Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (27 page)

Berezovsky served the writ on Sloane Street, Knightsbridge. He was shopping at Dolce and Gabbana and saw Abramovich at Hermes next door. He ran to his Maybach, grabbed the writ, bustled past Abramovich’s bodyguards, and threw the paper in Abramovich’s direction: “This is to you, from me,” the shop assistant heard him say. Now when Berezovsky arrives at Chancery Lane he skips and struts into court, a whirr of jokes and gesticulations, always in the center of an entourage of pretty women, chin-stroking advisers, giant Israeli bodyguards. In the morning before testifying, when he sees a traffic policeman outside the court ticket his Maybach, he calls out with a laugh: “Stop—we can do business together!”

“This is a very Russian story,” says Berezovsky when he takes the witness stand, “with lots of killers, where the President himself is almost a killer.” The ostensible cause of the complaint is Sibneft, an oil company. It was privatized for $100 million in 1996, and by 2005 was worth $13.5 billion. Berezovsky claims Abramovich and he were co-owners until Abramovich “acted like a gangster” and took Berezovsky’s share away, when he was on the political ropes, threatening to jail one of Berezovsky’s friends unless he gave up his part of the company. Of course there’s nothing on paper to prove the company was Berezovsky’s, but didn’t everyone know they had a verbal deal? Hadn’t the press always described Berezovsky as co-owner? (They had, and I have spent so long in Russia I think it perfectly normal for the actual beneficiary to never appear on paper.)

“I know it’s hard for you to imagine a world where two men shake on it and that’s it,” explains Berezovsky, patiently, to the judge, Elizabeth Gloster, “but this is Russia.”

Berezovsky delights in explaining how he acquired the oil company in question, using his Kremlin influence at a privatization auction, negotiating furiously in the corridors, getting one rival to bid lower in return for favors, another to withdraw if he paid off his debts.

Abramovich’s lawyer, Jonathan Sumption, who in his spare time writes history books about medieval wars and is described in the papers as “the cleverest man in England” (he is being paid a reported record $12 million for this case), rocks backward and forward and moves in for the kill:

“You made a collusive agreement with one of the bidders and bought off the other: would it be fair to say that the auction was stitched up in advance?”

“It’s not fixed,” insists Berezovsky. “I just find the way through! In my terminology, it’s not fixing.”

Abramovich, bottle of cold water pressed to his temple against a headache, explains that it was not he but Berezovsky who was the gangster, the political godfather he would have to pay extortion money to when Berezovsky was vizier in the 1990s Kremlin. But as soon as Berezovsky lost his influence, he lost his access to money. Thus the President and his network find it so hard to leave the Kremlin now; the minute he retires, they might lose everything. There are no Western-style property rights in this system, only gradations of proximity to the Kremlin, rituals of bribes and toadying, casual violence. And as the trial wears on, as court assistants wheel in six-foot-high stacks of binders with testimony and witness statements until they fill up all the aisles between the desks, as historians are called by both sides to explain the meanings of “krysha” (“protection”) and “kydalo” (a “backstabber in business”), it becomes apparent just how unsuited the language and rational categories of English law are to evaluate the liquid mass of networks, corruption, and evasion—elusive yet instantly recognizable to members—that orders Russia. And as I observe the trial from my cramped corner among the public seats, it takes on a dimly epic feel: not just a squabble between two men, but a judgment on the era.

“I was the first victim of President Putin’s regime,” pleads Berezovsky. “And then step by step he increased the number of victims.” And with a rising passion he reels off the names of all the jailed businessmen and women, murdered journalists, and dead lawyers.

And then Abramovich, speaking quietly, explains how back in the 1990s he would sell oil at base prices to his own companies in Cyprus and then to others at a market rate.

“If Russia in the 1990s was corrupt on a scale of four out of ten,” argues Berezovsky, “now it is corrupt ten out of ten. It is corrupt totally!”

Some $50 billion (sometimes more) is now moved illicitly out of Russia every year. Over the decades the tricks have multiplied: the state pipeline company, run by a friend of the President, buys pipes at inflated prices from a company that then turns out to be a shell owned by the state pipeline company’s management; state banks invest pension funds in companies that then mysteriously go bust. (The money just disappears! The banks deny all prior knowledge that the deals would sour.) The latest economic model is to create “hyper-projects,” which can act as vehicles for siphoning off the budget. The cost for the Russian Winter Olympics in Sochi was $50 billion, making it $30 billion more expensive than the previous summer games in London, and five times more expensive than any Winter Olympics ever. Some $30 billion is thought to have been “diverted.” There is also a “hyper-bridge,” which swings above the Pacific, connecting Vladivostok and South Sakhalin. There is nothing on South Sakhalin, the real economic benefits are almost zero, but the opportunities for graft are great. The new planned “hyper-project” is a tunnel between Russia and Japan. The USSR built mega-projects that made no macroeconomic sense but fitted the hallucinations of the planned economy; the new hyper-projects make no macroeconomic sense but are vehicles for the enrichment of those whose loyalty the Kremlin needs to reward, quickly.

But it was power, rather than money, that was always Berezovsky’s interest. The oil company the two oligarchs are fighting over was never more than a means to an end; he needed it to fund his control of television. He had been the first in Russia, in 1994, to understand that television could bring him that power. It was Berezovsky who introduced the “fabricated documentary” to Ostankino, inventing barely credible scandals about the President’s political opponents, his presenters brandishing random pieces of paper at the camera that “proved” corruption. In 1999 it was Berezovsky’s TV channel that created the new President, supporting his war in Chechnya and turning him from gray “moth” into macho leader. It was Berezovsky who invented the fake political parties, television puppet constructs, shells without any policy whose one point was to prop up the President. Russia’s slide from representative democracy to a society of pure spectacle was given its great push by Berezovsky. He created the theater I would later work inside, and which, after his exile, cast him as the eternal bogeyman: his old Ostankino channel blaming him for everything from sponsoring terrorism to political assassinations. And Berezovsky plays up to the role of Übervillain, claiming, once his influence was almost gone, that he was sponsoring attempted revolutions in Ukraine and Russia.

On Shrove Sunday during the trial, Berezovsky posts a confession on his Facebook page:

I ask for your forgiveness, oh People of Russia
 . . .
for destroying freedom of speech and democratic values.
 . . .
I confess for bringing the President to power. I understand confession is not words but deeds, these will soon follow.

The Russian journalists covering the trial chortle in response. No one can believe a word he says. Berezovsky is not so much the opponent of the Kremlin’s system as its progenitor turned absurd reflection. The shape-shifter spun to the point of tragicomedy.

“I found Mr. Berezovsky an unimpressive, and inherently unreliable, witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be molded to suit his current purposes,” says Justice Gloster in her final judgment. “I gained the impression that he was not necessarily being deliberately dishonest, but had deluded himself into believing his own version of events.”

Berezovsky is sitting just in front of me and begins to shake and laugh as the judge speaks. It’s a choking sort of laugh. In the hall outside the courtroom he paces up and down and then walks in circles for a while. He is still laughing when he goes outside to face the press.

In the following months he fades from view, for once refusing to give interviews.

The rumor is that he is destitute. The trial has cost him over $100 million. Six months later he sells a Warhol at Christie’s, one of 120 silk-screen prints of
Red Lenin
showing the Soviet leader in sun-touched yellow emerging from (or being submerged by) a canvas of blood red. It sells for $202,000.

Three days later Berezovsky is dead, hanging himself in the bathroom of his ex-wife’s Ascot mansion. I had assumed the Ostankino channels would gloat. Instead the atmosphere is mournful. The President’s press secretary sets the tone, announcing that the death of any person is a tragedy. Eduard Limonov, a former dissident émigré writer who transformed himself into the leader of the National Bolsheviks—a movement that started as an art project, became an anti-oligarch revolutionary party mixing Trotskyism and Fascism, and then transformed again to become a Kremlin ally—writes: “I had always admired him. He was great, like a Shakespeare character.” Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist scarecrow used by the Kremlin to frighten voters, who normally spits and scowls when he speaks of Russia’s enemies, sounds almost tender: “I’d seen him a few months ago in Israel. He was tired, disillusioned.” An Ostankino channel shows black-and-white photos of Berezovsky as touching mood music is played. “After all this time,” the presenter says, “and all the roles he’s played, we never did find out who he really was.” It is as if the vast charade of Russian politics has suddenly paused and all the actors are turning to the audience to applaud a fallen player, welcoming in his corpse.

But though the old master may be dead, the system he begat is growing, mutating, swelling now out of Moscow and flowing through many offshore, tax-free, beneficiary-disguised archipelagoes in Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands, and Monaco and from there into Mayfair, Belgravia, Sloane Street, White Hall, Central Park West. For the President’s men and those who fear him, for the bully-bureaucrats and the gangsters-turned-oil-traders, for the real entrepreneurs and the Russians who just want to get out and live a normal life. For everyone the pattern is the same. Make, steal, siphon your money off in Russia. Stash it in New York, Paris, Geneva, and especially London. My Moscow has landed.

•  •  •

I have been working on a TV show. My nine years in Russia are a bit of a black hole in my résumé, and I’m back at the bottom of the pile again: officially a “producer” (the word has lost all meaning), but actually an assistant with no editorial control, on a glitzy, trashy, documentary entertainment series for an American-English cable channel.
Meet the Russians
is about the new, post-Soviet rich in London, and the ad promises to take the viewer “into a world of wealth he has never before witnessed.”

There’s the pop star married to the steel tycoon who has spent $2 million on her career, including albums, winning Mrs. World (the husband bought the rights to the competition the year before she won) and starring in a Hollywood B movie with Stephen Dorff (the husband financed the movie). She keeps a falcon in their home. The home is decorated to copy a seven-star Dubai hotel she once stayed in. She takes baths in champagne to keep her skin smooth.

There’s the footballer’s wife who has spent over a hundred grand on Louboutins (“I can’t walk on anything less than 5-inch heels!”) and thinks that English women are frumpy (“They don’t even look like women!”).

There’s the ex-wife of the entrepreneur whose partner fell foul of the President and now can’t go back to Russia; she poses for us in her $180,000 fur coat.

And as the nine-part series rolls out, we see how those who have been in England for a while learn their Ps and Qs, learn how to spend righteously, not vulgarly, learn about charity and the virtues of flat shoes. Become, and I seem to hear this word a lot as I work on the program, “classy.”

The show rates well and feeds a double appetite. The local audience get to titter and feel pleasantly superior to the new rich they are selling parts of their country to: “Meet the most vulgar reality characters ever on TV,” explains the
Daily Mail
. But beyond this there is a deeper comfort in the thought that though the new Russian rich might be wealthier than any English person could ever hope to be, though the
Sunday Times
rich list is topped no longer by the queen but by Abramovich, Usmanov, and Blavatnik, at the end of the day these global nouveaux all yearn to fit into “our way of doing things.” Instinctively, out of habit, the editorial producers on
Meet the Russians
reach for some version of
Vanity Fair
,
My Fair Lady
, the myths the English grow up with. The Victorian compromise, the traditional marriage between new money and old class, is extrapolated to the era of globalization. The new global rich, the myth goes, all yearn for our culture, law, schools. Civilization.

Except I’m not entirely sure that’s what is happening at all.

•  •  •

Sergey is a character in
Meet the Russians
. He grew up in a Russian family in Estonia. In 1999, when he was thirteen, his parents took him on a holiday to London. He had never been abroad before. They took the ferry over and booked into the small, three-star Earls Court Hotel. Sergey was crazy about basketball, and he had never seen real black people before. They were all wearing the Nike Air Jordans that were his dream, and his head was already bursting with all of this, when his parents sat him down on the edge of the bed.

This was not a holiday, they explained. They were asking for asylum as Russians discriminated against in Estonia. This was his new life.

They moved to Kent. His father became an alcohol delivery driver. Worked hard. Bought a semi. On weekends Sergey would sneak up to London. First he organized underground raves in North London. As he turned eighteen, the Russian wave of money was just cresting: Abramovich was buying Chelsea, Lebedev the
Standard
and the
Independent
. The English were retreating, pulling out of their own post codes of aspiration, out of Mayfair and Belgravia and Knightsbridge, selling up and moving out to Oxfordshire or Tuscany or Norfolk, leaving behind the polished stucco squares and gated gardens to be inhabited by the new heroes of sudden wealth from Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, India, Krasnoyarsk, Qatar, Donetsk.