From Russia with Blood. Heidi Blake

Berezovsky would not hear a word of it. He was far too busy clearing his protégé’s path to power.

      Just as he had done for Yeltsin, Berezovsky backed Putin by funding the publication of a flattering book. The biography—first published in the pages of Kommersant—was carefully designed to bolster Putin’s strong-man image, while Channel One aired blistering attacks on his rival candidates. The oligarch also created and bankrolled a new pro-Putin political party, Unity, which won big in the December parliamentary elections. And he enlisted the help of Moscow’s premier adman—a fast-living, florid-faced media guru named Mikhail Lesin—to run a slick advertising campaign painting Putin as the powerful president required to lead Russia into the new century.

      With Putin surging ahead in the polls, Berezovsky persuaded the sitting president that the time had come to pick up and clear out. On New Year’s Eve in 1999, Yeltsin announced his resignation, making the prime minister acting president, effective immediately. There was a quid pro quo: Putin’s first decree, signed on December 31, 1999, granted the Yeltsin family immunity from prosecution. Having thus delivered his side of the bargain, Putin could fight the upcoming presidential elections from pole position inside the Kremlin.

      Putin hardly had to lift a finger. Beyond a well-televised victory lap around the devastated Chechen capital of Grozny, he barely set foot on the campaign trail. The people of Russia were behind him—and the rulers of the West were cheerleading him, too. Britain’s fashionable new Labour prime minister even jetted over to St. Petersburg to meet the presidential hopeful amid much fanfare a fortnight before polling day. Tony Blair caught stinging criticism from human rights groups for feting Putin amid harrowing reports of looting, rape, mass execution, and torture by Russian troops in Chechnya and for shunning all the other candidates before the election was decided. But as the two vigorous young politicians shared an evening at the opera in St. Petersburg, both had their eyes on a glittering prize.

      “He was highly intelligent and with a focused view of what he wants to achieve in Russia,” Blair told the BBC afterward with a classic Cheshire cat grin, praising Putin’s desire to modernize the Russian economy and open the country to foreign investment. Putin did his bit, too, promising to welcome British involvement in the development of Russian oil and gas resources. So when Blair caught awkward questions about human rights violations in Chechnya, he leapt to the defense of his new ally. “The Russians have been subjected to really severe terrorist attacks,” he said, referring to the Moscow apartment bombings Putin had blamed on the region’s rebels.

      What the public didn’t know was that the prime minister’s night at the opera with Russia’s future president had been carefully orchestrated by the two countries’ spy agencies. The arrangement had arisen when a senior FSB officer approached the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, in London and asked him to help arrange a high-profile meeting between Blair and Putin to burnish the latter’s presidential credentials ahead of the election. After protracted discussions back at the River House, the spy chief had decided this was an “unusual and unique opening” for the UK and urged Downing Street to accept the invitation. Thus Britain had its hand in smoothing Putin’s ascent.

      Blair wasn’t the only world leader who was starry-eyed about Russia’s putative president. Bill Clinton had phoned the British prime minister months before polling day to express his own excitement.

“Putin has enormous potential, I think,” the US president opined.* “I think he’s very smart and thoughtful. I think we can do a lot of good with him.” There was a faint note of caution—“He could get squishy on democracy”—but overall, Clinton was hopeful that Putin would come to the table with the right coaxing. “His intentions are generally honorable and straightforward,” the US president said. “He just hasn’t made up his mind yet.”

      On the contrary, Putin’s mind was very much made up.

      Seven days after his official inauguration, in May of 2000, Russia’s new president enacted a raft of new laws all aimed at what he euphemistically called “strengthening vertical power.” He replaced elected members of the upper house of parliament with Kremlin appointees, sent presidential envoys to supervise the running of Russia’s semiautonomous regions, and granted his administration the power to remove local governors on the mere suspicion of wrongdoing. With the regions thus under tighter control, Putin clamped down on other competing power sources. Next in line was the free media.

      Putin’s media minister Mikhail Lesin, the adman who had helped secure his victory, led an assault on the independent TV stations, newspapers, and magazines that had proliferated since the fall of the USSR, using all the levers of state power to pressure their owners into ceding control to the Kremlin. Journalists and proprietors were arrested; advertisers were leaned on; offices were raided; trumped-up charges were brought. Lesin, who would go on to found the sprawling international propaganda network Russia Today (RT), so relentlessly rammed independent media outlets back under Kremlin control that he earned himself the nickname the Bulldozer.

      And with the media purge well under way, Putin turned his attention to the oligarchs. Berezovsky and his fellow tycoons were summoned to the Kremlin and told that their special privileges were being revoked. While Putin would stop short of reviewing the rigged privatizations, they would no longer enjoy special access to power. In short: they would be allowed to keep their loot, as long as they kept out of politics.

      Berezovsky was agog. He had rubbed shoulders purringly at Putin’s inaugural ball, delighting in telling everyone how he had plucked Russia’s new ruler from obscurity. So confident was he in his status as Kremlin chess master that he had gone to the new president soon after to propose an audacious deal. Putin would rule Russia, while Berezovsky would nominally head up the opposition party, thus carving up power between them, shoring up the position of the oligarchs, and making sure the presidency remained effectively unopposed. But Putin had declined that offer with icy disdain, and that was when Berezovsky first began to realize his mistake.

      Putin’s creeping authoritarianism had in fact been well in evidence long before his inauguration for anyone with eyes to see it. As the Chechen war raged on, he had used his three months as acting president to reverse some of the more pacific reforms of the post-Soviet era: signing a decree allowing for the use of nuclear weapons in response to major foreign aggression and ramping up spending on the armed forces. And then there were the warning signs that those who knew too much might have exactly that much to fear.

      Anatoly Sobchak had returned from his exile in Paris to become a vocal if chaotic supporter of Putin’s election campaign. The old mayor had struggled to stay on message: he appeared to have forgotten his liberal credentials when he hailed Putin as “the new Stalin,” and he was all too fond of reminiscing about episodes from the old days in St. Petersburg that the presidential contender would rather forget. On February 17, 2000, Putin asked Sobchak to travel to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, between Poland and Lithuania, for a campaign pit stop. Three days later, the old man was found dead in his hotel room. The official postmortem declared that he had died of a massive heart attack—but that didn’t explain why his two bodyguards had to be treated for mild symptoms of poisoning. The investigative journalist Arkady Vaksberg later published an account suggesting that Sobchak had been eliminated by a toxin smeared on a lightbulb in his hotel room—a classic KGB technique. Soon after, the journalist’s car was blown up in his Moscow garage. He happened not to be inside—but the message had been sent.

      As Putin lurched toward autocracy, Berezovsky decided to show his protégé who was boss, using the pages of Kommersant to publish a searing critique of the president’s plans to centralize power. “In a democratic society, laws exist to protect individual freedom,” he lectured in one of his open letters. When Putin ignored that moral lesson and continued his crackdown, Berezovsky’s aides and advisers counseled the furious oligarch to let matters lie.

      “You have to think, Boris! Slow down, calm down, think,” one adviser beseeched him over wine and cigars in the Logovaz Club lounge against the tinkling backdrop of the grand piano. “You have access! Work with the guy. You’re very persuasive, you’re cleverer than he is, you put him in that