Free Once Upon a Time in Russia by Ben Mezrich Page B

experienced her share of surreal events.
    History would one day judge the goings on of the precedingweeks. A combination of applied genius, force of will, and the ability to navigate through a corrupt system—all perfectly executed by two men. While they brought very different skill sets, they had managed to create one of the largest oil companies in history almost out of thin air.
    They say that in business everything is timing, and in this case, the timing could not have been more perfect; Abramovich, with his idea of combining the two state-owned businesses—the oil refinery in Omsk and the production company in Noyabrsk—had caught Berezovsky at exactly the right moment; falling directly in the midst of his privatization of ORT, in an effort to advance the candidacy of Yeltsin in the upcoming election.
    The months that had followed the Caribbean cruise had only inflated Berezovsky’s position and the potential of his ORT proposal—as Yeltsin’s own status had grown more precarious. The president was facing a real threat in the Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov—while Yeltsin’s health had begun to deteriorate at an even faster pace. There were always rumors of heart issues, even impending surgery. Without ORT and Berezovsky’s promise to use the network as a publicity tool, Yeltsin might lose the presidency. And if the Communists took over, it would be a disaster for the business community.
    After the cruise, it had been relatively easy for Berezovsky to convince his contacts in the Yeltsin government that for ORT to continue its operations and campaign for Yeltsin, the network would need a massive and sudden infusion of money—especially after the freezing of advertising that Vlad Listyev had enacted right before his untimely death. Like Yeltsin, ORT was in a precarious state.
    Privatizing an oil company would essentially give ORT—and Yeltsin’s campaign—a bottomless war chest. Once the concept had been accepted, it had just become a matter of putting the pieces inplace. The first step: Abramovich and Berezovsky had needed to convince the Red Directors who ran the state-owned refinery and the production plant to agree to the unification of the company—under new management.
    Since Abramovich had previously established relationships with the Red Directors—Viktor Gorodilov in Noyabrsk, and Ivan Litskevich at the refinery in Omsk—from his years in oil trading, he began the process of convincing the two men that he could indeed run the company in a way that would benefit them all. Eventually, Berezovsky had joined in on the efforts, using his status to further push the directors in the right direction.
    Gorodilov had acquiesced fairly easily, but Litskevich had resisted; at one point he seemed to be becoming a true roadblock to the endeavor. Concerned, Berezovsky had written a personal letter to the director, asking him to trust Roman Abramovich as he obviously did himself. Thankfully, the letter had been unnecessary, and Berezovsky’s status and political capital hadn’t been needed to convince the man to change his mind. In the sort of coincidence of timing that seemed to happen more and more often in modern Russia, at some point during the weeks the merger was being discussed, Litskevich had organized a late-night party for himself and an attractive young woman on the banks of the Irtysh River; halfway into the tryst, Litskevich decided to try to impress his date by jumping into the frozen waters in front of them—and almost instantly after hitting the 7-degree water, had a heart attack and drowned. His driver—one of the few witnesses to the event—died in a bar fight shortly afterward.
    Thankfully, Litskevich’s replacement had been more acquiescent, and soon both Red Directors were ready to play ball. The pieces for privatization were in place.
    The privatization system had been honed through practice in theshort time since