The privatization of Svyazinvest was expected to highlight Nemtsov’s independence from the influence of the oligarchs and turn it into his political capital. But if the oligarchs did not fit into Nemtsov’s picture of Russia, neither did he fit into theirs. Although he clearly had nothing to do with the book scandal, he was an obvious target. To attack Nemtsov, Dorenko hired prostitutes who, for a modest price of about $200, would say that Nemtsov used their services but forgot to pay. ‘I am a [TV] killer and they wrote a contract out on you,’ Dorenko apparently told Nemtsov a few years later when they bumped into each other at an airport.69 (Dorenko said the prostitutes’ tape was simply given to him and he did not think it necessary to verify their story.)
NTV peddled Nemtsov’s gaffes, including his appearance in white chinos at an official ceremony greeting the President of Azerbaijan. Kiselev tracked Nemtsov’s rating, which he himself helped to drive down, until it reached single digits. He then gleefully placed a large graphic cross over Nemtsov’s face and ‘sent’ his portrait into a dustbin.
In fact, the talk about anyone’s electoral rating a year after the presidential elections was meaningless. But as Maxim Sokolov sarcastically wrote at the time, television channels thrived on election campaigns just as a military industrial complex thrives on a war. ‘A war guarantees demand for arms. Election campaigns create the same demand for information weapons.’70 By constantly hyping up the subject of rating, NTV was reminding the politicians of its powers.
The ‘revelations’ were addressed to one spectator – Yeltsin – and were supposed to persuade him to sack the government of young reformers with little idea of who would replace them. Yeltsin took NTV’s attack on his reformers, and Nemtsov in particular, to heart. A couple of weeks after the Svyazinvest auction, Yeltsin called Nemstov in. ‘I am tired of defending you,’ he said. Nemtsov stayed in the government for another year, but he was weakened and demoralized and in the end handed in his resignation.
What started as a war between bankers had turned into a major political crisis.
Chubais rightly likened the scandal stirred up by television in 1997 to ‘exploding an atomic bomb’. The abbreviation NTV now stood not for ‘normal’ or ‘nezavisimoe’ (independent), but for ‘nuclear’ television. The bankers’ war left no winners, destroyed everything in its range and left the field polluted with radiation for years to come. The point of ultimate victory and triumph, which NTV and Gusinsky reached in 1996, marked the beginning of a decline. Surviving victory turned out to be a far greater challenge than achieving it.
The irony was that the oligarchs who sided with Yeltsin against the communists and nationalists managed to do what the parliament in 1993 failed to achieve: the oligarchy destroyed the government of liberal reformers and discredited the idea of liberal media. Yet, unlike in 1993 and 1996, the information war of 1997 contained no ideology or even an idea about the country’s future. But it did contaminate television and NTV in particular.
Powerful media magnates behaved not like the elite they claimed to be, but like small-time co-operators with sophisticated weapons in their hands. They dressed like a Westernized elite, spoke like one, sent their children to Western schools, but they lacked the most important attribute of an elite – a sense of responsibility for, and historic consciousness of, their own country. They behaved like caricatures of capitalists in old Soviet journals. Having helped Yeltsin to win in 1996, they did not use the chance to make Russia better. Nor did they care about public good, or the well-being of the Russian people. ‘We did not match the historic task which was in front of us,’ Malashenko admitted.71 The same could be said of Chubais, though.
Giddy with their own wealth and power, the oligarchs did not realize that, along with Chubais and Nemtsov, they were also destroying their own futures and the future of the country. Arrogance and narrow-mindedness on both sides of the conflict got the better of common sense. The ultimate irony was that the asset, which the oligarchs fought for so furiously, turned out to be worthless. Having sold 25 per cent of the firm, the government did not privatize it further and Potanin never got real control over the company. George Soros called it the worst investment he had ever made.
The breakout of the ‘bankers’ war’ coincided with a dramatic event in the life of NTV which had an equally lasting consequence on the country’s narrative. On 10 May, Elena Masyuk, the channel’s intrepid war reporter, and two members of her crew were kidnapped in Chechnya, which had received de facto independence as a result of the 1996 peace accord aimed at improving Yeltsin’s chances for re-election and was allowed to hold its own presidential elections.
Chechnya’s new president, Aslan Maskhadov, was a moderate but ineffective former military man, who could barely control his own field commanders. Chechnya turned into a black hole, sucking in money allocated by the Kremlin, siphoning off oil from a pipeline that went through Chechnya, and kidnapping journalists and aid workers for ransom.
Masyuk was not the first journalist to be kidnapped in Chechnya, but of all Russian television reporters, she was arguably the most sympathetic towards the Chechen independence cause. She also had the best access to its field commanders, including Shamil Basayev. In 1995, days after Basayev had led the attack on the hospital in Buddenovsk and was then allowed to ‘vanish’ in Chechnya as part of the deal for freeing the hostages, the Kremlin claimed that he had gone abroad. Masyuk managed to find and interview him on camera, embarrassing the Russian security services. Her reporting, much of it from the Chechen side, tested the limits of objectivity and Malashenko effectively banned her from travelling to Chechnya. This did not stop Oleg Dobrodeev, who had assumed day-to-day control of NTV, from sending Masyuk to interview one of the field commanders who had taken responsibility for an explosion at a railway station a few weeks earlier.
In July 1997, in the midst of NTV’s frenzied attempts to free its journalists, Yeltsin held a dinner for those who had worked in his election team. Yeltsin talked about the great successes over the past year – both in the economy and in settling for peace in Chechnya. Yeltsin’s forced optimism could barely conceal his worries. Then Malashenko asked to speak.
He told Yeltsin that the situation in Chechnya was not as radiant as the president had painted and that sooner or later Russia would face a choice: either to start another war or to capitulate, in which case Chechnya would rule Russia, because it had a will and Russia did not. The government, he asserted, could not provide safety for its own people. He spoke for ten or fifteen minutes. ‘I don’t know what came over me, but it just burst out. It was wrong, of course – one cannot speak for that long, and in that way, to the president.’72