As Malashenko said, ‘I would rather have elected Yeltsin’s corpse than Zyuganov as Russia’s president.’45 Although Malashenko never told his journalists about what had actually happened to Yeltsin, rumours about Yeltsin’s heart attack, or even stroke, spread through Moscow. Journalists knew Yeltsin was gravely ill. Yet none of the TV channels, including NTV, said anything about the president’s health. On 3 July – the day of the second round – Yeltsin appeared on television at a polling station set up near his country residence. He could barely slot his ballot paper into the box. The two doctors in white coats behind his back were edited out of the picture. Yeltsin was elected with 53.8 per cent of the vote – a result that had seemed impossible only a few months earlier.
Yeltsin’s presidential inauguration a few weeks later was conspicuously short. He could hardly walk. He managed to take a few steps towards a microphone and said thirty-three words in total. It was clear that Yeltsin was only half alive. The central idea of defeating the communists through elections rather than by force, noble in its intentions and effective in its results, did not alter the fact that behind Yeltsin’s victory was not a broad coalition of democratic forces and parties but a narrow alliance of oligarchs and media managers. The actual democratic movement that brought Yeltsin to power in 1991 was virtually extinct. The main democratic parties, including Russian Democratic Choice, led by Yegor Gaidar, were weak and at best played the role of a chorus, rather than protagonists in the 1996 drama. As Gaidar wrote, ‘Given Zyuganov versus Yeltsin, we, as the party of democracy, were simply obliged to back Yeltsin.’46
Yeltsin’s victory, therefore, was not a triumph for democratic institutions, the rule of law and property rights. Rather it was the triumph of those who had invested in and stood to benefit most from it – the tycoons and media chiefs. As Kirill Rogov, a political essayist and a founder of one of the country’s first internet news sites, noted, control over the media and its technology allowed the oligarchs to reach a goal which had little to do with public good.
The 1996 elections and the loans-for-shares privatization turned business tycoons into oligarchs and journalists into spiritual leaders. Berezovsky boasted about it in an interview with the Financial Times. He spoke on behalf of the seven bankers who had participated in the Davos pact to have Yeltsin re-elected. ‘We hired Chubais and invested huge sums of money to ensure Yeltsin’s election. Now we have the right to occupy government posts and enjoy the fruits of our victory.’47 With Yeltsin only semi-functional, the oligarchs felt they would be the ones ruling Russia.
‘Berezovsky’s logic was very simple: if we are the richest, we must be the smartest. And if we are the smartest and the richest then we should be ruling Russia,’ said Chubais.48 They nominated Potanin, the author of the loans-for-shares scheme, to be Russia’s deputy prime minister. Within a few months, Berezovsky was appointed the deputy secretary of the Security Council. However, the main tool of power in the hands of the oligarchs was not their official jobs, but the media and, in particular, television. Yeltsin’s election persuaded the oligarchs that control over the media equalled political power. ‘At some point I realized that the thing we created had become too powerful and I was trailing behind,’ said Malashenko.49 It certainly was not ‘normal’ television as Malashenko had initially designed it.
Gusinsky showered his journalists with bonuses and privileges, giving them free credit and buying them flats and cars. Paid well above their peers in other media outlets from the very beginning, they were incorporated into the oligarchic clan. They dined in Moscow’s most expensive restaurants. Kiselev, who had earned the nickname barin (‘landlord’, a master), received a free house – as did Malashenko and Dobrodeev – in Chigasovo, a fenced country settlement built by Gusinsky. It was known as ‘Russian Switzerland’.
In the opening credits to Itogi, Kiselev walked through the Kremlin. A kaleidoscope of pictures and fragments of phrases were flashed onto the screen: Thatcher, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Nixon. The last snatched phrase was spoken by the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church: ‘a spiritual image of Russia’, he was heard saying as Kiselev swaggered across Red Square. The scene was recorded before the election, but after the election it gained a new meaning.
‘Kiselev in his Itogi programme is preaching, rather than broadcasting,’ critic Irina Petrovskaya wrote less than a year after the election. ‘He is speaking, not even on behalf of the presidential team, but as one of its fully accepted members.’50 Itogi shaped the political process more than it reflected it. Kiselev could get almost any information he wanted. ‘It became very difficult for Kiselev to distance himself from the Kremlin,’ Malashenko admitted.51 Kiselev turned from being a political commentator into a political figure, whose rating was followed by newspapers along with other politicians.
In recognition of Malashenko’s role in the election campaign, Yeltsin asked him to be his chief of staff – one of the most important posts in the Kremlin. But Malashenko did something that was unprecedented: he turned Yeltsin down – a decision he would regret for the rest of his life. He did not do it out of false modesty or even humility. On the contrary, Malashenko believed that being in charge of a private television channel was far more important than being in charge of one of the Kremlin’s towers, as Yeltsin’s election campaign had just proved.
Having defeated the communists and demolished the party of war in the Kremlin, Malashenko and Gusinsky felt invincible. The victory of liberalism in Russia seemed complete and final – whoever would come after Yeltsin. ‘I did not see a political task. Now I understand that the central question in Russian political history is one of succession. If, back in 1996, I realized that Yeltsin’s succession would determine Russia’s future direction, perhaps I would have acted differently. But at the time this did not occur to me,’ Malashenko said years later.52
There was another reason for his refusal, however. Having observed Gusinsky and Berezovsky during the election campaign, having fought on their side against the ‘statists’, he knew that if he accepted Yeltsin’s offer, they would treat him as ‘their’ man in the Kremlin, a tool of their influence rather than a source of power. The only way he could be his own master would be to declare a war on the oligarchs – something that he was neither willing nor able to do.
Yet, for all the brashness and the questionable origins of their wealth, he saw the oligarchs generally, and Gusinsky in particular, as private businessmen whose individualism and initiative could keep state power in check, something that Malashenko strongly believed in. An extreme individualist and misanthrope, Malashenko, the operator of one of the most important mass media channels in the country, had a low opinion of the masses. Liberalism and democracy were not synonyms to him, but antonyms. Fascinated by Spanish history, he fully subscribed to the ideas of Ortega y Gasset, who argued that democracy is no guarantee of liberalism and of individual rights and that any state – democratic or despotic – will seek to extend its powers and therefore needs to be countered with alternative sources of power that can be mustered only by private barons.