Yeltsin saw himself as taking cover in a storm. Contemporary analysts often concluded, though, that he had made the more drastic step of surrendering control to a collectivity termed, in the parlance of this period, “the Family” (Sem’ya). The Family, so it was said, consisted of relatives of the president, high state officials, selected financiers, and hangers-on; at its hub were Tatyana Dyachenko, Valentin Yumashev, and especially Boris Berezovskii. The unspoken reference was to the Sicilian Cosa Nostra or the clan of Suharto, the corrupt president of Indonesia forced out of office in May 1998. The group was portrayed as bound together by consanguinity and marriage, frequent socializing, shared economic interests, and Berezovskii’s powers of persuasion. And it was Russia’s real government. “Few people do not know,” journalist Yelena Dikun wrote breathlessly in 1999, “that the Family rules our country. In the popular mind, it is the highest institution of power—higher than the president himself.”57 The picture of an unassailable cabal, with a chief executive, unwell, acting as its stooge, has been a part of the conventional wisdom about the Yeltsin era.
Fragments of this image had cropped up before. Ruslan Khasbulatov, remember, had attacked Yeltsin in 1993 for surrounding himself with a “collective Rasputin.” Other fragments did not necessarily have sinister connotations. It was no revelation that the president would take counsel from his chief of staff, which Yumashev was until the end of 1998, or from a daughter whom he had appointed a Kremlin adviser and who lived under the same roof as he. The economic and non-economic ties that purportedly bound the Family together vary from one story to another; the evidence for them is uneven and in some cases missing entirely.58 Leonid Dyachenko, the then-husband of Tatyana, took up oil trading in the mid-1990s for a firm called Belka; a Belka specialty was the sale of products from a Siberian refinery run by Sibneft, the petroleum company owned by Berezovskii and his partner Roman Abramovich. But the information about his business operations is inconclusive, and no one has suggested that Yeltsin knew much about them or that Leonid had any great affinity for or competence in politics.59 Meanwhile, in the spring of 1997, Valerii Okulov, Yeltsin’s other son-in-law, was made director general of Aeroflot, a blue-chip company in which Berezovskii also had a stake. Within a year, he started to purge Berezovskii allies from the board and to cut the financial apron strings to the oligarch—for which Berezovskii sharply criticized him.
Narratives of the Family in action exaggerate the power and unity of its putative members, including Berezovskii—who missed no chance to toot his own horn. Sibneft, Berezovskii’s acquisition through loans-for-shares, was Russia’s sixth or seventh largest oil company. Some of the other oligarchs got choicer industrial assets, and Berezovskii lost out to Vladimir Potanin on Norilsk Nickel, which he very much wanted to take over in 1995. Berezovskii and Vladimir Gusinskii were bested in the Svyazinvest battle of 1997; in May 1998 Berezovskii was prevented from merging Sibneft with fellow oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovskii’s company, Yukos. In the political sphere, Berezovskii after the 1996 election had his ups and downs. Yeltsin took away his position in the Security Council in November 1997. In April 1998 Berezovskii bounced back as executive secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States, for which he had lobbied extensively with the CIS presidents; Yeltsin had him stripped of that post in March 1999, following a criminal inquiry into embezzlement at Aeroflot. On some questions on which he took a position, Berezovskii came out on the winning side; on others, he found himself on the losing side.60
As for Yeltsin, it is apparent that he had not the slightest fondness for Berezovskii. “I never liked and I do not like Boris Abramovich,” he wrote in Presidential Marathon, where he skewered Berezovskii’s overconfident manner, his “scandalous reputation,” and “the fact that he was ascribed a special influence on the Kremlin that he never had.” He valued Berezovskii as an ally on an issue-by-issue basis, one who was talented and energetic if “painful” to work with. What pained Yeltsin most was the combination of personas Berezovskii presented. He posed as the offstage kingmaker and the intimate of the present king, the very point that was infuriating about Gennadii Burbulis in the early 1990s. Then again, on the issues of the day Berezovskii expounded loudly and demandingly, often reaping more publicity than members of the elected government and, on some points, than the president. To continue with the section in Marathon:
In people’s eyes, Berezovskii was my constant shadow. “The hand of Berezovskii” was seen behind the Kremlin’s every decision. Whatever I did and whomever I appointed or dismissed, they always said the same thing: “Berezovskii!” And who was creating this mysterious halo, this reputation of the éminence grise? Why, it was Berezovskii himself…. Every time the situation heated up, Berezovskii would go on television and say, “For my part, I am dead set against this…. I believe that… I am certain that…” He always got a lot of airtime. And the people would think: This is who is really governing the country.61
So far as the actuality and not the myth of influence goes, it bears mentioning that Yeltsin as president had only several direct conversations all told with Berezovskii. He did not give the tycoon telephone access; in fact, the two never seem to have spoken on the phone. Nor was Berezovskii ever once invited into the Yeltsins’ home or to an out-of-Moscow residence like Zavidovo or Bocharov Ruchei.62 Their dialogues were purely business. “I felt that Yeltsin was not fond of me personally,” Berezovskii said in an interview in 2002; “he did hear out what I had to say and took it seriously.”63 But listening was not the same as agreeing, on either one’s part. When Berezovskii saw it as in his interest, he was not afraid to come out against the government line (as on Svyazinvest in 1997) or even to have his newspaper, Nezavisimaya gazeta, in 1998 predict devaluation of the ruble and question the fitness of Yeltsin to finish out his term. At a press conference in September 1999, Berezovskii spoke disparagingly of Yeltsin’s lack of a master plan and his “abominable” cadres decisions.64
What, then, of an oblique connection to Yeltsin? Berezovskii got together with Tatyana Dyachenko once every two or three months in the late 1990s. With adversaries, he found it useful to brag that he played Svengali to the unsophisticated daughter of the president and had psychological sway over her.65 Asked in 2002 whether she was his gateway to number one, he was much more guarded. This would be “a worse than mistaken judgment,” he replied. “I was well acquainted with her, but mark my words: Tatyana is in the same genetic mold as Boris Nikolayevich. And Tatyana also kept her distance [tozhe derzhala distantsiyu]. It was as if she constantly felt that she was the daughter of the president.” Tatyana acknowledged that she thought well of Berezovskii’s intellect and drive but at the same time related to him with “great caution,” as she was unsure of his motives and did not want to favor or be seen as favoring one particular plutocrat. Chief of staff Yumashev, who had worked with Berezovskii in the publishing industry, was friendlier. “A lot of what I wanted to say to Boris Nikolayevich,” Berezovskii has stated, “I said to Yumashev.”66 And yet, Yumashev’s primary loyalty was unambiguously to Yeltsin, and he and Berezovskii were not on the same wavelength on every issue. To give one example, Yumashev and Dyachenko, fearing that Berezovskii would be deadweight on Yeltsin, both opposed his appointment to the CIS position in 1998 and favored his removal from it in 1999. To give another, in March 1999 the Yeltsins and Yumashev were reliably reported to be livid at stories in the press that Berezovskii was using one of his companies to record their cell phone calls and that Dyachenko was financially dependent on him.67 In other words, mutual wariness between Berezovskii and the other two set the tone within the threesome as much as mutual appreciation.