What shocked Yeltsin most were not the actual revelations, but the fact that this was done by people who knew him and his immediate family personally and who had spent time with them. He saw this as a personal betrayal of trust.
NTV’s journalists were barred from important Kremlin meetings. There was a strict and concerted decision that no Kremlin official should appear on NTV, said Pavlovsky, who was responsible for the media in Putin’s presidential campaign.23 NTV was left with Primakov and Luzhkov. ‘We got marginalized,’ Kiselev recalled. Itogi magazine was paid a visit by the tax police.
Berezovsky, who championed Putin, exploited the situation to his own ends by persuading the Kremlin that NTV had switched sides and was working for Luzhkov and Primakov. This was not strictly speaking true. Gusinsky and Malashenko did not support Luzhkov. Gusinsky had fallen out with Luzhkov and it was Malashenko who had ruled him out as a possible prime minister in his conversation with Yeltsin back in September 1998. Nor did they see Primakov as ‘their’ man – at least not initially. In fact, their main weakness was that they did not have a candidate of their own and did not think this was important. As the owners of the country’s most influential television channel, they considered themselves to be the power to be reckoned with, whoever the president.
On 9 August, Yeltsin named Putin as prime minister and his ‘successor’ – the only man who could ‘consolidate’ the country. Berezovsky was in a celebratory mood. With Gusinsky out of the way, most probably with his help, he was the sole kingmaker – the most indispensable man in Russia, who controlled the main television channel. Despite Berezovsky’s public objection to Primakov as a security man, Putin’s background didn’t bother him in the least.
To the world outside the Kremlin walls, this seemed like one of Yeltsin’s eccentric antics. His previous prime minister, Sergei Stepashin, had lasted less than three months. Most people had never heard of Putin and would not have recognized him in a photograph if they had seen one. The majority did not even notice his appointment. His rating hardly registered in sociologists’ polls, falling into the margin of error – below 2 per cent. He rarely appeared in public or gave interviews. Meantime, Primakov’s rating was 32 per cent. Gusinsky had every reason to think that the odds of ‘defeating’ the family were in his favour.
But while the barons were getting agitated in anticipation of political battles for Yeltsin’s succession, forming alliances, getting ready for information wars and loading their media weapons with explosive revelations and compromising material, the rest of the country felt more and more alienated from politics. The majority did not feel responsible for the actions of their government and felt they had little influence on the direction of the country. ‘Nothing depends on us and everything is decided behind the stage’ – this was the most popular attitude of Russian voters.
According to Alexander Olson, a sociologist who worked for Yeltsin in the 1996 election and carried out work for Putin’s election campaign, the population recognized familiar political actors – such as Yeltsin, Luzhkov, or Primakov – but looked at politics as someone else’s game in which they were just spectators. This attitude to politics, instilled in the population by the media themselves, perfectly matched the format of television-watching. Nobody enjoyed staging television spectacles more than Berezovsky.
The rules of the game were different this time. In 1996, however biased the media was, Yeltsin was still ready to compete with Zyuganov. His little-known ‘successor’ had no chance of winning fairly against such heavyweights as Luzhkov and Primakov. To make Operation ‘Successor’ work, Luzhkov and Primakov had to be removed from the presidential race, to leave Putin the only real contender. To perform this task, Berezovsky turned to the man who was known in Russian television as the assassin: Sergei Dorenko.
The Gunman
Dorenko, the son of a military pilot, grew up in garrison towns, moving from one part of the country to another. He had a suitably colourful career for a showman. As a boy he had dreamt of a military career but ended up in television because of bad eyesight. He learned Spanish and Portuguese and served as a military interpreter in Angola during the civil war that pitched the Soviet Union against America. He had frequent contacts with the KGB, but said he was never formally recruited. ‘Whenever they talked to me – I would tell everyone else, so they did not think me reliable.’24 In the early 1990s he moved freely between different channels and freelanced for the Spanish service of CNN, reporting on the shelling of the White House and the war in Chechnya. But in Dorenko’s own mind, his two careers – in the military and in television – merged into one. He called himself pulemetchik – a machine-gunner. The territory in which he felt most comfortable was war. Any war. Political or military.
Dorenko belonged to the same breed as Nevzorov. He was a perfect mercenary. Stylistically, he was the antithesis of Kiselev. Whereas Kiselev was a symbol of respectability and bourgeoisie, an icon of the middle class, Dorenko addressed a broader and less sophisticated audience. He had none of Kiselev’s deliberations. He was not asking his audience to think for itself – as Kiselev did – but told it what to think and to feel, skilfully manipulating its instincts and prejudices.
Berezovsky first ‘fell in love’ with Dorenko while recovering from an attempted assassination in 1994, when his Mercedes was blown up. From his hospital bed he watched Dorenko telling the audience that, although there was nothing wrong with oligarchs blowing each other up, it would be better if they found a special area for doing this, so that ordinary people would not get hurt.
Berezovsky then went to see Dorenko in his office. Dorenko said he was busy. Berezovsky waited for a while, was fed some watermelon by Dorenko’s assistant and left without seeing his ‘hero’. ‘Why should I’ve seen him? He was just an oligarch,’ Dorenko recalled.25 Dorenko’s ‘stunt’ of not seeing Berezovsky only strengthened Berezovsky’s appreciation of Dorenko’s showmanship. When they finally met, in a Japanese restaurant in the monstrous Rossiya Hotel opposite the Kremlin, Berezovsky offered Dorenko the job of presenting the country’s main television news programme, Vremya. ‘In the middle of the conversation he ran to the Kremlin to clear my appointment with the administration.’26
Berezovsky loved Dorenko’s style. ‘I am a big fan of Dorenko. I think he is an outstanding journalist… I watch him not as a political analyst – I don’t need to. I watch it as a brilliant show in which my point of view coincides with his. The form is particularly important to me. I can’t read books written in poor language. But I can read books about nothing that are written in brilliant language,’ Berezovsky said in an interview at the time.27 Dorenko said Berezovsky would call him after every other programme. ‘He always started the conversation by saying, “You are a genius”. He then quoted lengthy passages from my own programme back to me.’28
Dorenko was a Russian version of America’s Rush Limbaugh – a right-wing tyro who moved seamlessly between earnest lecture and political vaudeville. Presenting the Vremya programme in 1997–8, Dorenko transformed it into a show of damning revelations, a sermon turned inside out. It lowered the tone, agitated and inspired outrage and hatred, but most importantly it captivated the audience and removed taboos. He did not appeal to reason, like Kiselev did. He penetrated people’s minds through sensations, repeating evocative words and phrases, heavily rolling his ‘Rs’ when talking about ‘Russia’ or ‘betrayal’, modulating his voice in bemusement, juggling words and showing images that conjured up associations even if they had no direct relevance to the subject. Facts were irrelevant.