It was pure circus and mischief – the kind that Koroviev, a character from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, engages in as part of Satan’s band. Koroviev famously performs acts of ‘black magic’ in a variety show, uncovering adultery and greed among members of the public. Dorenko acted in much the same way, poking fun and terrorizing his victims whom he was hired to destroy. Asked how he would define his profession in those years, Dorenko replied: ‘Peresmeshnik’ – a mocking-bird, a jester, a fool.
In fact, said Dorenko, the ‘Sergei Dorenko’ that appeared on the screen was a creation, a fiction:
He existed only for as long as I was on stage, in front of the camera. Some powerful people, including Yumashev and Dyachenko, often invited me to their dacha, but I never went. They wanted to meet ‘Sergei Dorenko’ from the television screen, but he did not exist in real life… He died every time the cameras were switched off. Away from the stage there was an introvert person who shunned big company and despised the oligarchs. I often told Berezovsky: ‘Listen, when I am fighting against Potanin, I am, in fact, fighting against all of you.’ I was setting them off against each other.29
On stage, he was so shameless in his demagoguery, so cynical in his groundless, over-the-top allegations – that it was almost breathtaking. Like some fairground act it could prompt gasps of disbelief among critics and spectators: ‘How does he do it?’ or ‘How can he get away with it?’ The more ‘unbelievable’ and ‘outlandish’ Dorenko’s revelations were – the greater their entertainment value.
People believed what they saw, not because they were persuaded by factual evidence, but because it confirmed what they thought anyway: that everyone was a liar and a thief. ‘I did not “programme” anything. I simply whispered what people wanted to hear,’ said Dorenko.30 Berezovsky courted and cultivated Dorenko for some time, recognizing in him an enormous television talent with few principles attached.
In August 1999, Berezovsky, who returned to Russia after a short self-exile, which Primakov had forced him into, was once again in hospital – this time with hepatitis. He summoned Dorenko, who turned up with a bag of tangerines. ‘He was lying in a palatial two-room ward. There were drips all over him and he told me we would “fuck” them all [Primakov and Luzhkov].’31 It was there that Berezovsky also first shared his plan to set up the Kremlin’s own Unity Party which was to provide Putin with loyalists in the parliamentary elections in December. ‘Its emblem is going to be a bear – can you draw a bear?’ he asked Dorenko.
Dorenko needed little persuading to attack Primakov and Luzhkov. A few months earlier he had been kicked out of his job at Channel One on Primakov’s instructions. Dorenko was also the subject of a tax investigation in Moscow, which he blamed on Luzhkov and Primakov. The investigation ended on the day that Primakov was fired as prime minister. The adrenaline of a battle excited him: ‘I told Borya [Berezovsky], the result will be this: they will hang you among the first five people on Red Square. And they will hang me among the next ten. And we will both be hanging in Red Square. “So?” asked Berezovsky. “So, let’s have a good smoke and go for it – with God’s help.”’32
Dorenko’s new programme started to come out in September on Sunday evenings – the same time slot as Kiselev’s Itogi. Like Kiselev, Dorenko was now wearing glasses – to appear more respectable and authoritative. He made fifteen programmes and called them ‘fifteen silver bullets’. Watched in sequence, these fifteen ‘analytical’ shows worked like a soap opera which used documentary footage, but in such a way that it turned into fiction. It had a set of villains and heroes and a loose plot peppered with conspiracy, murder stories, sex, intrigue and titillating images. Like any soap opera, it was shown at the same time every week and combined the repetition of situations, familiarity with the main characters and new twists in the plot. As Boris Dubin, a sociologist, wrote at the time, the repetition created a calming sense of order while new twists provided the entertainment.
Appropriately, the opening titles of Dorenko’s series consisted of industrial cog-wheels and the sounds of grinding metal and hammering. Primakov and Luzhkov – the main characters of the show – were ground into mincemeat by Dorenko’s television machine. The machine was primitive, crude and extremely effective. The themes and even some formulations were fed to Dorenko by Putin’s election campaign staff, but the presentation was self-inspired. Primakov was to be portrayed as ‘old’, ‘weak’ and ‘Soviet’; Luzhkov as one of the oligarchs with bloodied hands and connections to the North Caucasus Mafia. Dorenko cultivated the image of Luzhkov as a comic inversion of a Godfather figure: a short, bald and plump man under the heel of his wife, Yelena Baturina, Russia’s richest oligarchess.
In one programme, Dorenko alleged that Luzhkov’s family was receiving money from a Swiss firm, Mabetex, which was involved in a scandalous renovation of the Kremlin. He showed bank transfers for hundreds of millions of dollars from its German sister firm into various offshore bank accounts held by a man with the same family name as Luzhkov’s wife. As it happened, the man was of no relation to Baturina and Dorenko never even spoke to him. But none of this mattered to Dorenko. Luzhkov – hardly an example of integrity – was forced to justify and defend himself and his wife, but the more he spoke, the deeper he dug himself into a hole.
‘My wife has a brother, but his name is Viktor and not Andrei, and he is her only business partner,’ Luzhkov tried to explain in exasperation. ‘Sorry, we have to stop the mayor here before he says something that he would later regret,’ Dorenko said with a mischievous sparkle in his eyes. ‘We never said that Andrei was the only business partner of his wife. Anyway, if Luzhkov were a real man, he would not involve his wife in it. This is not our Sicilian way. You and I, Yuri Mikhailovich,’ Dorenko addressed the absent Luzhkov, ‘we are two Dons: Don Sergio and Don Georgio. We must not involve your wife. You see, Don Georgio, I am still trying to defend your honour.’ For the rest of the programme, Dorenko referred to Luzhkov as only a ‘member of his wife’s family’.33
He also accused Luzhkov of killing an American businessman, Paul Tatum, who was gunned down three years earlier in a murky dispute over the Radisson Slavyanskaya Hotel in central Moscow.
Sensation. The family of Paul Tatum has filed a legal suit against Luzhkov in an American court. I am sure that Luzhkov won’t be able to bribe the American courts at least for now, which means for the first time he will be tried by an independent court,’ Dorenko announced on his television show. He then read out a press statement prepared by Tatum’s lawyers as though it were a high court verdict. ‘Luzhkov is responsible for committing the murder of Paul Tatum and is guilty of expropriating his property in Russia.34
The main point of Dorenko’s show, however, was to ridicule Luzhkov and turn him into a laughing stock. ‘I have a feeling that Luzhkov will soon be hunted by the law-enforcement agencies and will be put on the Interpol list. But our programme will come to his rescue. Let me make an official statement,’ Dorenko said with a deadpan expression on his face. ‘I will personally run away with Luzhkov. We will try to cross the border between Argentina and Paraguay – incognito. I don’t need to disguise myself – nobody knows me anyway. But the member of his wife’s family will have to change his appearance. We will dress him up as a man. Here are the options…’ Dorenko then showed Luzhkov with a Fidel Castro beard and in a Che Guevara beret. And ‘since none of those suited Luzhkov’, he portrayed him with Monica Lewinsky’s hair – ‘in case he has to hide in America’. It was political assassination.35