The Oligarchs, page 38
In Moscow, fast-paced crises kept the Kremlin reeling. On October 11 came the unexpected “Black Tuesday,” when the ruble lost 27 percent of its value. On October 17, Dmitri Kholodov, an investigative reporter for the mass-circulation daily Moskovsky Komsomolets who was probing military corruption, was killed in a bomb blast. Many journalists and politicians were outraged at the brazen murder of the young reporter.
Yeltsin, isolated and ill, was told that his enemies were everywhere. Korzhakov claims Berezovsky brought him kompromat about Gusinsky. Berezovsky had lit a fuse, and it was burning inside the Kremlin. He was using Korzhakov and Yeltsin for his own goals, to crush a rival.
One day at a Kremlin lunch with Korzhakov, Yeltsin asked, “Why can’t you deal with what’s-his-name, with Gusinsky?” According to Korzhakov’s account, Yeltsin then complained about Gusinsky’s car cutting off his wife and family on the highway into town. “How many times did it happen when Tanya and Naina were driving somewhere and the road was blocked to make way for Gusinsky? His NTV has gotten out of control; it behaves imprudently. I order you, deal with him!”
Korzhakov claims he protested that they had no legal grounds. “Find something,” Yeltsin steamed, according to Korzhakov’s recollection. “Follow him around everywhere, give him no peace. Make the ground burn under his feet!”
The ground soon began to burn. One of the first signs came on the morning of November 19, 1994, with an article in Rossiiskaya Gazeta, a pro-Kremlin state-owned newspaper. The article was headlined, “The Snow Is Falling.” It quoted unnamed sources with dark hints that a shadowy Moscow financier—Gusinsky—was preparing to make Luzhkov president. The article reflected the depths of the Kremlin’s paranoia about the Moscow mayor and Gusinsky, who was blamed for the October ruble crash and depicted as a diabolical powerbroker, buying up the mass media. The Most empire, the article said, “is planning to force its way to power.”36 Gusinsky read the article knowing that it was a threat. “The first political hunt had begun,” he recalled. He was the prey.
Gusinsky’s troubles also had their origins in the Chechnya misadventure that Yeltsin, Korzhakov, and the “party of war” were soon to embark upon. The Chechen republic, in southern Russia, was increasingly coming under the control of separatist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev, and the Moscow authorities, isolated and blind, were sliding toward war. The first stage came in mid-November, when Russian intelligence services secretly arranged an assault by forty-seven tank crews, under the cover of an attack by an “opposition” to Dudayev. The “opposition” were really untrained Russian troops, recruited just days before from Moscow’s Interior Ministry forces, the Kantemirov and Taman Tank Divisions. The youthful soldiers were not even told where they were going or why. The tank offensive was begun on November 26, but as they rolled into the capital, Grozny, the poorly prepared troops were slaughtered by a fusillade of rocket-propelled grenades fired by the Dudayev forces. The whole covert operation turned into a bloody debacle for which the Kremlin was slow to admit responsibility. Twenty-one soldiers were captured by Dudayev’s forces and shown on television. The head of the Kantemirov division, General Boris Polyakov, resigned, saying the assault had been arranged behind his back.37 What made these tense days even more dangerous for Gusinsky was the sudden, amplified power of television. Polyakov’s resignation had been broadcast on NTV, which infuriated the Kremlin. “When these guys decided to start the war, they started to think about media coverage, and it made them extremely nervous,” Malashenko recalled. They were nervous because there was one channel, NTV, that they could not control. One day in November, just before the tank debacle, Malashenko, then president of NTV, met a top official from the security services while waiting for an appointment in the Kremlin. The man was intimately involved in the tank assault. He was an old friend of Malashenko. “Igor!” he implored Malashenko. “Can you forget about Chechnya for just two weeks? In two weeks, we’ll finish the whole operation and I personally will go on NTV and tell you the whole story.” Malashenko was stunned. Was he crazy? “Do you sincerely believe you can wind up this problem in two weeks?” Malashenko refused to stop the coverage.
Just as the tank debacle was unfolding in Grozny, Gusinsky was summoned to the Kremlin by Korzhakov’s deputy, Georgi Rogozin. “He started a soul-searching discourse about how one should be in love with the authorities,” Gusinsky told me, “and what one is to do.”38
On the morning of December 2, black-masked men wearing fatigues without any insignia and carrying automatic rifles pulled up to Gusinsky’s home outside Moscow and tried to start a fight with his security detail. The masked men left, but they returned to tail Gusinsky on the highway as Gusinsky was driven from his country house to the center of the city. They followed him all the way to his offices in the high-rise building on Novy Arbat. The high-rise also housed offices of Luzhkov’s city government. Gusinsky had no idea who the armed, masked men were, but in fact they had been sent by Korzhakov, who later chortled, “The bankers’ security guards were nervous, and Gusinsky himself was scared to death.” When Gusinsky reached the high-rise, he scurried inside and up to his twenty-firstfloor offices, while Korzhakov’s goons began to gruffly interrogate Gusinsky’s security guards in the parking lot. Up in the windowed tower, Gusinsky began madly calling for help. The goons left, and at 5:30, another group of masked, armed men arrived in crisp fatigues with weapons. They bore no markings, no insignia, just menacing masks and guns. They roughed up Gusinsky’s security guards in the parking lot and forced several of them to lie in the snow for several hours. An agitated, panicked Gusinsky then called a friend, Yevgeny Savostyanov, head of the Moscow branch of another federal security service.39 Savostyanov was a liberal, a bearded academic who participated in the pro-democracy movement during perestroika and had been close to Gavriil Popov. Savostyanov sent a team of agents to the high-rise tower.
Korzhakov’s Kremlin goons were suddenly nose-to-nose with Savostyanov’s Moscow agents, and a fight broke out. Korzhakov claims that Savostyanov’s men were slightly drunk. Shots were fired, one of which grazed the leather jacket of one of Korzhakov’s men. Another bullet hit a car. Just when the situation was about to explode, one of Savostyanov’s men recognized one of Korzhakov’s, with whom he used to work. The Savostyanov team realized they were up against the elite presidential security service and retreated.
Korzhakov recalled that when he heard about the episode, he went immediately to Yeltsin, who signed a decree firing Savostyanov. Then Korzhakov sent a small unit of rapid-reaction troops to Gusinsky’s parking lot. They blocked the entrances to the building and began checking all the cars in Gusinsky’s fleet. “The driver of Gusinsky’s armored Mercedes locked himself inside the car,” Korzhakov recalled. “When he was asked to get out, he refused. Then a grenade was put on top of the car. He immediately jumped out.” It was typical of Korzhakov’s swaggering style. He claimed the grenade didn’t even have a fuse.
Meanwhile, Gusinsky summoned Moscow’s press corps to the scene. The Korzhakov goons were captured by two dozen television news crews, with the Gusinsky men still facedown in the snow. The episode was known long after as “faces in the snow.” The reasons for the confrontation remained unclear to the outside world that night. Certainly, the Kremlin’s anger at Gusinsky over coverage of Chechnya was one plausible reason for the assault, but it was not evident precisely who had sent the goons. After the confrontation in the parking lot, Gusinsky realized who he was up against, and he was furious.
Gusinsky later reflected on the events: “If back then these morons at the Kremlin were smarter, they would have called me and said, ‘Volod, we beg you, please give us your support here.’ I probably would have tried to. But they decided to intimidate me. And I’m an idiot, a ram from childhood. If you are going to threaten me, get lost!”40
On December 5, Gusinsky was again invited to see Korzhakov’s deputy, Rogozin. He decided to disarm all his bodyguards, so there would be no question about shooting back if another confrontation erupted. He also decided to send his wife, Lena, and his young son to London. As he was headed for the Kremlin, Gusinsky got a call from his security chief that three blue Volvos, unmarked, were trailing his wife on the way to the airport. “There are men with machine guns sitting inside,” the security man said.
“Got it,” Gusinsky replied, curtly.
At the table with Rogozin, Gusinsky broached the idea of a compromise. What would it take?
“Chechnya, Kukly,” said the Korzhakov deputy, suggesting that Gusinsky’s television station needed to fall into line. He was referring to Kukly, a brand-new television satire program, based on puppets, which often made fun of Yeltsin and his men.
“I am not going to discuss it,” Gusinsky cut him off. He would not give up the station.
Rogozin replied, “Something needs to be done; the emotional temperature needs to be lowered.”
“Are you letting my wife fly out today, by any chance?” Gusinsky asked.
“Judging by your behavior,” Rogozin replied cagily.
Gusinsky had a sudden flashback. He was in the courtyard as a small boy. He was picking up the pipe in his hands to smash the man who had called him a Yid. He looked Rogozin in the eyes. “I told him that I would personally kill him, if anything happened to my wife and child,” Gusinsky recalled. “This was an unpleasant incident for me. I told him, ‘I don’t need any security. I will personally strike you dead, I’ll strike you dead myself.’ Probably this is wrong, uncivilized, but I had no choice. Had something happened to my wife and child at that point, I would have killed him in his office with something heavy, an ash tray, anything.”
Gusinsky’s wife flew out of the country. But the pressure on Gusinsky did not let up. Korzhakov boasted in a newspaper interview a few days later that “hunting geese is an old hobby of mine.” The Russian word for goose—gus—is a play on Gusinsky’s name, and a favorite nickname for Gusinsky.
In mid-December, Kiselyov got a telephone call from the Kremlin. The warning was blunt. “You are in great danger,” said Viktor Ilyushin, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, who had dialed Kiselyov directly, not even through a secretary. Kiselyov went to the Kremlin to meet Ilyushin for a formal interview, in which Ilyushin said nothing. But after the interview, Ilyushin took the television anchor aside, and said, “You have big problems, guys.” Just a year before, Yeltsin had signed the decree giving NTV the expanded airtime on Channel 4. Now Yeltsin’s wife, Naina, could hardly watch the channel, Ilyushin reported. “Why did you do that terrible story?” Ilyushin demanded to know.
“What terrible story?” Kiselyov asked.
Ilyushin said the Yeltsin family was distraught over an NTV feature about how Yeltsin was deeply unpopular even in the village where he was born. The story reflected a sad truth: Yeltsin’s public approval ratings were sliding into single digits because of the strains of reform and the shadow of war.41
Gusinsky too was feeling more and more pressure. “They summoned me to the Kremlin and they told me, if you continue showing Chechnya, we will strip you of NTV and kill you,” Gusinsky recalled. “It felt scary. But I could not agree to it, of course. I grew up on the street, didn’t I? I don’t like to be threatened. I am deeply scared, of course I am, but I cannot show to anybody that I am afraid, can I? I said, fuck off—all of you.”
If his tormentors thought they had defeated Gusinsky, they were wrong. They saved him. The beginning of the Chechen war in December 1994 changed Gusinsky’s life forever. It forged a new, popular, private television channel, NTV, which soon posed a serious challenge to Yeltsin’s authority.
NTV not only brought home the horrors of the war but became a sort of alternative power center, telling the stories that the government would not admit. Night after night, NTV broadcast in a way that television in Russia had never done before. When a Russian helicopter was downed, NTV showed the bodies, but government officials said nothing. When Russians were taken prisoner in mid-December, NTV showed them; the government said there were no prisoners. When Yeltsin said the bombing of the presidential palace in Grozny had stopped, NTV showed the bombs still falling.
Kiselyov told me that in 1994, even before the war began, “We were permanently in Chechnya from late spring, throughout the summer, into the fall.” More than any other television channel, NTV was prepared when the war broke out, and broadcast footage of the troop concentrations, the mobile field hospitals, and the war itself. Gusinsky recalled, “Thanks to our honesty in covering that war, we became the NTV company. We were honest. We were showing what we had to show. It was exactly at that point that I realized what public service was. Exactly at that point.”
Fearing arrest, Gusinsky left Russia on December 18 and remained in London for six months. The pressure, the threatening phone calls, and the vows to shut down NTV continued into the spring as the war turned into a quagmire for Yeltsin. Kiselyov told me that after all the tumult he and his colleagues had been through in recent years, when the Chechen war began, they knew exactly what to do. They did not debate how to cover the war—they went and did it. “We had a good understanding that information was a powerful tool in our hands, to fight back,” he said. The reporting was impassioned, at times sickening in its unblinking treatment of the war’s ghastly, bloody victims. My colleague Lee Hockstader, who covered the war at great risk and with enormous personal intensity, wrote of NTV: “Mangled limbs, agonized death throes, eviscerated corpses, all of it was fair game for the evening news. The tone of some of the coverage became overtly antiwar.” Oleg Dobrodeyev, who had founded the channel with Gusinsky and Kiselyov, led the day-to-day coverage. His rule was that if correspondents saw it, they aired it. “I remember myself sitting and watching all those reports, making decision about what would and would not be put on the air,” Dobrodeyev told me. “I broadcast everything,” he said, because the footage spoke for itself—powerfully. The pathos of war on television, which Americans had discovered a generation earlier in Vietnam, proved gripping to Russian viewers, who had never seen anything like it.42 NTV enjoyed a surge of public trust. Television became the chief source of information about the war; newspapers and magazines were far behind. Vsevolod Vilchek, a longtime public opinion specialist for Channel 1 and later for NTV, reported that when people were asked at the outbreak of the war if they were following events, 80 percent said yes. The audience for television was expanding, but the share of the new viewers that went to Channel 1 was tiny, just a few percent. The second channel, RTR, did better, but NTV got an astounding 70 percent of the new audience.43 NTV doubled its total viewers and at the peak of the war NTV audience in Moscow was 48 percent—nearly half of all the televisions turned on at that time.44 Those early months of the Chechen war transformed NTV into Russia’s most professional television channel, and people noticed. So did Yeltsin.
On July 8, 1995, NTV aired another segment of its regular weekly satire program, Kukly, which featured life-sized puppets and was written by a wicked humorist, Viktor Shenderovich. Kukly had been launched just as the Chechen war was getting under way, and it unexpectedly became another thorn in Yeltsin’s side. The show that evening depicted government leaders as tramps who could not subsist on the government’s minimum wage. Yeltsin was shown wandering through a passenger train, begging for change, dragging his security chief, Korzhakov, along as a baby. Yeltsin had a thick skin after years in politics, but Gusinsky believed Kukly provoked him into fits of rage. After the train episode, the general prosecutor launched a criminal investigation of Kukly, which brought the show even more attention. Nothing ever came of the probe, but Gusinsky realized the penetrating influence of his television channel. “Yeltsin had quiet hatred reserved for me,” Gusinsky said. Yeltsin once called Luzhkov personally and implored him to ask Gusinsky to stop the puppet show.
“They humiliate me!” Yeltsin begged. But the show went on.
The Kremlin attack on Gusinsky had one major consequence: it drove a wedge between Gusinsky and Luzhkov. The Moscow mayor felt the pressure from the Kremlin and wanted to keep his head down. Gusinsky’s Most Bank depended on the “authorized” accounts of the city, but those accounts were shifted to the new Bank of Moscow. Gusinsky’s relationship with Luzhkov cooled. At some point the two men, who had been so close to each other since their days in the cooperative movement, stopped talking to each other. Gusinsky also lost the Aeroflot business to Berezovsky, a decision taken in the Kremlin as punishment for his opposition to the war.
“It was a very difficult time for the whole group,” Malashenko recalled of Gusinsky’s team, “because people in the bank were of course extremely upset. For them, it was the death of their business. But I told them, listen guys, we don’t have much choice. We are not going to sacrifice NTV.”
Gusinsky had reached a crossroads. He decided that his future lay not in banking and not in construction, but in media, as a mogul. A one-minute advertisement on NTV cost about $10,000. It was a tremendously valuable enterprise, both for business and for politics. He had built it up from almost nothing. Gusinsky was proud of this: his assets were not “ready-made” Soviet-era enterprises like Berezovsky’s Avtovaz or Ostankino. Gusinsky was an entrepreneur, perhaps because he had to be—he built from zero. He had no reservations about lobbying the government, as he had done to win the license for NTV, but the station itself was created by him. It was not a Soviet leftover. It was his ticket to the future.
