‘What plan?’ I ask him.
‘You don’t know?’ he says, looking hard at me, and I feel for one moment that all he wants me for is this. And I don’t know the answer he wants.
He looks away, apparently relieved that I don’t know what he’s talking about, and beyond that, he doesn’t expand, however hard I press him.
Even for him this monologue is rather melodramatic and portentous, yet there’s something so powerful emanating from him as he speaks that my initial urge to laugh is quietened. He stands there in the dark forest, with the snow falling around us, like some kind of shaman possessed by a supernatural force. I wonder what I’m doing even considering trusting this man.
Yet I know we have missed a chance for us, an opportunity, and it was me who rejected it. This time there will be other chances, but one day we will run out of chances to save ourselves.
I realise that, despite the inevitable searching somewhere out there in the darkness. Finn has chosen to absent us from the microphones for this moment.
I wonder what General Kerchenko and my two case officers will think of Finn’s theatrical eloquence when I submit my report later. This Plan he talks about…Will they think it fiction? Bathos? Madness? To my surprise, they thought it was none of them. They ignored it.
9
IN THE SPRING of the year 2000 Vladimir Putin moved into the Kremlin and began to cement his seat of power.
At the British embassy across the River Moskva from the Kremlin, Finn slowly undermined whatever power he possessed. He told me he’d argued with his station head about the direction in which Putin was taking Russia. He was uncharacteristically truculent and morose.
One afternoon the two of us took a trip out to New Jerusalem, the seventeenth-century Orthodox monastery on the River Istra west of Moscow, and afterwards we had supper with friends of mine who lived nearby. Finn usually drove when we went anywhere, but this time he asked me to bring my car. He was in a foul mood.
‘I’ve been given a formal warning,’ he grumbled. ‘Accept my government’s policy, work with the status quo, or get out.’
‘That seems reasonable,’ I said. Then we both laughed that it was I who was telling him to be loyal to his country. The rest of the trip revived his spirits and he seemed like his usual self.
But he told me as we walked around the huge monastery later that behind the scenes they were going to get him out anyway.
‘I’m finished with Moscow,’ he said finally, and we lit a candle to us.
He held my hand.
‘And I don’t want us to be separated,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘So if it’s going to be one thing or the other,’ he said, ‘us together, or you staying in Russia without me, which is it to be?’
I didn’t reply. And after the night by the pond, this was my second denial, a second opportunity lost.
In the weeks after our trip out to New Jerusalem, Putin first gathered round him the trusted members of his St Petersburg KGB clan, people who had worked with him when he was deputy mayor of the city, and from earlier when he was stationed in East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell.
Simultaneously he summoned the men who had been the real rulers of Russia in the shadows behind Yeltsin’s presidency.
I heard from a colleague based at the Kremlin that they came to him one by one. These shadow rulers were known to us Russians and to the world as the oligarchs. In the words of Boris Berezovsky, the oil, metals and media billionaire, they were the ‘seven bankers who ruled Russia’. These immensely powerful men had formed an uneasy alliance between themselves- one that transcended the clash of their own business interests–in order to put their support behind Putin to win the presidential elections. First, they had persuaded Yeltsin as the millennium approached to hand his crown over to the younger man and now they supported Putin to ensure that he won the contested election. They were backing him with their huge resources as the best candidate to protect their own interests.
One night Finn and I went to see American Beauty at the cinema in Tverskaya. Finn fidgeted throughout the film and when I tried to talk about it afterwards he appeared not to have seen it at all.
‘They’re afraid for their prospects if Evgeni Primakov wins the presidency,’ Finn said.
‘Who?’ I asked him, thinking about Kevin Spacey’s dead-looking face in the movie.
‘The oligarchs! They’re so afraid of Primakov that they’re going to jump straight into the fire and support Putin!’
Primakov was my chief, the boss of the SVR, who was running against Putin in the elections.
‘Are there really people like that in America?’ I asked, thinking still about Spacey’s character. But Finn was obsessed. For once it was me trying to introduce some levity, not him.
‘It’s just the same as it was five years ago,’ Finn went on. ‘Then it was the Communists they were afraid of. They thought the Communists would turn back the clock and deprive them of their wealth. So they formed an alliance between themselves for as long as it took to see off that threat and make sure Yeltsin was re-elected.’
‘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.