The Oligarchs (81 page)

I left with a feeling the Kremlin was lashing out at Luzhkov because they lacked a successor to Yeltsin and didn't know what to do. It was a hot, breezy August afternoon as I walked across the cobblestones of Red Square after the meeting—the autumn political season seemed distant, the intrigues and backbiting so senseless. I should have known that the clues from the Kremlin were not accidental. Berezovsky never rested. Only a few months before, thrown on the defensive by Primakov, he had been on the run from prosecutors and masked men breaking into his businesses. Now the compressed ball of energy was back—and preparing to strike.

Dorenko also watched the Luzhkov-Primakov alliance with disdain and decided to make Luzhkov the “star” of his autumn television program. He had often been at loggerheads with both Primakov and Luzhkov, so the attack on Luzhkov would dovetail perfectly with his personal feelings. He relished the idea. Berezovsky and Dorenko spoke by telephone about how to carry out the onslaught.

Berezovsky: “Seryozha, this is Boris. Hello dear. How are things?”

Dorenko: “The clerks are writing.”

Berezovsky: “Think—what kind of scheme. Think!” Berezovsky used a Russian slang word,
razvodka,
which means a scheme in the sense of a setting one partner against the other. Then Dorenko and Berezovsky brainstormed how to smear Luzhkov's reputation and destroy his political viability. Their conversations were wiretapped and later printed in a newspaper.
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Dorenko's programs always included a bit of truth to keep his commentary plausible, but then he tried to twist the facts to make a point. Often Dorenko took his show to the absurd. To highlight Primakov's ill health after his hip operation, Dorenko showed the gory details of surgeons cutting away at legs and thighs. “Oh, that was a piece of work!” Dorenko laughed at the memory. Another part of Dorenko's
power was the creative side of the show, presented with no apologies, no hesitation, and more than a little tabloid embellishment. Dorenko would have been perfectly in his element announcing a UFO sighting.

Throughout the autumn, Dorenko toyed with the powerful mayor of Moscow, not in a slugfest but in a teasing, wicked series of broadcasts that always portrayed the mayor in a terrible light. Dorenko waited for Luzhkov to react and then used the reaction to repeat the smear. “These programs weren't done solely by me of course,” Dorenko commented facetiously. “Luzhkov and Primakov were helping me; the three of us were making those programs. We were working as a team.”

For Luzhkov, the televised assault by Dorenko came at an awful time in Moscow. A series of bomb blasts terrorized the city's population. In September, explosions ripped apart three Moscow apartment complexes, killing more than three hundred people in their sleep. Luzhkov rushed to the scene each time. He struggled to maintain calm and oversee the rescue operation as hysteria and anger spread.

Putin, the new prime minister, was catapulted to leadership at this moment. Putin had an ultracool demeanor; a voter once remarked to me that Putin looked like a cheetah ready to strike. Putin blamed the bombings on Chechens, and, in the climate of fear, his public approval ratings skyrocketed as he prepared to launch a new large-scale military offensive in Chechnya. At the same time, Luzhkov saw his own political rating collapse, his city aflame and crazed with fear, and his reputation torn to shreds every Sunday on television. It all happened at once.

Dorenko was more interested in destroying Luzhkov than the brewing war in Chechnya. On October 17, Dorenko devoted most of his program to portraying Luzhkov as a hypocrite. Dorenko described how a hospital was rebuilt in the southern Russian city of Budyonovsk. The hospital was wrecked during a terrorist raid in the first Chechen war. Dorenko said Luzhkov took credit for rebuilding the hospital but never thanked the donor of the money. Dorenko repeated the point several times, saying Luzhkov hogged all the credit for the hospital. “Darlings!” Dorenko said, figuratively, to the Moscow mayor's office. “What are you doing? Why don't you just thank” the donor.
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In the next segment Dorenko hinted at mysterious money transfers from Moscow to foreign banks. Dorenko noted recent articles in the
New York Times
about the Bank of New York channeling Russian
money out of the country.
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A document flashed on the screen: a bank transfer to the Bank of New York. Forty million dollars! Another! A third! No one who saw the show—myself included—could quite figure out what was going on, but Dorenko was all about form, not substance. He closed with a killer line impugning Luzhkov. “I suppose that Luzhkov is not going to share the details with the public,” he said, “but perhaps he will have to share the peculiarities of his economic activity with the investigating teams working on the theme of Russian money laundering in the Bank of New York.”

At the end of the show, Dorenko dropped another video bomb on Luzhkov's head. He showed a series of fast-paced, alternating video clips. First, Luzhkov at the mayor's office, attacking the Kremlin “regime,” and the ill Yeltsin; then Luzhkov at the climactic rally of the Yeltsin 1996 campaign, supporting Yeltsin. “I say, Russia, Yeltsin, freedom!” Luzhkov bellowed at the rally. “Russia, Yeltsin, victory!” The crowd roared. “Russia! Yeltsin! Our future!”

Dorenko said nothing—he didn't need to. He had savaged Luzhkov. There was nothing inconsistent in what Luzhkov had really said. Yeltsin was his choice in 1996, and Yeltsin was sick two years later. But Dorenko flashed the two scenes back and forth in a way that made Luzhkov look silly, and the tactic was damaging. “I think this is hypocrisy,” Dorenko recalled, relishing the memory of his handiwork. “Hy-poc-ri-sy!”

Luzhkov was stunned at the Dorenko show. He had been mayor of Moscow for more than five years and was the boss of his city. Luzhkov sputtered angry denunciations at Dorenko and took him to court for slander, a tactic that he had always used in Moscow politics. But it had not been very effective against Dorenko. “It's madness,” Luzhkov said. “It's a kind of psychotic attack, in the sense that it is usually mentally unstable people who do this sort of thing,” he declared.
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“It is shocking for Russia. It includes lies and slander, floods of dirt poured on politicians and statesmen.”
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Luzhkov got so caught up in the Dorenko television torture chamber that he did not break out to make a case for himself. He never launched the one slogan that Yevtushenkov thought might be the basis for a presidential bid—that he could rebuild Russia. His wife, Yelena Baturina, told me at the time that “politics from my point of view is a very hard choice for Yuri Mikhailovich now. Politics doesn't always use proper methods. He finds himself at a loss. He has a lot of
principles, and very often his opponents do not have any at all.”
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When I talked to Yevtushenkov, he also recalled that Luzhkov was not prepared for what hit him. “For long years,” he said, “Yuri Mikhailovich lived in an environment, in an atmosphere of being everybody's favorite. And on a large scale, he was a sacred cow whom nobody dared criticize much.... He was not prepared, morally, for what would happen. He just wasn't prepared.”

The relentless drumbeat of negative broadcasts took their toll on Luzhkov. Dorenko had enormous reach on ORT, since the signal covered the whole of Russia. In October, the Public Opinion Foundation, a leading private polling company that also worked for the Kremlin, reported that Luzhkov's standing in the polls was beginning to collapse. It was common for presidential front-runners in a crowded field to have only 20 percent or slightly more in weekly polls. In January, 15 percent of those questioned said they would vote for Luzhkov as president. In October it had fallen to only 5 percent. The percentage of those saying they mistrusted Luzhkov went from 35 percent in late 1998 to 51 percent a year later.

Dorenko reached the apogee of his smear campaign on November 7, 1999. Again he reached for a topic that was connected to real events—the murder of Paul Tatum, the U.S. businessman gunned down in 1996 after a dispute over the Radisson-Slavyanskaya Hotel. No one was ever apprehended or even charged for the murder.

Dorenko told me that the Tatum show fell into his lap. Ever since he began the on-air smear campaign, his office was deluged with people bringing him complaints about Luzhkov. “Dozens of people asked to meet with me and were bringing documents on Luzhkov,” he recalled. “And among all those people, a guy comes to me and tells me, ‘Look, two months ago I was in Florida and I taped an interview with some crazy American.... He is kind of disturbed.'” The crazy American claimed that Luzhkov was to blame for Tatum's murder. The crazy American was about to become Dorenko's video Gatling gun. Dorenko spoke to Berezovsky about how to cast the Tatum program for maximum effect to smear Luzhkov. Berezovsky suggested a convoluted, bizarre story line that involved the Federal Security Service. But he was careful to instruct that Putin, the former FSB head, be left out of the show.

Dorenko went on the air. He said at the opening of the program, “Luzhkov is guilty of Tatum's death, as Tatum said the instant before
he died. So testifies Jeff Olson, friend of the dead man.” Olson was the “crazy American.”

Olson was then shown sitting in an enormous leather chair, a can of Dr Pepper™ on a stand next to him. Olson made a surprising claim that was difficult to believe: He was a Tatum friend who was the first to be called about the murder. “Paul, when he was shot, was still alive for several minutes after he was hit by the bullets. He was communicating a little bit with the bodyguards, the bodyguards were communicating with the office, the office was communicating to me. His last words to the office, to me, were: ‘Luzhkov is responsible, he did this to me.'”

Dorenko then plunged into a long, twisted narrative, following Berezovsky's cues. The raw thrust of Dorenko's point was to blame Luzhkov for the murder. The rest of the facts, conspiracies, and testimony passed in a blur. To top it off, Dorenko closed the evening with a piece attempting to link Luzhkov with the head of the Aum Shumriko, the Japanese sect that poisoned the Tokyo subway, and the Church of Scientology. No bit of guilt by association, no scrap of ammunition escaped Dorenko. It was all a show.

Berezovsky loved it. That autumn, he was campaigning for a seat in the Duma from Karachayevo-Cherkessia, an ethnically divided republic in southern Russia. Berezovsky was also actively organizing the new parliamentary party to support Putin. The gathering storm of a military offensive in Chechnya was highly popular, and Putin was riding a wave of acclaim. Berezovsky was also serving as kingmaker to Putin. He let Dorenko handle the assault on Luzhkov, a serious potential rival to Putin, who needed to be pushed out of the way.

When I asked Berezovsky at the time what he thought of the Dorenko show, he answered, “The voters watch it with pleasure. And the answer to whether it is good or bad can only be the democratic tradition: if you don't like it, turn your TV off. If you like it, go ahead and watch it. From my point of view, it is a brilliant show.”

“I absolutely don't attempt to analyze the content,” he added. “I am an admirer of his talent: from my point of view, the form is amazing. That is, the level of influence that he achieves. It is real talent.”
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In other words, Berezovsky loved the smear and didn't care if it was far from the truth.

At the end of the parliamentary campaign, Luzhkov, wounded and bitter, held one last rally in Moscow on the edge of Red Square at Vasilyevsky
Slope. It was dark as the crowd gathered. In the background, St. Basil's Cathedral was brightly illuminated by spotlights. The moment was filled with distress for Luzhkov. Near the same spot, three and a half years earlier, Luzhkov delivered his rousing endorsement of Yeltsin. Now he was reduced to shouting at Yeltsin, shouting in vain into the cold night air, shouting so his voice reverberated against the Kremlin walls just beyond. Luzhkov, wearing his trademark cap, rattled off his critique of the ruling powers, recalling the GKO pyramids, the ruble crash, mass privatization. “They are afraid of us!” he declared. “They are afraid of us because we say it is necessary to bring to justice all those who allowed this lawlessness, and this theft of the country's property and money!” The crowd was wooden, mostly city workers and trade union supporters who were bused in and marched to their preassigned spot on the cobblestone slope. They left immediately after it was over. They carried placards such as “Dorenko Is Berezovsky's Puppy,” and “Hands Off Our Mayor!” It seemed to me that Luzhkov made a huge mistake in devoting his final energy to shadowboxing with Dorenko. He could have run a powerful political campaign based on Moscow as a showcase city, but he never did. I wrote in my notebook that Luzhkov “is a
khozyain
at heart, who's made some effort to be a politician, but he's been mowed down by Dorenko and the rest, and he surely doesn't know how to respond to it.” Luzhkov was still fuming about the “regime” at the end of the rally. He said bitterly, “We had to show those scoundrels that we are a real force, that we won't give in. We had to show that we can stand up to a flood of lies and slander. We are against the ways in which the regime is starting to rule in the country.”

Luzhkov won his libel suits against Dorenko, but he lost the larger political war. His hopes of running for president were dashed, although he was reelected Moscow mayor in December 1999 by 70 percent. Luzhkov continued to rule Moscow, but the chance that he might lead Russia after Yeltsin was destroyed.

When I asked Luzhkov about the events of that autumn more than a year later, he was still furious. He blamed Yeltsin, Yeltsin's inner circle, Berezovsky, and “parasitic capital.” When I suggested he had not fought back vigorously enough, Luzhkov grew quite animated. He recalled the lawsuits he filed and insisted that he had tried to respond. “Were we supposed to drive tanks in the direction of the Ostankino TV center?” he asked. “It is absolutely well-known that in all his
episodes, Dorenko was slandering me, and he knows it. He received huge money from Berezovsky, a fee, huge money. By court decision he was ordered to pay $4,500. He is laughing at justice. We don't have effective justice.”