
