Putin

It was an odd atmosphere that prevailed in those days. A mix of Klondike Gold Rush and Feast in Time of Plague, a sense that anything was possible, calamity included. Though Russian gangsters were making small fortunes via extortion, protection, drugs, and casinos, the great fortunes would end up in the hands of educated men like Boris Berezovsky, who held a Ph.D. in mathematics, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who, before he became Russia’s richest man and then its most famous prisoner, earned a degree in engineering. Though a few of the future oligarchs had street smarts, what they all had, and what made them all superrich, was knowing how to work the system. It really didn’t matter which system it was—the crumbling Soviet system, the system for transitioning to capitalism, or the new rudimentary capitalist system itself—as long as there was some sort of system they would find some way of gaming it.

The image of Berezovsky stumbling away from the smoking wreckage of his Mercedes is, in its way, an oligarch icon. It was a perfect example of Nietzsche’s “What does not kill us makes us stronger.” Only prison and death could stop those men in Russia who had dedicated their every waking moment to the acquisition of fabled wealth.

Berezovsky, born in 1946, an only child, a Jew, took Russian maximalism to the max. His applied-mathematics lab needed not only to flourish but to win the Nobel Prize. When he pursued wealth, only billions would do. Others said of him, “He uses every person to the maximum. That is his principle of life,” and he said of himself: “Everything I do, I do to an absolutely maximum degree.” If Berezovsky wanted to speak with you, he would wait on your doorstep for hours or follow you fully dressed into the shower at your athletic club. Short, dark-haired, dark-eyed, he vibrated with incessant nervous energy. If he ever had a moment’s peace in his life, he would not have had the slightest idea what to do with it. “He was in one place one minute. And in another the next. He had a million phone calls. A million places where he was to arrive. Another million places where he promised to arrive but never went,” recalled a colleague. He was insistent, infuriating, charming.

The USSR was officially based on so-called scientific socialism, and in the country’s waning days its rulers hoped science would save socialism. A great deal of hope, trust, and credence were placed in institutes and labs, like Berezovsky’s, which studied the mathematics of decision making. That plugged him into industry, specifically the auto industry, on a high level and allowed him to make a fortune by obtaining cars from the state with loans that soaring inflation allowed him to pay back with much cheaper rubles.

Berezovsky also wormed his way into the Kremlin by publishing Yeltsin’s ghostwritten memoirs in a deluxe edition that greatly pleased the “author,” who was even more pleased by the tremendous checks from the inflated, if not in some cases utterly bogus, foreign sales that Berezovsky routinely presented. Bribes disguised by vanity as royalties.

Now in the Kremlin’s inner circle, Berezovsky could put his capital to good use. He gained a controlling interest in the national airline, Aeroflot, and the television broadcast company ORT, which gave him access to the burgeoning advertising revenue; but more important, it gave him political power because Russians got their news and views from TV, as they do to this day.

His two daughters attended Cambridge. He had a new, glamorous trophy wife. He had attained both significant wealth and significant power. Nothing could stop him.

The post-Soviet Russian government may still have had enough nuclear power to destroy the planet, but it couldn’t pay its bills. Teachers, nurses, pensioners, weren’t being paid. Inflation was still sky-high. And there were presidential elections coming in 1996. Yeltsin could easily lose. Already there was a powerful nostalgia for Soviet stability, which the Communist Party promised to restore.

Yelstin was increasingly seen as a fool, a has-been, a drunk. Gorbachev had alienated Russians by his clampdown on vodka; Yeltsin had alienated them by his overreliance on it. At the final ceremony for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Germany in August 1994, Yeltsin grabbed the baton from the Berlin Police Orchestra leader’s hand and began vigorously conducting himself. Good for a laugh, but an uncomfortable one. His popularity rating was in the single digits and flirting with zero.