But August is a dangerous time in Russia and when the rest of the world goes quiet, things start happening: political coups, financial defaults, wars in the Caucasus. That year was no exception. On 12 August, two powerful explosions ripped through the Russian nuclear submarine the Kursk with 118 crew members on board. Most of the men died instantly, but 23 members of the crew managed to seal themselves off in a rear compartment of the vessel while it sank into sand 350 feet (106.5 m) below the sea’s surface.
The Russian military responded in a familiar way – it lied, tried to cover things up, and arrogantly refused foreign help. The navy, which at first said nothing at all, provided contradictory accounts. It claimed that it was communicating with the crew by knocking on the hull of the submarine, that it was providing the crew with oxygen through special tubes, that its rescue operation was obstructed by storms and a strong current – all of which later turned out to be untrue.
On the day of Russia’s worst ever submarine catastrophe, Putin went to Sochi on holiday. He decided not to interrupt his vacation and kept silent for four days. Stories about the suntanned Putin jet-skiing with his family and ‘scaring off fish’ clashed with the footage of the distraught relatives of the Kursk sailors. NTV questioned the official line and demanded answers to why the military was refusing offers of foreign rescue assistance. ‘When a country thinks about the lives of its soldiers and sailors, national pride does not usually suffer,’ NTV’s correspondent bitterly told the viewers. Channel One drew parallels between the Kremlin’s handling of the Kursk disaster with the shameful attempts to cover up the Chernobyl nuclear explosion in 1986. Putin was furious.
While the lies about Chernobyl in the end triggered the opening up of the media, the Kursk disaster had the opposite effect. Television journalists were barred from entering the garrison town, Vidyaevo, the base of the submarine crew. Even when Putin, dressed in black, came to Vidyaevo to meet the relatives on 22 August, only a handful of reporters was let into the hall. No recording equipment was allowed. The only television camera was placed behind soundproof glass in the top gallery. The sound was relayed separately into a television van and apparently edited by plain-clothed FSB specialists. A full record, secretly taped by one of Kommersant’s journalists, showed that Putin was more furious about the television coverage than he was about the attempts to cover up the incident. He saw the role of the media not in informing the audience, but in keeping things from it.
‘Television? They are lying! They are lying! They are lying!’ he fumed. He blamed the dire state of the army and the navy on the oligarchs. ‘There are people in television who shout louder than anyone today [about the state of the navy] and who over the past ten years have destroyed that same army and navy where people are dying today. And today they pose as the army’s biggest defenders in order to discredit and ruin it completely. They have stolen so much money that they are buying everyone and everything.’16
After his return from Vidyaevo, Putin met with the journalists from the Kremlin pool. ‘I don’t want to see or talk to Gusinsky. He does not respect agreements,’ Putin told Alexei Venediktov, the editor of Echo Moskvy radio station who acted as a go-between for Putin and Gusinsky.17 Putin saw NTV’s coverage of the Kursk as a clear sign that Gusinsky was reneging on his word and breaking their informal deal. In the same conversation with Venediktov, Putin explained the difference between enemies and traitors. Gusinsky, who had never been on his side, was an enemy. Berezovsky was a traitor.
The relationship between Putin and Berezovsky had began to sour a few months earlier, when Berezovsky had tried to advise his ‘protégé’ to negotiate a peace deal in Chechnya. Berezovsky also wrote Putin an open letter, which resembled (in its ambition rather than its content) Solzhenitsyn’s letter to the Soviet leaders and contained his advice on how to run Russia. The laws proposed by Putin, Berezovksy argued, infringed on the civil society and individual liberties that were the main achievement of Yeltsin’s years.
Berezovsky also wrote a private letter to the president, addressing him in a familiar way by his shortened first name, Volodya. ‘I told him he was an idiot to write to Putin like that,’ Dorenko recalled. ‘I said, “You don’t understand – Putin is a Russian tsar, not a European leader. In Russia a tsar is not a leader, a tsar is a high priest. You can’t write letters to a high priest. You need to crawl, kiss the carpet and kneel before the throne. Because he is not Volodya – he is the throne of the Russians, a mystical, ancient throne.”’18
According to Dorenko, in April 2000 Berezovsky went to talk to Putin and presented him with his four points on running Russia. First, Russia would need a proper president by 2004; second, it would need a proper party system – like in America; third, one of the leftist parties could be headed by Putin; fourth, the right-wing party would be headed by Berezovsky. ‘When Berezovsky told me all this, my hair stood on end. I asked what Putin had replied to him. “He told me – it was very interesting and that we should try,” Berezovsky said. “Borya, you are fucked! This is your end. You might as well buy yourself a strong rope,”’ Dorenko told Berezovsky in a tragically prophetic turn of phrase.19 Any reader of Machiavelli’s The Prince would have told Berezovsky the same – disposing of people who helped you on your way to power and who consider you to be indebted to them is rule number one.
‘I have read Machiavelli. But I have not discovered anything new for myself,’ Berezovsky said years later in his London exile. He had more time for Lenin: ‘Nobody had a better perception of what was possible. He had a unique sense of the moment and events.’ Berezovsky believed there was no limit to what was possible for him, but he misjudged both the moment and events.
The relationship between Putin and Berezovsky completely snapped after Channel One’s coverage of the Kursk. Not only did it blame Putin for carrying on with his holidays, but Dorenko openly called Putin a liar and accused him of ‘immorally’ paying off the widows of the submarine sailors. Coming from Dorenko, the word ‘immoral’ sounded like mockery, but Dorenko grew up in a garrison town and felt a strong affinity with the people in Vidyaevo. In his usual forceful and judgemental manner, Dorenko on his programme played extracts from Putin’s interview and dissected them with his own killer commentary: ‘What Putin says contradicts facts,’ he said. Like Nevzorov, Dorenko was a mercenary ‘whose cannon rotated in any direction’. But as a professional hit-man, he took pride in his work and worked off his contract to the end. He did not turn against Berezovsky even when it would have been expedient to do so.
That was Dorenko’s last programme. A few days later he was fired. Berezovsky was told that either he gave up his shares in Obshchestevnnoe Rossiiksoe Televidenie (Russian Public Broadcaster), as Channel One was formally known, or he would follow in Gusinsky’s footsteps. In his thorough book about the oligarchs, David Hoffman describes a conversation between Berezovsky and Putin. After reading a list of accusations which seemed to have come straight from Primakov, Berezovsky’s old nemesis, Putin told him: ‘I want to run ORT… I personally am going to run ORT.’ ‘This is ridiculous, at a minimum. And second, it is unrealizable,’ Berezovsky retorted. Putin told him, ‘ORT covers 98 per cent of Russian territory, of Russian households,’ and he left the room.20 Unwilling to follow in Gusinsky’s footsteps, Berezovsky sold the shares in ORT to Roman Abramovich, his younger partner, and left the country. Years later he tried to sue Abramovich in the London courts, but lost. Soon after, he died, allegedly committing suicide.