Yeltsin’s family had their own reasons to like Putin. He had faithfully served Anatoly Sobchak, the democratic mayor of St Petersburg, and when Sobchak got entangled in a corruption scandal and was effectively banned from leaving the country, Putin managed to smuggle him to a hospital in France. Yeltsin’s ‘family’, who heavily promoted Putin, calculated that if Putin had not given up Sobchak, he would stick to Yeltsin. Putin also proved his loyalty to Yeltsin’s family by helping to deal with Skuratov, the troublesome prosecutor general, who had been secretly videotaped in bed with prostitutes. Putin, who was put in charge of the inquest into the tape’s origins, confirmed its authenticity and is believed to have authorized that the footage be shown on television, which led to Skuratov’s dismissal.
Berezovsky had his own relationship with Putin. He had befriended Putin in the 1990s and invited him to go skiing in Switzerland. In the spring of 1999, when Berezovsky’s conflict with Primakov was at its peak, Putin came to a birthday party Berezovsky organized for his wife, even though he was not invited. ‘Primakov will never forgive you this gesture,’ Berezovsky told Putin. ‘Friendship is friendship,’ Putin apparently replied. Several other similar accounts of Putin’s remarks exist, but all of them point to Putin’s loyalty to friendship. Berezovsky, who had always exercised control and reaped benefits through people, rather than formal positions, believed that Putin was his man.
The media were to play a key role in this game of substitution, just as they played a key role in getting Yeltsin re-elected in 1996. The difference, however, was that Yeltsin was a genuine politician of historic proportions. Neither Malashenko nor Chubais, nor anyone else, ‘created’ Yeltsin. All they had to do was to galvanize him and persuade the majority of the country that he was the only one who could stop the communists from coming to power.
But Yeltsin’s victory in 1996 convinced his entourage that the trick, performed with the help of television, could be repeated without Yeltsin; that any candidate – however negligible – could be turned into a successor, given the right technology.
In 1999 politics was replaced by political technology, citizens by spectators, reality by television. ‘Media became a branch of state power,’ Pavlovsky said.20 The idea that by means of television a group of ‘political technologists’ and media managers could create a president out of someone nobody ever heard of seemed incredible. This time, however, Gusinsky’s NTV, which had led the 1996 campaign, found itself on the wrong side of the Kremlin.
Gusinsky did not object to the principle of creating a presidential candidate as such. He objected to being treated as a branch of state power, rather than a power in its own right. In 1996 he was a partner who chose to back Yeltsin and got his dividends from it. Now he was told to fall into line or to get lost. It was partly a question of money and partly of kudos. Gusinsky demanded that NTV should receive the same $100m that was given by the government to Channel One. Instead, Alexander Voloshin, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, backed by Berezovsky and Abramovich, told him to get lost. Gusinsky, who was notorious for his bad temper, flew off the handle. Whether this spat was an accident or a deliberate provocation by rival oligarchs, is hard to say, but the result was a feud. Neither Gusinsky nor Malashenko, who had been offered the job of Yeltsin’s chief of staff, was prepared to put up with Voloshin’s insolence.
While Gusinsky was having his spat with Voloshin, Yumashev tried a softer approach with Malashenko. In June 1999 Dyachenko and Yumashev, who had a house in Gusinsky’s Chigasovo village, dropped in on Malashenko for tea, trying to persuade him to back Putin. To make up his mind, Malashenko asked his friend, Peter Aven, a former trade minister and a banker who knew Putin personally, to arrange a meeting with Putin. A casual dinner was held in Aven’s dacha which had once housed the famous Soviet writer Alexei Tolstoy. Putin arrived with his two daughters. Malashenko’s own daughter was on her way to London for the last term at her English boarding school. The dinner lasted nearly three hours and revealed little, apart from one small detail.
Towards the end of the dinner, Malashenko’s daughter called from Heathrow where she had just landed. The school car was not there to pick her up, so she was calling to see if she should wait or get a taxi, Malashenko’s wife told the dinner guests, and she had said her daughter should take a taxi. Suddenly, Putin intervened in the conversation. ‘You gave the wrong advice to your daughter. She was right to wait for the school car. You can’t be sure that the taxi she will get is a real taxi.’ Malashenko’s wife, who had arrived late and had hardly registered Putin, looked at him in surprise. London taxis, she explained, are not some gypsy cabs – they are black cabs with taxi signs and meters. ‘You can’t be sure that it would be a real taxi,’ Putin repeated calmly. ‘He was effectively saying that our daughter could be kidnapped,’ Malashenko recalled.
The conversation moved on. ‘Afterwards, my wife told me that this comment was a distilled Putin, a KGB officer. I laughed it off at first, told her she was exaggerating. But then I thought – she was right, because the KGB was not about repression at that time, it was all about control. Anything you control is safe. Anything you don’t control by definition represents a threat – it is in their mental set-up and a KGB officer is always a KGB officer.’21 Malashenko was no idealist. He had dealt with plenty of KGB people in his life. One of the KGB’s top people, Bobkov, was working for Media Most. He was not worried about terror, but he resented the very idea of the state’s exercising control over private lives through its security service.
Guarding the state as a dominant power was the KGB’s top proclaimed goal. It was not called the ‘Committee for State Security’ for nothing. It was the quintessence of that state, its main embodiment after the collapse of the Communist Party. As someone who believed in keeping the state in check, Malashenko did not like the idea of the KGB coming to power. A few days after that memorable dinner, Malashenko dropped by Yumashev’s dacha to tell him that he could not support Putin. ‘I told him that the KGB was the KGB for ever.’ That was, as Malashenko reflected, NTV’s last chance to jump on Putin’s train.
Instead, it came out with an Itogi programme that exposed Yeltsin’s ‘family’ as a narrow circle of people who made all the decisions in the country and manipulated the president himself. The story was illustrated with a diagram of ‘family’ members. This was a shot against Yeltsin’s ‘family’ and, by extension, Putin himself, their preferred choice as successor. The notion of the ‘family’ had hardly been used before, although some strange billboards had started to appear around Moscow – probably as part of Luzhkov’s anti-Yeltsin campaign. One such billboard carried a reference to the tycoon Roman Abramovich – widely rumoured to be ‘the family’s cashier’. The text on the billboard, surrounded by golden coins, read: ‘Roma looks after the family. The family looks after Roma.’
In the minds of the Kremlin’s political technologists, Gusinsky’s attack on the ‘family’ and that of Luzhkov had merged into one coordinated campaign. Yeltsin took the NTV programme as a stab in the back:
The photographs [of the members of the ‘family’] shown on TV reminded me of wanted posters I used to see at factories, bus stations, or movie theatres in Sverdlovsk. The posters usually depicted the faces of drunks, thieves, murderers, and rapists. Now, the ‘police’, in the person of NTV, was talking about my so-called Family – myself, Tanya, Voloshin and Yumashev. All of these people were accused of everything under the sun – bribery, corruption, the hoarding of wealth in Swiss bank accounts, and the purchase of villas and castles in Italy and France.22