The Black Box

On March 26th, Russia’s acting Pres-ident, Vladimir Putin, will likely be elected President by as many as thirty percentage points. This is an unlovely prospect. Putin is a figure at once bland and severe, whose true predecessor is Yuri Andropov, the ex-K.G.B. chief who ascended to General Secretary with a rhetoric of discipline and rectitude. A career intelligence agent, Putin speaks of the K.G.B. with unambiguous pride and affection. “For better or worse, I was no dissident,” he has said. As the Berlin Wall was coming down, Putin, who was stationed in East Germany, in Dresden, wondered when and if Moscow would activate Soviet troops to defend his offices. “Moscow kept silent,” he says. “I felt that the country no longer existed.” Before leaving for home, Putin helped roll up spy networks, destroy communications, bum documents: “We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst.”

Putin’s career in the K.G.B. was not especially distinguished (he was recruited in 1975 and he retired in 1991, as a lieutenant colonel), but it clearly shaped his thinking, his manner, his sense of order. Since he became Prime Minister, eight months ago, and then acting President, when Boris Yeltsin resigned on New Year’s Eve, Putin’s singular achievement has been to lead the war against Chechnya. He promises what so many have yearned for—a modernized version of the iron hand. The other day, Mikhail Gorbachev remarked that Putin’s seeming obsession with the restoration of a powerful state was a throwback to the psychology of the Soviet era.

If the Kremlin had a Rose Garden, Putin would be running a Rose Garden campaign. He is visible all the time—meeting with foreign leaders, visiting hospitals, threatening more mayhem in Chechnya—but never campaigning. Putin has spurned commercials and televised debates, and has vowed never to participate in vulgar spectacles that decide only “what is better, Tampax or Snickers?”

The truth is, the campaign is over, and Putin won it on television. A major reason for that victory has been the support of Boris Berezovsky, one of Moscow’s new “oligarchs,” a small circle of industrialists and bankers who grew fantastically rich during the Yeltsin era by snatching up state properties at preposterously low prices. Berezovsky is the most notorious of the oligarchs, a former mathematician who has made billions in interests ranging from oil to aviation. To make sure he holds on to those interests, he has been very helpful to Putin. Berezovsky owns a string of newspapers and radio stations, and chief among his media holdings is a large interest in state television’s Channel 1, or ORT, the most powerful channel on the dial. Last summer, Berezovsky unleashed a propaganda blitz that obliterated the opposition as surely as Russia’s tanks obliterated Grozny. His motives were simple. Without access to the Kremlin, a tycoon is lost. Berezovsky needed a friend in power who would not only tolerate him but indulge him, as Yeltsin did.

Until the propaganda war began, Berezovsky seemed lost. The most popular party in the country was Fatherland-All Russia, led by former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov. Primakov, a veteran of Soviet politics, had threatened to put a few of the oligarchs in jail; when he was in office, he had unleashed the prosecutor general on Berezovsky, among other Kremlin officials, to look for evidence of bribery, kickbacks, money-laundering, or any other illegalities. In Luzhkov, Berezovsky saw another enemy and a potential President who would challenge his control of various properties and corporations.

To cut into Primakov and Luzhkov’s support, Berezovsky enlisted the help of Sergei Dorenko, a forty-year-old newscaster-propagandist, to start a weekend news-magazine show, a sort of “ ‘60 Minutes’ Meets Jerry Springer.” There was nothing Dorenko would not say or do. He showed a film of the prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov, having semi-successful sex with a couple of chirpy prostitutes. To prove that Primakov, who had undergone hip surgery, was not fit to run for President, Dorenko showed an endless and gory sequence of surgeons sawing through bones and ligaments. The message was clear: Wasn’t one old, sick President enough? He accused Pri-makov of participating in an assassination plot against the Georgian President, Eduard Shevardnadze, and of insufficient hatred of Chechen terrorists, and accused Luzhkov of ordering the murder of Paul Tatum, an American who co-owned a Moscow hotel.

There is no mystery about the program’s chain of command. A month after the Luzhkov accusation was aired, one Moscow newspaper published transcripts of telephone conversations between Berezovsky and Dorenko in which they talked about how best to use television to link Luzhkov to the Tatum killing. Dorenko told reporters that, yes, such a conversation had taken place; Berezovsky said that “the context, which allows one to interpret it in a particular way, is wrong.” When I asked Berezov-sky recently about his working relationship with Dorenko, he said, “As an owner of mass media, I have a chance to speak with people in the company. But I will never give anyone directions, orders—never! Not one time! Sometimes, I may explain my position. If they are against that position, well, O.K. But the difference between me and the man on the street is that I can do that.”

The campaign worked. “People watch this stuff and they believe it,” Leonid Parfyonov, a well-known television producer and personality, said. “In 1916, most Russians believed that the tsarina had been the secret agent of Germany. They believed the stories about American evil. Our people tend to believe the worst garbage that’s shovelled at them.” Primakov went from being the most trusted politician in Russia to quitting the race. Luzhkov’s ratings plummeted. Neither one was capable of heading a winning ticket. What remained was Putin and a long list of also-rans.

“Our media are something different from yours,” Berezovsky told me. “It wasn’t possible just to go on the air and calmly explain things. This was a huge war of interests, a dangerous war.”

The rumors in the television business are that Berezovsky paid Dorenko more than a million dollars, but no one knows for sure. “Whatever it is, it’s a good investment for them,” Parfyonov said. “After all, look what’s at stake: a major share of the world’s oil reserves, forty per cent of the world’s natural gas, one-sixth of the world’s landmass. The stakes are high!”

Sergei Dorenko works out of a shabby set of offices and studios at the Ostankino television center, on the north side of the city. Last week, he took me into an editing room, and there a couple of young staffers were preparing the ritual assault on Luzhkov. “This is where we manipulate the mass consciousness!” Dorenko boomed, with a jack-o’-lantern smile.

Like his boss, Berezovsky, Dorenko is sly and self-knowing, and does not pretend to righteousness. He is tall and dark; with a bit more polish, he could be a local anchor in, say, Tampa. On the air, his style is without affect, an expression he learned well in his years on the main news program, “Vremya.” On his own show, Dorenko’s deadpan is a counterpoint to the visceral film clips: the sex, the violence, the absurdity.

“Television is a show,” he said. “It is a spectacle that you watch. People watch TV, and at the same time they are talking to their wives, they’re pouring themselves some tea, they might get up and go to the bathroom, and who knows what else. To get their attention, you have to jump out of the set, grab them by the collar, get them close, eye to eye, and talk in simple language.”

Dorenko was not the first to show the tape of Skuratov and the prostitutes. The Kremlin, with Putin the head of Russian intelligence, is thought to have leaked it first to Channel 2, RTR, which played it last March, late at night. Do-renko brought it to prime time. The raw material is pathetic enough (“I haven’t done this in a while,” Skuratov meekly tells the prostitutes. “I may not succeed”), but, for dramatic effect, Dorenko spliced in his own comments and the speeches of Luzhkov and other politicians who defended the prosecutor. Do-renko began the report by telling viewers that perhaps parents ought to ask children to leave the room, “because after seeing the prosecutor general like this it will be hard to bring up your children as patriots.” Everyone manages to look squalid.

“I’m a difficult client for you,” Skura-tov says as the girls try valiantly to arouse him. Finally, they succeed, and so, after a fashion, does he.

“I made it for the first time in a while!” Skuratov exclaims after much moaning. “I think we’ll see each other again,” he adds hopefully.

“He was a good old guy,” one of the prostitutes told Dorenko at a subsequent filmed encounter on the street. “I felt sorry for him that he found himself in such a mess.”

Naturally, Skuratov became a national joke. Even people who might have hoped that someone would pursue the shadowy allegations against Bere-zovsky and others in and around the Kremlin could not help laughing about Skuratov.

Primakov was so furious about Do-renko’s attacks that, according to Do-renko, he arranged investigations of him, tapping his phones and examining his financial records for tax fraud. Now that Putin is cruising to victory, the show has become tamer. Dorenko is happy. And his boss is happy, too.

“Boris Berezovsky and I are friends, and professionally we are of one mind on the most important questions—we share the same Sermon on the Mount,” Dorenko said. “But I do what I like. I follow my own thoughts. Berezovsky calls me only to tell me that I have a first-rate program and that I am a genius. He tells me that I’m a genius all the time.”

I asked if he would ever even mildly criticize Berezovsky on the air.

“Only if I resign first and do it on another channel,” Dorenko said. “By the way, is there a lot of criticizing Ted Turner on CNN? And what attacks are there against Rupert Murdoch on Fox?”

In the Soviet Union, and now in post-1 Soviet Russia, television has been an instrument of propaganda and battle. Since the days of Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretaries have used the medium to send a unified message to every corner of the empire. Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985, did that, too, but, just as important, he used it to promote himself as a new, more vigorous leader. Both Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, paid close attention to their televised images; they often called the men who ran state television to order this camera angle or that clip. To his credit, Gorbachev also sanctioned shows like “View” and “Before and After Midnight,” which were the first to broadcast unvarnished reports on the Stalin era, the war in Afghanistan, and organized crime.

Within two or three years, however, Gorbachev’s monologues had become a target of mockery In May, 1989, the televised focus of the revolution was the first session of the Congress of Peoples Deputies, at which speakers lambasted everything from the K.G.B. and the Communist Party to Gorbachev himself. For weeks, one could walk down the streets of Moscow and in every window see the blue haze of televisions and hear the sound of impassioned speeches. Yeltsin, who was now saying forbidden things about the Party leadership in blunt language, was banned from state television, but Leningrad’s “The Fifth Wheel” dared to show him. And so in Moscow people bought special antennae just to pull in “The Fifth Wheel.” In retaliation, in October of 1989 state television showed a film of Yeltsin speaking at Johns Hopkins University, and seeming exhausted, incoherent, and possibly inebriated.

“But even that backfired,” Oleg Do-brodeyev, who is now the chairman of RTR, told me. “Soviet propaganda had ossified to such a degree that it failed to recognize that, traditionally, in this country people have a perfectly sanguine attitude to people who drink. To drink means you are a good guy, one of us. Non-drinkers are thought to be underhanded, strange. The majority of people liked Yeltsin even more after this.”

In the years that followed, television became a crucial prize of political struggle. “To ‘take the Kremlin,’ you must ‘take television,’ “ Gorbachev’s adviser Alexander Yakovlev once said. And so it happened. Yeltsin developed RTR as the first real alternative to Soviet state television, and that led to an alternative news broadcast, called “Vesti” (“News”) and the rise of a Russian challenge to central Soviet power.

As the first generation of Russian oligarchs looked for opportunities to buy properties during the unprecedented wave of privatization in the early nineties, a few recognized that the easiest way to get the political influence they needed was to buy newspapers, maga-zines, and television stations or to start new ones. The banker Vladimir Gusin-sky, who had once been an obscure thea-tre director, launched NTV, in 1993. It was around this time that Boris Bere-zovsky began to invest in media, too.

As the 1996 elections approached—as Yeltsin’s health and the Russian economy both corroded, as the first Chechen war was showing up the Army’s own implosion—Yeltsin appeared doomed. His popularity ratings fell to single digits as he prepared to face the Communist Party candidate, Gennady Zyu-ganov. Berezovsky, Gusinsky, and several other Moscow oligarchs _decided that their only chance to hold on to their fortunes was to set aside their rivalries and unite behind Yeltsin. They ran and paid for the Kremlin campaign with more than a hundred million dollars and orchestrated a slavishly loyal media effort. Losing the election, they thought, would force them all to emigrate. After the first round of voting, Yeltsin suffered a heart attack and dropped out of sight. He was near death. Not to worry. Television provided a report that was a cross between Soviet propaganda and Gogolian comedy: the President, viewers learned, had a cold, he was tired. Yeltsin was hoarse, his spokesman said, but he still had “a firm handshake.” Within months, the oligarchs were handsomely rewarded. They not only enriched themselves through easy access to state properties—the privatization deals for oil wells, refineries, factories, and raw materials were like so many billion-dollar party favors—but also widened their media holdings. Yeltsin signed a decree that tripled the hours that Gusinsky’s NTV could broadcast, and Berezovsky strengthened his control as the largest private shareholder in state television’s Channel 1. Berezov-sky has even befriended foreign media barons; he was a guest at Rupert Murdoch’s wedding to Wendi Deng.

Gusinsky and Berezovsky have long since forgotten their alliance of 1996. They are mortal enemies now, and their television stations reflect their differences. Berezovsky’s ORT, and especially “The Sergei Dorenko Program,” is a focussed extension of his political aims. Gusinsky’s NTV, although it is perfectly capable of airing a politically motivated report, next to ORT is an exemplar of probity and rigor. Its weekend news-magazine show is called “Itogi” (“Summing Up”), and the host is an intelligent, if strangely portentous, man named Yevgeny Kiselyov. Comparing last week’s “Sergei Dorenko Program,” on Saturday, to “Itogi,” on Sunday, would be like comparing Jenny Jones to Ted Koppel. Both programs carried reports, for instance, on a disastrous battle in early March in the Chechen area around the Argun Gorge. The Russian military authorities lied for days about the casualties. Dorenko, like certain American reporters in Vietnam, parroted the official line about enemy losses and Russian heroism; “Itogi” reported bluntly, if sympathetically, that eighty-four Russian soldiers, all from the same company in Pskov, had been killed.

I met recently with Kiselyov and Igor Malashenko, a Gusinsky executive, and both were quick to condemn Do-renko and Berezovsky’s manipulation of ORT. The NTV people—and, in fact, nearly all members of the “liberal media”—routinely say that the 1996 campaign was not so much an election as a kind of civil war, and that to have attempted any kind of fairness in the media would have meant suicide, a return to the past. Now, they insist, it is time for new rules.

“For Berezovsky, television is a gun, a weapon, a propaganda machine,” Mala-shenko said. Ten years ago, when I first met Malashenko, he was working as an aide in the Communist Party’s Central Committee headquarters; now he wears a three-button Italian suit, and his new offices have more brass and marble than a palazzo in Milan. “Berezovsky’s ambition is always to be the largest fish in the pond, to have the most influence and power, with money being the byproduct,” he went on. “For him, money just goes with everything automatically. He is a gambler. He enjoys what he is doing. He enjoys the game.”

Journalists and businesspeople who follow the oligarchs closely say that while Berezovsky wields enormous power in various industries it is not exactly clear what he owns. In Russia, the notion of transparency in business hardly exists. “Berezovsky buys people more than he buys companies,” Mala-shenko said. “There is a joke about post-Soviet life that is by now widespread: It’s cheaper to privatize the managers than to privatize a company.”

Even Vladimir Posner, who is known to Americans as Phil Donahue’s former sidekick, and who now hosts a talk show on Channel 1, says that there are no illusions about what has happened. “Dorenko played a substantial role in the collapse of the Luzhkov-Primakov coalition’s drive for power,” Posner said. “I can think of no other journalist, if that’s what you want to call him, anywhere in the world who could inflict that kind of damage and destroy a potential Presidential movement.”

As for Berezovsky, Posner said, “He is a tactician who wants to protect his turf and gain as much power as he can. He believes the country should be run by businessmen, the Russian version of ‘What’s good for General Motors is good for America.’ He kicked and clawed his way into using the media and they’re his best tool.”

Ifirst met Berezovsky four years ago, at a tsarist-era mansion downtown that he had converted into a lavish “business club.” Outside that club in 1994, a bomb, apparently intended for him, exploded and decapitated his driver. I met him most recently a couple of weeks ago, in a more tranquil setting—Princeton University, where he had been invited to give a lecture.

Although in Moscow Berezovsky is usually surrounded by bodyguards, he arrived in Princeton in a stretch limousine, accompanied only by an associate from London. Berezovsky is short and nearly bald, and has dark, intense eyes. Even his enemies, who consider him evil, say that he is extremely smart. He has not merely been close to power; he has held powerful positions in the government, including deputy secretary of the Security Council. He recently won a seat in the Duma. His opponents claim that the only reason he wanted a place in the Duma was that it provides immunity from prosecution.

Wearing a fine, dark suit, Berezovsky stepped up to the lectern, before a full house of students and alumni, and delivered a talk on recent Russian politics that cast the role of the oligarchs in a loving light: during the past fifteen years, he said, the Soviet Union and then Russia have been undergoing a revolution. Finally, after many false starts, and after a series of Prime Ministers who were either too lacking in will or too mired in the past, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin—and “now, for the first time, the consolidation of power has taken place,” Berezovsky said. “What some call a totalitarian dictatorship is nothing more than the consolidation of power.”

Berezovsky has a keen sense of public relations, and he understands well that he and his fellow-oligarchs are known, even in the West, for grabbing up valuable properties for a song. And so instead of denying anything Bere-zovsky tried for spin: “Why was there a civil war after the revolution in 1917, and no civil war after the modern revolution? There was no civil war following privatization. . . . In 1917, property was taken from concrete people. This time, it was taken from a state, a faceless entity; no one thought of it as his own.” Sure, he went on, Russia has “violated the canons of liberalism on the way to democracy,” and “these extremes will happen, but they will not stop the process.”

After the lecture, Berezovsky and a few members of the faculty and administration walked across the campus. Students whizzed by on bikes. The birds were singing. And Boris Berezovsky—Satan, Luzhkov has called him—was on his way to the Faculty Club for dinner. Not since I saw Mikhail Gorbachev fly into Santa Barbara eight years ago aboard the Capitalist Tool, the Forbes jet, have I felt such a strange sense of displacement. Berezovsky, for his part, seemed completely at ease. He did his best to charm his hosts. Someone asked him if he minded being called an oligarch. He smiled shyly. “Oligarch?” he said. “I used to be against the term, but now I accept it. I can’t fight everyone!” He went on, “We are not different from the American oligarchs. We are completely the same. They were rational, and we are rational. We spent our power on privatization because it was more rational than building factories. Our behavior was completely rational, like Morgan’s or Carnegie’s. Finally, we will start to compete. Maybe the rules were wrong, but we used those rules.”

Someone asked a rather gentle question about the occasional investigations pointed in his direction, and Berezovsky shrugged. “As far as I am concerned,” he said, “I never felt that I did something against the law. No one ever proved that I did something wrong. There were lots of opportunities to prove I did something wrong, and they never did.”

Dessert was served, and afterward Berezovsky offered me a ride back to the city As we sped along Route 1, he told me that his father had been a construction engineer, working on factories from Moscow to Uzbekistan; his mother was a nurse in a pediatric institute. Berezovsky got his doctorate in systems-theory mathematics in 1973 (he is fifty-four) and worked until the late eighties in academia. He has six children, by three wives, and lives, “like all the other oligarchs,” near the Rublyov Highway, in an enormous, well-guarded house. He has various other residences, including an interest in a thirty-million-dollar estate in Cap d’Antibes, a couple of planes, and a yacht.

“In cash, I have tens of millions of dollars,” he said, “and, as far as shares in my businesses, they are worth billions of dollars, but it is hard to say exactly how much. It is hard to estimate a Russian company. The values change every day.”

As Berezovsky grew richer in the mid-nineties, he made closer acquaintances in Yeltsin’s circle. In the last couple of years, Berezovsky’s relationship with Yeltsin and Yeltsin’s, daughter, Tatyana, has grown so close and influential that, when television commentators referred on the air recently to the “family,” it was understood that he was a member.

We headed into the Lincoln Tunnel. Berezovsky yawned. “I am thinking about politics less and less now,” he said. ‘And this is a sign of stability.”

One can understand his sense of achievement. While Sergei Dorenko was busy destroying Primakov and Luzhkov, Berezovsky was masterminding the creation of a new party, the Unity Bloc, as a vehicle for Putin.

“I want to transform the media from power to a business,” Berezovsky said contentedly. “Change priorities. For me, mass media is a political instrument, but, now that politics have been decided, we’re not moving backward. Mass media will be good business.”

Did that mean that he was retreating to the boardroom? Was he getting out of Kremlin politics?

“Capital will have great influence on power. How can it be otherwise?” he said. “Doesn’t Bill Gates, and Microsoft, have political power? Doesn’t General Motors have political power?”

Berezovsky dropped me off on the West Side before heading east to his hotel. In a couple of days, he was flying off to California for a conference hosted by Michael Milken.

In Moscow, Berezovsky’s media are trying to create a heroic image for Putin, who is the antithesis, in almost every way, of his predecessor. Yeltsin was a memorable physical presence, a muzhik, a real Russian man—bearish, provincial, crude, funny, erratic, undisciplined, a drinker, a Communist Party apparatchik who became the Party’s biggest enemy. He was a man of rages, intrigues, courageous confrontations, benders, impulsive decisions. He behaved less like a General Secretary than like a tsar. Putin is blessed with the sort of slight frame and unmemorable face that perfectly match who he was: a colorless mid-level spy. Born in 1952, Putin comes from an ordinary urban family (his father was a factory foreman in Leningrad); he speaks fluent German and some English, works ceaselessly, doesn’t drink much, enjoys skiing and judo.

Although most Russians entertain few illusions anymore about the crimes of the past, not least the crimes of the K.G.B., they don’t care much anymore, either. Most do not see a career in the intelligence services as a political liability Many people I talked to said that Putin reminded them of the cool and efficient hero, Stirlitz, of a 1973 television serial, “Seventeen Moments of Spring.” Masha Volkenstein, who has worked as a commercial and political public-opinion executive for the past decade, told me that she was surprised when people in focus groups told her that one of the reasons they liked Putin was his “Germanness”—his Germanic appearance, his Germanic work habits, his close contact with Germans while working as a spy in Dresden.

“This is fairly amazing, considering the history of Germans in this country,” she said. And yet it seems that, for Russians, after enduring the embarrassment of a President whose public performances ranged so often from the drunken to the incomprehensible, Putin’s Germanic posture, his severity, is a political plus. Putin is like the antagonist, Stoltz, in Ivan Goncharov’s nineteenth-century novel “Oblomov.” The hero, Oblomov, sleeps, naps, dozes. He seems never to get out of his nightgown. He can barely summon the energy to speak, much less work. He is the epitome of Russian sloth and lost opportunity. Stoltz is the Germanic ideal: energetic, efficient, neat. In Russian politics, Oblomov has retired to his dacha. Stoltz will win the Kremlin.

Putin has revealed himself only slowly. Recently, in an attempt to compile a kind of official biography, he met for a total of twenty-four hours with two reporters from the Berezovsky-owned paper, Kommersant, and those transcripts have now been published.

In the book, Putin says that he first became interested in intelligence work when he was in ninth grade; “I’d read the books, seen the movies.” To be an officer meant honor and romance to him, and it still does. He describes how, as a teen-ager, he walked into the Leningrad K.G.B. offices to offer his services. “Some kind of old guy came out, and although it seemed strange he listened to me and took me seriously,” Putin says. The man told Putin that they didn’t take volunteers, and that he would have to wait until he had graduated from university.

“What’s the recommended course of study?” Putin asked.

“Law” came the answer.

“I understand.”

When he had almost finished college, he was invited to come in and begin work.

After so many years of listening to reformist, and even mainstream, Russian political figures criticize the K.G.B. and agonize over its history, I find it disturbing to hear Putin describe and defend the K.G.B. so blithely. When pressed, he’ll admit that a few instances, like the K.G.B.’s treatment of Andrei Sakharov, were “rough,” but he does not volunteer such comments.

Putin invariably blames idiotic Communist Party officials for wrongdoing under the old system. He portrays intelligence agents as upstanding patriots intent on defending the state and remains proud of the countless Soviet citizens who worked as stukachi, ground-level informers for the K.G.B. “You know that ninety per cent of all information was gained with the help of agents among Soviet citizens?” he says, with obvious admiration. “Agents work in the interest of the state.”

Unlike Gorbachev and Yeltsin, both of whom had close relatives who were sent to camps during the Stalin era, Putin is defensive even about the peak years of the purges. At a private session with writers at the Moscow PEN club recently, he said, “Of course, one must not forget about the year 1937, but one must not keep alluding only to this experience, pretending that we do not need state-security bodies. All seventeen years of my work are connected with this organization. It would be insincere for me to say that I don’t want to defend it.”

In East Germany, Putin saw firsthand the loss of the Communist world’s place in technology and economics. He witnessed the system’s rot as it was happening. “I already understood in Germany that there was no future for this system, and that there was no future for the Soviet Union,” he says in the biography.

In 1990, Putin returned to Leningrad, and, for a year and a half, he had a double role at the university: he was the rector’s “international relations” adviser, as a cover, and at the same time he kept an eye on foreign students, even recruiting some. He left that post to work for his old law professor Anatoly Sob-chak, a reformist who had become the city’s mayor. Putin resigned his commission the same year. Putin is not so much a moralist as a loyalist. In the new book, he calls Oleg Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general who renounced the agency in 1990, a “traitor”; the same goes for Andrei Babitsky, the Radio Liberty reporter in Chechnya who was arrested by the Russian Army. Babitsky’s reporting on the Chechens, Putin says, was “more dangerous than firing a machine gun.” On the other hand, Pavel Borodin, a Yeltsin aide who invited Putin to work for the Kremlin in 1996, is judged by another standard. Although Swiss authorities have long wanted to question Borodin about a bribery case involving the construction company Mabetex, Putin’s view is that “there is a golden rule, a founding principle of any democratic system, and it’s called the presumption of innocence.”

How a Putin Presidency will turn out for Boris Berezovsky is not altogether clear. Moscow is a city of terrific political gossip, most of it melodramatic. “We have an authoritarian system—soft authoritarianism—con-trolling political life,” Igor Malashenko, of NTV, said to me. “People are nervous because they have no idea what Putin will do.” One scenario has Putin moving against Berezovsky, just to show how tough he can be.

“There is not a close relationship between me and Putin,” Berezovsky told me. “I am asked, ‘If Putin comes to power, will he put you in jail?’ I have no guarantees that this will not take place.”

But it is hard to believe. Berezovsky and Dorenko provided an important service to Putin. “The political game is done, and we won,” Dorenko told me. “I feel like a person who can stay in Russia now. If Luzhkov and Prima-kov had come to power, I would have had to hide abroad. And I don’t like abroad.”

In the past month, Berezovsky and his partner, Roman Abramovich, have bought up more than sixty per cent of the aluminum business—the biggest industry after oil and gas. Putin’s Anti-Monopoly Ministry had no problem with the deal, and Putin, in his new book, makes a friendly gesture to the oligarch. He and Berezovsky talk fairly regularly, Putin says. And why not? “He has a lively mind,” Putin says, “and many suggestions.” ♦