Less than a week after the programme, Primakov attacked Berezovsky. Commenting on a decision by the Duma to amnesty nearly 100,000 prisoners, Primakov said Russia needed to free up some space in prisons so that it could jail people who had committed economic crimes. A few days later, firms linked to Berezovsky were raided by camouflaged police with guns and in skiing masks. Berezovksy was fired as the secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States and soon faced an arrest warrant in connection with siphoning money from Aeroflot. Primakov also tried to retake control over Channel One.
For Primakov, who had served as a candidate member to the Politburo and had started his career in television, Channel One and its iconic Vremya programme were main staples of the state power. The idea that the national channel had been hijacked by Berezovsky who turned it into a tool of personal influence was nonsense. Primakov offered Channel One a state subsidy of $100 million on the condition that Dorenko was removed from the air. Dorenko also came under investigation by the tax police.
Berezovsky, who was forced to flee the country, launched a counter-offensive on Primakov, portraying him as a force darker than the communists and stoking and exploiting the fears of the liberal media about Primakov’s style. ‘Communists want to bring back the communist system. Primakov wants to build the empire. From the first day [in office] he started fighting for control over the media, security services… He has succeeded in his fight for the security services. For ten years they were quietly lying low. When they saw one of their own men [in power], they started coming out of their hole,’ Berezovsky said.12
On 12 May 1999, Yeltsin sacked Primakov, invoking jubilation among liberal journalists. ‘It is the departure of the last big figure of the Soviet era and the fact that he was incapable of governing post-Soviet Russia speaks only about one fact: the country has changed and the point of return to the bright Soviet yesterday has passed,’ read an article in the pro-Western and liberal Itogi magazine – part of Gusinsky’s media empire.13 The media placed Primakov into the context of an old battle between the Soviet past and the Westernized future that shaped the 1996 elections. But unlike in 1996, this was not a battle of ideas or even directions. It was a battle for power and for survival within the Kremlin. It had little to do with the public good of the country, but everything to do with the interests of those who had been empowered and enriched by Yeltsin’s rule and who had much at stake in the question of his succession.
Operation ‘Successor’
Vlast’. The untranslatable Russian vlast’ is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘political power in the countries of the former Soviet Union’. In Russia and its former republics, vlast’ is inseparable from sobstvennost’ or ownership, property, assets. Lacking legal property rights, Russian ownership can be backed only by state power. So for the oligarchs who received their main assets as a result of the highly dubious loans-for-shares privatization, the continuity of vlast’ meant the preservation of sobstvennost’.
‘We were obsessed with the idea of vlast’,’ said Gleb Pavlovsky, who had been working for the Kremlin since 1996. ‘Preserving Yeltsin’s “rule” while letting him leave safely at the end of his second term was the horizon of our planning.’14 All this was done in the name of saving Yeltsin from a possible retribution and protecting his legacy. In fact the legacy of Yeltsin as Russia’s first democratically elected president who parted with communism and launched reforms was the last thing on the minds of those who planned his succession and in the end caused more damage to his legacy than anyone from the outside could have done. Yeltsin’s own safety was not under threat, but the safety of his entourage was.
Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko and her husband Valentin Yumashev had been implicated in several financial scandals, including alleged kickbacks for a contract to renovate the Kremlin. It was the subject of a probe by Yuri Skuratov, Russia’s prosecutor general, who threw dirt at Yeltsin’s family and was implicitly supported by Luzhkov. Luzhkov was an oligarch in his own right, he controlled one of the most profitable ‘corporations’ in Russia – Moscow itself. On the one hand, Luzhkov epitomized Russia’s regional feudalism. On the other hand, he considered his Moscow fiefdom a nucleus of a more centralized country. He could be a new prince Yuri Dolgoruky, the founder of Moscow. As Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs, ‘After the incredibly pompous and overblown 850th anniversary of Moscow, the mayor evidently became dizzy with success.’15
In the summer of 1999 Luzhkov teamed up with Primakov, whose sacking was opposed by 80 per cent of the population and whose rating jumped from 20 per cent to 32 per cent. Luzhkov quickly drew Primakov to his side. Luzhkov’s ‘Fatherland’ Party and Primakov’s ‘All Russia’ Party forged a coalition: ‘Fatherland–All Russia’. Their likely victory in the parliamentary elections in December 1999 could make one of them president and the other prime minister. In either case, a redistribution of assets, the sidelining of Yeltsin’s family and the banishment of rival oligarchs including Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich (his junior partner in 1999–2000) would be inevitable. Luzhkov openly called for the revising of the result of the privatization and Russia’s agreement with its former republics. ‘Sebastopol is a Russian city,’ he stated. ‘And will belong to Russia. It can be achieved by force. But I am an advocate of a peaceful solution.’16
Luzhkov’s mouthpiece was a well-equipped Moscow television channel, Central Television, which he controlled and which he turned against Yeltsin’s entourage. (One of its presenters was the little-known Dmitry Kiselev who would later turn into the most audacious of propagandists even by the Kremlin’s own standards.) Every day, it lobbed populist-loaded shells at the Kremlin. ‘The Yeltsin regime has sold the motherland to foreign capital… It created the system of corruption. It arranged for the “genocide of Russian people.” And it is to blame for the fall in the birth rate, the catastrophic state of science and education, medicine and culture. A Mafia-like family, a real gangster clan, has formed around the president,’ Luzhkov’s media trumpeted.17
Yeltsin’s clan, which apart from his daughter and her husband, also included Alexander Voloshin, Yeltsin’s chief of staff and Berezovsky’s former business associate, and Roman Abramovich, Berezovsky’s junior business partner, now needed their own, obedient Primakov. In the autumn of 1998 – shortly after Primakov’s appointment as prime minister – Pavlovsky wrote in a memo to the Kremlin: ‘Any new head of state will be a Primakov. Either we get onto this process or it will unfold without us.’18 In the late spring of 1999, the Kremlin ‘got onto this process’. While Berezovsky blamed Primakov for relying on the security services, the Kremlin engaged in the extraordinary exercise of substituting Primakov with a political ‘double’ – a loyal and obedient man of a similar background who could appeal to the same electorate.
The short list included Sergei Stepashin, the former interior minister, Nikolai Putin, the head of the FSB, and Nikolai Aksenenko, the minister of railways. In the end, the choice fell on Putin. ‘Putin and Primakov were two former intelligence officers, two representatives of the security services, and they occupied the same niche in the public mind,’ Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs.19