Free Red to Black by Alex Dryden Page A

changed other, more important, matters. From now on, he told them firmly, only if they stayed out of politics could they run their businesses and continue to enjoy the wealth they’d seized. It was not what they wanted to hear and many of them, to their cost, didn’t actually believe it.
    When Boris Berezovsky confidently went off to his French château on the Côte d’Azur in the summer of 2000 to rest and recuperate after the successful but gruelling spring election campaign, he left his protégé Stepanovich with a list of names to give to the newly elected Vladimir Putin of those he wanted to see in positions of power around the President. The list was Berezovsky’s hold on power.
    But at the Forest, I watched my bosses and they laughed at the names on it. The Kingmaker had made a serious error.
    By the end of the summer, Berezovsky’s television stations were confiscated by Putin and he, with Gusinsky, fled into exile-Berezovsky to London, Gusinsky to Tel Aviv.
    ‘I told you, didn’t I, Rabbit?’ Finn said triumphantly.
    I don’t know what role Stepanovich had in the fall of Berezovsky, if he had a role at all. But we all saw that from then on he was very close to Putin and, later, Berezovsky cursed his protégé’s betrayal. Stepanovich, who only a few years before served the drinks on Berezovsky’s private jet, had made a separate peace.
    ‘Watch what happens now,’ Finn said. ‘Berezovsky and Gusinsky are examples pour encourager les autres. Just watch.’
    It was true. With Berezovsky’s fall, the others quickly saw which way the wind now blew from the Kremlin and they bent their knees to the new chief and his KGB entourage.
    Only the richest of them all, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, took a stand against Putin. He lasted until 2004, when his private jet was stormed by masked special forces on a Siberian runway. Tried in a kangaroo court, he was put away to rot in a Siberian uranium mine that still serves as a prison camp in our new democratic Russia. For disobeying the President’s instruction to stay out of politics, he received eight brutal years in Russia’s old gulag, with the promise of more to come.
    Between Putin’s appointment to the presidency on New Year’s Eve and the March elections, on the other side of the Moskva River from the Kremlin, the British embassy prepared for a visit to Moscow by Tony Blair in February 2000, to endorse Putin as candidate.
    ‘Blair’s come smiling to Moscow,’ Finn said. ‘He’s been strolling in the grounds of Putin’s dacha, describing Putin to the lapdog press as a reformer, a man we can do business with. The little creep wants to be Margaret Thatcher and casts Putin as his Gorbachev.’
    To return this endorsement of him, Putin graced Blair with the rich reward of making London the venue for his first official foreign visit after he was elected. In London, Putin was given the red-carpettreatment and dined with the Queen. The massacres of Chechens in Putin’s war there were brushed aside by Downing Street. Putin promised the hopeful world a ‘dictatorship of the law’.
    But whose law, we asked ourselves in Russia, if not the law of the KGB?
     
    During this time, Finn and I often met at the Baltschug Hotel on the river, a few doors away from the British embassy, and we enjoyed its fine view of the Kremlin over lunch or a drink or in bed. Despite me telling him archly that the Forest would gladly pay for our room, Finn somehow obtained these rooms at what he called ‘diplomatic rates’, and said he didn’t want our lovemaking being listened to.
    ‘I’m supposed to persuade you,’ I said.
    ‘Then you’ve failed.’
    ‘Thank God for that.’
    We could never trust Finn’s apartment, nor mine, and to the irritation of Kerchenko, visiting random hotel rooms was the only way to keep our most private moments to ourselves.
    At the Forest, General Kerchenko and my other case officers on Finn, Yuri and Sasha, ignored Finn’s talk about a plan which I had