The happy days of Itogi ended with the firing of Yegor Yakovlev and the resignation of Malashenko. Bragin, who replaced Yakovlev, was an insult to human intelligence, a ‘clinical case’, as Dobrodeev put it. For an erudite man, the crème de la crème of the Soviet establishment, the idea of answering to a provincial party apparatchik who had hastily rebranded himself as a ‘democrat’, was humiliating. Ten years later, Dobrodeev himself would turn into the Kremlin’s chief propagandist, but in 1992 he found the idea of using television as a means of propaganda distasteful. ‘Information as such is not needed by the authorities; they see it as an instrument of instantaneous influence and rapid reaction,’ he complained.
Kiselev, too, was unhappy – not so much because of censorship, but because he realized that he was sitting on a gold mine and getting paid peanuts. Everyone around him was making money by turning programmes into independent production companies which then sold the programmes back to the state channel, pocketing the profit. Itogi, however, remained part of state television and Kiselev was a state employee on a modest salary that was being wiped out by raging inflation. Kiselev decided it was time to walk away from Ostankino and take the programme with him. When Dobrodeev, once again, came into his office to moan about the pressure, Kiselev told him it was time to act.
The speed with which the events unfolded in the next few hours was typical of 1990s Moscow. Kiselev picked up the phone and called Sergei Zverev, an old acquaintance who worked for Vladimir Gusinsky, the owner of a bank, a newspaper and radio station Echo Moskvy. ‘I am here with Oleg,’ he told him. ‘We’ve been reading your paper. Big success. Have you thought of doing something similar in television?’ ‘Who would do it?’ Zverev asked. ‘We would.’ ‘Come over now,’ Zverev told him.8 Less than two hours later Dobrodeev and Kiselev were discussing their idea with Gusinsky, a theatre director turned oligarch.
The Oligarch and the Intellectual
‘The oligarch was a special species which could only have been born in Russia in the late 1980s. We came out of the Soviet system, but we overcame that system and the remarkable criminality in the country. We were the people with fangs growing from the back of our necks,’ Gusinsky said in the mid-2000s, several years after being kicked out of Russia.9
The business world of the early 1990s was a jungle in which only the fittest survived and Gusinsky was among those. He did not come from a privileged background, like Kiselev or Dobrodeev. The story of his family was fairly typicaclass="underline" grandfather shot in 1937, grandmother sentenced to seven years in the Gulag. Gusinsky was born in 1952 – a few months before Stalin’s death – and grew up in a single-room, 18-square-metre (21.5-square-yard) flat with his parents. He received his first education on the street, fighting with other boys in the courtyard who picked on him as a ‘little Yid’.
At school he wanted to be a physicist, but ended up studying engineering at an oil and gas institute – a fairly typical downshift for someone who was marked down as a ‘Jew’ in his Soviet passport. (High-profile university departments had secret, but strict, quotas for Jews and physics was enormously popular.) But he was not an academic type and after he had served his two-year conscription in the Soviet army, his boisterous temperament and his taste for theatrics guided him to GITIS, a Moscow drama school, where he studied to be a theatre director. He staged a couple of shows in the provincial, industrial Russian town of Tula, but left no mark on the theatre.
To make a living, he drove a gypsy cab ferrying foreigners to and from airports, pushed blue jeans and American cigarettes he bought from foreigners on the black market and traded foreign currency – all of which was illegal. In his excellent and thorough book The Oligarchs, David Hoffman describes Gusinsky as a fartsovshchik – a huckster.10 As someone who was buying stuff from foreigners, he came to the attention of the KGB, which caught him trading foreign currency. He was brought in, though never charged, and had an audience with Filipp Bobkov, the head of the KGB’s fifth directorate that dealt with dissidents. As Hoffman suggests, Gusinsky may have been a useful source for Bobkov who kept tabs on the intelligentsia.
In the late 1980s Gusinsky founded a co-operative that made bogus, vaguely oriental ‘healing’ bracelets out of copper wire that he bartered for a few bottles of vodka from a tramway depot. He also used copper to cover fake figurines made out of moulded plaster – copies of Russian art – and persuaded a senior man at the Central Committee to give him permission to export them for hard currency.
Connections mattered and nowhere more so than in the construction and real estate business in Moscow – another of Gusinsky’s ventures. Gusinsky struck up a friendship with Yuri Luzhkov, the bald, stout and fiercely energetic future mayor of Moscow who, at the time, oversaw vegetable distribution and co-operatives in Moscow. Gusinsky’s friendship with Luzhkov bordered on partnership – a private–public partnership of a very Russian sort which resulted in Gusinsky’s company setting up its headquarters on top of the Moscow mayor’s office.
Almost all big business in Russia grew out of this nexus between state and private interests. Gusinsky’s construction company received city land and permits with miraculous ease. But the real trick was latching onto the cash flow of state enterprises or the government itself. All Russian oligarchs did so. Gusinsky latched onto the Moscow government which channelled its operational capital into a consortium of banks led by Gusinsky himself.
The difference between Gusinsky and others was in how they used the state capital. While most of the oligarchs used it to privatize state assets, effectively bidding for state companies with the state’s own money, Gusinsky prided himself in using city hall cashflow as starting capital for building his own business from scratch, including newspapers and now a television channel. He felt that while most oligarchs were simply scrounging off the state, he was creating something new. None of the businesses that he owned had existed in Soviet days.
By the standards of the early 1990s, Gusinsky’s business was still on a small scale. But what he lacked in terms of industrial assets he made up for in appearance and in status. Along with Boris Berezovsky, who managed to work himself into Yeltsin’s inner circle and take charge of Channel One, he was the ultimate Russian oligarch. A man of the theatre who did not fulfil himself on stage, he did not just live the life of an oligarch with all its trimmings, including private jets, yachts and bullet-proof cars, but he also acted it.
One of the key attributes of a Russian oligarch in the early 1990s was a large security service that could fend off gangsters and racketeers. Instead of paying for protection, they recruited policemen and KGB staff. Gusinsky’s security services, however, amounted to a small army, numbering 1,000 people. And although he sometimes deployed it for business purposes (he once helped Luzhkov to reclaim dozens of petrol stations that had been raided by gangsters), it was mainly a status symbol. It was as though Gusinsky was playing soldiers.
At one point Gusinsky had a proud collection of five top KGB ranks in his employment, including Bobkov, who had questioned Gusinsky when he was brought in just a few years back. What kind of work Bobkov did for Gusinsky was never entirely clear, but it certainly flattered Gusinsky’s ego. Gusinsky’s media interests fell into the same category. When he bankrolled the newspaper Segodnya, he did not do it as a business proposition. It was largely an ornament on the façade of his business empire, a symbol of status and influence. A television channel, however, would move him to a different league.