On 13 June 2000 Gusinsky was arrested and put into one of Moscow’s oldest, flea-ridden jails without any clear charges and with no connection made to previous investigations. Malashenko was on holiday in Spain where Putin was about to begin his first post-election tour. Despite the Russian security services’ best efforts, Malashenko called a press conference in Madrid in a hotel across the street from the one where Putin was staying. ‘Today Russia got its first political prisoner,’ Malashenko announced to a room packed with journalists who were supposed to be covering Putin’s visit. ‘His name is Vladimir Alexandrovich Gusinsky.’ As Putin moved to Berlin, so did Malashenko. ‘I was sitting in Gusinsky’s small Challenger on the runway in Madrid and we had to wait to let the presidential jet take off.’10 The double-act continued: Putin talked about the investment climate in Russia, Malashenko about the politically motivated case against a private company.
Foreign journalists loved the drama that was unfolding in front of them. Instead of Putin, newspapers made a splash with Gusinsky. Putin said he knew nothing about the case. ‘I hope the prosecutor has sufficient reasons for this step,’ he said, adding that he could not get through to him on the phone. Everyone knew Putin was lying and Putin knew that they knew, but this was within the remits of his power: as a former spy, a modern-day Stierlitz, Putin had a licence to use decoy and deceit as his fighting tactic – especially in Berlin. NTV, on the other hand, fell back on its tactic of ‘explosive armour’, putting on a special edition of a popular talk show to discuss Gusinsky’s arrest. The most unexpected guest on the television progamme was Dorenko.
We thought that the old system was broken over these ten years. We dumped the robots. They have been lying there. And they have stirred and started moving again, as if they have heard some music. Today the security structures throughout the whole country are taking a message from Putin’s rise to power… They hear music that we don’t hear, and they get up like zombies and walk. They surround us. And they will go far if there is silence… We need to bash them over the head every day.11
Coming from Dorenko who had extolled Putin, such a level of solidarity seemed odd. Putin was so put off by Dorenko’s appearance that he called him in for a chat a few days later. ‘We want you on our team,’ he told the ‘TV killer’. In answer, Dorenko said, ‘I am not part of anyone’s team. You and I have a relationship – let’s just keep it this way.’ But he also told Putin that by attacking Gusinsky he was sending the wrong signal to security men throughout the country. When Putin indicated that Dorenko could be handsomely rewarded for his services, Dorenko felt belittled. He recalled walking out of Putin’s office shouting on his mobile phone to Berezovsky: ‘What have you done, Borya? What the fuck have you done?’12
The reasons for the stand-off between NTV and the Kremlin went far deeper than the Kremlin’s dissatisfaction with NTV’s programmes. It was a fundamental conflict between individualists and private barons on the one hand and statists on the other. Television channels controlled by the oligarchs may not have been objective, but they were independent of the state. Whatever Gusinsky’s faults, he had used his brain and energy to create something from scratch. As Gaidar warned back in 1994, a bureaucrat is always a greater source of corruption than a businessman. ‘A businessman can enrich himself honestly. A bureaucrat can only enrich himself dishonestly. The carcass of a bureaucratic and punitive system can become a carcass of a mafia state – the only question is the goals of its actions.’13
In relation to Gusinsky, the state certainly behaved like a mafia. While Gusinsky was in jail, the Kremlin dispatched Press Minister Mikhail Lesin, a former seller of NTV’s airtime, to negotiate with Malashenko about the ‘ransom’ of his boss. The Kremlin’s condition for dropping charges and releasing Gusinsky was that he sold NTV to Gazprom, the state-controlled gas monopoly, for $300 million and a debt write-off. If he disagreed, he would share a cell with prisoners infected with AIDS and TB. Gusinsky agreed to sell and three days later walked out of jail on the further condition that he would not leave Moscow until he signed the deal.
After several weeks of intense talks, Gusinsky signed the sales contract, though not before secretly telling his American lawyers that he was acting under duress. Cunningly, Gusinsky also demanded that Lesin attach an appendix guaranteeing his freedom to the contract, which Lesin did, thus providing Gusinsky with crucial evidence of political pressure that was later used in the European Court of Human Rights. On 26 July 2000, a few days after his signing the papers, the prosecutors, without any explanation, dropped all charges against Gusinsky. The same day he and Malashenko boarded a plane and left Russia, hoping to return before too long. (Malashenko returned after nine years; Gusinsky is still waiting.)
The attack on Gusinsky reopened an old debate between ‘fathers and sons’. The old intelligentsia recognized the old Soviet methods in the actions of the Kremlin. Obshchaya gazeta, first printed during the August 1991 coup when the putsch leaders shut down all independent press, and revived by Yegor Yakovlev as a reincarnation of his old Moskovskie novosti, argued that Gusinsky was fighting not just for his business, but also for dignity and justice which had been trampled on by the Kremlin. The ‘children’ – those who had started Kommersant – responded with contempt and derision.
Alexander Timofeevsky, who assisted Putin in his election campaign, said a few weeks later: ‘What dictatorship, what terrors? I can’t see a single sign of terror. I see chimeras of the intelligentsia’s consciousness, but no terror.’ Timofeevsky, who praised Kommersant for modelling reality, now accused NTV of twisting it: ‘Gusinsky’s media did not describe reality, but created it and sold its creation.’ Timofeevsky ridiculed Gusinsky’s intelligentsia as ‘all those throbbing hearts that so love the small, distant but proud people of Chechnya’.14 In fact, the main reason Gusinsky’s NTV opposed the war in Chechnya both in 1994 and in 1999 was based on the premise that a state that kills its own people in Chechnya would break any laws.
Maxim Sokolov, who personified the values of liberalism in Kommersant, wrote on the day of Gusinsky’s departure: ‘Those who fight against the state and its deadly interference (much exaggerated in the case of freedom of speech) are right that there is nothing pleasant in such interference. They assume that the alternative to such interference is the individual, independent of the state both economically and spiritually.’15 But, Sokolov argued, Media Most had cynically used the notion of freedom of speech to defend its own right to interfere, dictate and regulate. So, in the end, Sokolov concluded, it is all a matter of taste. Timofeevsky and Sokolov, who so despised the Soviet era, acted in its finest tradition: denouncing someone who had been forced out of the country. This time it was not a question of ideology but of simple ethics.
Soon after Gusinsky’s departure, an NTV correspondent who worked in the Kremlin pool asked Putin about his relationship with the tycoon. ‘I can talk to him now, if you like. Do you have his number?’ Putin asked playfully. Seconds later, Putin was talking to Gusinsky in front of several other journalists. There was a rich history of ‘theatrical’ telephone calls made by the country’s leader to disgraced artists, starting with Stalin’s famous call to Mikhail Bulgakov, but unlike the playwright who was struggling to survive in Moscow, Gusinsky was sailing on his yacht in Spain. Putin agreed to meet with Gusinsky, implying he could return to Moscow after the summer holidays. It seemed like a good sign.