Free Red to Black by Alex Dryden

presidency.
    I heard from a colleague based at the Kremlin that they came to him one by one. These shadow rulers were known to us Russians and to the world as the oligarchs. In the words of Boris Berezovsky, the oil, metals and media billionaire, they were the ‘seven bankers who ruled Russia’. These immensely powerful men had formed an uneasy alliance between themselves- one that transcended the clash of their own business interests–in order to put their support behind Putin to win the presidential elections. First, they had persuaded Yeltsin as the millennium approached to hand his crown over to the younger man and now they supported Putin to ensure that he won the contested election. They were backing him with their huge resources as the best candidate to protect their own interests.
    One night Finn and I went to see American Beauty at the cinemain Tverskaya. Finn fidgeted throughout the film and when I tried to talk about it afterwards he appeared not to have seen it at all.
    ‘They’re afraid for their prospects if Evgeni Primakov wins the presidency,’ Finn said.
    ‘Who?’ I asked him, thinking about Kevin Spacey’s dead-looking face in the movie.
    ‘The oligarchs! They’re so afraid of Primakov that they’re going to jump straight into the fire and support Putin!’
    Primakov was my chief, the boss of the SVR, who was running against Putin in the elections.
    ‘Are there really people like that in America?’ I asked, thinking still about Spacey’s character. But Finn was obsessed. For once it was me trying to introduce some levity, not him.
    ‘It’s just the same as it was five years ago,’ Finn went on. ‘Then it was the Communists they were afraid of. They thought the Communists would turn back the clock and deprive them of their wealth. So they formed an alliance between themselves for as long as it took to see off that threat and make sure Yeltsin was re-elected.’
    ‘Are we going to get something to eat?’ I suggested. ‘Or are you going to rave on out here? I’m freezing.’
    So we went into Yolki-Palki on the other side of the Bolshoi from Tverskaya. Finn always liked it there. The restaurant was dressed up in peasant decor with straw bales and wooden farm animals and checked tablecloths. Finn stopped talking about the elections for a moment.
    ‘This place has never been the same since the city banned the real animals,’ Finn said.
    Back in the early nineties, when it first opened, the restaurant had real chickens and ducks that wandered about inside.
    But then Finn was off again before we’d even ordered.
    ‘Putin is essentially the oligarchs’ choice,’ he said. ‘He’s reassured them somehow. Why do they believe him?’
    ‘Because it’s what they want to believe.’
    Later we walked in the freezing night to the Kremlin and watched the black Mercedes and four-wheel-drive Porsches enter and leave the Kremlin with their windows blacked out, and I told him, one by one, which rich Russian baron had come to pay his respects to Putin.
    ‘They come like boyars to a medieval tsar,’ Finn said. ‘They pay their respects and hope to exert their influence.’
    And in the course of those weeks up to Putin’s election victory in March, they all came: the oligarchs, the richest, most powerful men in Russia. Preceded, some said, by lavish gifts or suitcases of cash, they came to ensure that their choice for the elections was an ally. They were confident, powerful and richer than the rest of Russia put together.
    But once he’d got their money and once their media outlets had ensured his victory, Putin was not the man they thought they’d voted for. To their dismay, having funded his rise to power, what they found was a president unlike the weakened, pliant Yeltsin.
    While Putin had the decor of Yeltsin’s Kremlin bathroom changed from whimsical trompes l’oeil of twittering birds and fluffy clouds to a formal burgundy, ‘like dried blood’ as one of the oligarchs put it, he also