Putins Rise And The Familys Strategy

84 Luzhkov responded to these attacks by
accusing the Presidential Administration under Aleksandr Voloshin of seeking
a confrontation with him. Luzhkov declared that Yeltsin’s “administration and

80 Ibid., pp. 83-87.
Aleksandr Zhilin, “Opasnye igry v kremlevskikh zastenkakh,” Moskovskaya pravda, 25
August 1999.
Ibid. Mikhail Kas’yanov, another Family protégé, and not Aksenenko, became prime
minister.
Interfax, 19 May 1999.
Elena Dikun, “Kremlin Out to Get Moscow’s Mayor,” Prism, 16 July 1999.
his circle foster a growing desire to crush [me] and consider [me] a chief
enemy.”85
On 8 June, Luzhkov sought to offer Yeltsin an olive branch, proposing that “all
retiring presidents be given permanent membership in the Federation
Council.”
It was pointed out at the time that, as a senator, Yeltsin would be
immune from criminal prosecution. Luzhkov then called directly for Yeltsin’s
resignation, stating, “If a man is sick he must have the bravery and courage
to make a decision [to step down].” He noted that the Russian Constitution
mandated that if a president is permanently unable to perform his duties
then he must step down.
One Western commentator observed that Luzhkov’s offer manifestly did not
extend to the members of the Yeltsin Family: “Cut a deal with Luzhkov and
Primakov? This works for Yeltsin, and perhaps his daughter and image advisor
Tat’yana D’yachnko... But Luzhkov and Primakov have shown no inclination
to offer such sweet terms to Berezovsky and Voloshin.”88 In August of 1999,
a leading supporter of the Luzhkov-Primakov coalition, Georgii Boos, was
reported to have threatened Yeltsin with a “Romanian scenario”—Nicolae
Ceausescu had, of course, been executed together with his wife in a
courtyard in 1989 after losing power. This report, which appeared in the
Berezovsky-owned newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta and was then repeated
over the Berezovsky-controlled ORT television channel, could have been a
largely invented one. Boos subsequently maintained that he had been
misquoted and told reporters that the Fatherland-All Russia coalition in fact
favored legislation guaranteeing Yeltsin’s security after he left office.

Putin’s FSB Investigates Luzhkov’s Wife

In July, in a ratcheting up of the attack, the Kremlin turned its fire on
Luzhkov’s wife, businesswoman Elena Baturina, head of the firm “Inteko.”
The FSB, headed by close Family ally Vladimir Putin, served as the battering
ram for this attack. In an interview with NTV’s “Itogi” program, Luzhkov
claimed that he had become a target “not just for Berezovsky but also for the
Presidential Administration.” The FSB, he stressed, had now become directly
involved in the campaign against him. “Unfortunately,” Luzhkov lamented,
“the FSB now works for the Kremlin and not the country.”
The FSB of Vladimir region, Luzhkov pointed out, had opened a case against
a large number of companies that were being charged with laundering money
and then transferring the cash to Switzerland. Baturina’s firm “Inteko” was
one of companies being investigated. Luzhkov claimed that his wife’s firm

85 Monitor, 7 June 1999.
Ibid.
Valentina Korchagina, “Moscow Renews Call for Yeltsin to Quit,” The Moscow Times, 12
June 1999.
Matt Bivens, “Can Kremlin Cope with New Bloc?” The Moscow Times, 6 August 1999.
See Brian Whitmore, “Scandals could make Yeltsin afraid to leave,” The Moscow Times,
1 September 1999.
“Itogi” program, NTV, 18 July 1999. English translation in JRL, no. 3399, 19 July 1999.
had never undertaken activities in Vladimir. He said in the afore-mentioned
NTV interview that he had documentary proof that the Vladimir FSB had
added the name of his wife’s firm to the list of those companies being
investigated on direct orders from the central FSB in Moscow, whose obvious
goal was to find something criminal in his wife’s business. “My wife’s
telephone and my children’s telephone as well [are being tapped],” Luzhkov
complained, adding, “I would not be surprised if they get at my children, the
youngest of whom are five and seven.”
Luzhkov’s spirited and emotional counter-attack, which was publicized over
NTV, forced the Family and its point man Putin temporarily to back off. On 29
July, the official news agency ITAR-TASS reported: “A Russian Deputy
Prosecutor General said investigators had no claims to Elena Baturina...”
In September 1999, Baturina told the newspaper Moskovskii komsomlets
that Nikolai Patrushev, the director of the FSB (and one of Putin’s right-hand
men), had invited her to come see him. She related what was said during
their conversation: “He tried to convince me that the case [against ‘Inteko’]
was not one ordered up from above, not political. I permitted myself not to
agree with him... Patrushev one more time offered to personally check
everything out and, if the information was not conformed, to offer me official
apologies in the name of the FSB.”
In addition to seeking to destroy Luzhkov and his wife, the Family during the
spring and early summer of 1999 also attempted to crush two television
channels seen as being pro-Luzhkov: NTV and “TV-Center.” At a meeting of
D’yachenko, Voloshin, Putin, Gleb Pavlovskii and several others on 1 June, as
has been noted previously, the participants discussed possible punitive steps
to be taken against these two channels. The revoking of their licenses to
broadcast was one of the options discussed.
The Family also appears to have sought to intimidate all perceived
opponents. There was a bomb threat at the offices of the Moscow Arbitration
Court. “A little earlier there were explosions near the offices of Iosif Kobzon
and Valerii Kazantsev, who are openly on the mayor’s side... Explosions and
gunfire are heard everyday in the capital.”95 An attempt was made to involve
the Justice Ministry, headed by Pavel Krasheninnikov, in the struggle against
the Family’s political opponents. On 29 June Yeltsin publicly tongue-lashed
Krasheninnikov “for the fact that he had not undertaken radical measures
against the Communist Party.”96 At the Second All-Russian Conference of the
FSB, held at the end of June, Yeltsin charged the assembled officers to
monitor the election process and instructed them not to admit into the Duma
“criminals and swindlers.”
Presumably this order meant that they should

91 Monitor, 23 July 1999.
ITAR-TASS, 29 July 1999.
Elena Egorova, “Elena Baturina,” MK.ru, 21 September 1999.
Nikolai Ul’yanov, “To li sensatsiya, to li provokatsiya,” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 2 June
1999.
Zhilin and Vanin in Novaya gazeta, 20 November 1999.
Guseinov, Ot Yeltsina k...?, p. 14.
Ibid., pp. 14-15.
find ways of disqualifying some of the Family’s opponents—a task that was
later fulfilled in certain cases.

Putin Helps Neutralize Yeltsin’s Enemies

One key service rendered by close Family ally Vladimir Putin during the
spring and summer of 1999 was to contain and attempt once and for all to
remove from office the pesky General Procurator of Russia Yurii Skuratov. On
17 March, in a stinging blow to Yeltsin and the Family, the Federation Council
had voted against Skuratov’s removal from office by a vote of 146 to six. In
February, Skuratov had been allegedly filmed having sex with two call girls,
and this footage had then been shown on Russian State Television (RTR) on
17 March. On 2 April, Putin had announced publicly that the prostitutes had
been paid for by individuals being investigated by the General Procuracy,
thereby suggesting that an attempt at corruption or blackmail had
occurred.
Unlike the fastidious Stepashin, Putin was completely prepared to
publicly authenticate these videotapes.99 When Skuratov was at one point
lying in the hospital, “Putin,” he recalls, “came several times to me and,
opening up, said to me that the Family was satisfied with my conduct. He
said that they wanted to name me ambassador to Finland, to send me, so to
speak, into honorable exile. ‘I won’t go,” I said firmly... In this situation
contacts with Putin were important for me because they were also contacts
with Tat’yana... She herself did not enter into contact [with me] but for that
purpose chose Putin.”
Commenting on Putin’s close ties to the Yeltsin Family, Liliya Shevtsova has
observed: “Putin confirmed his capacity for loyalty in the spring of 1999,
when he defended Yeltsin during his conflict with then-prosecutor general Yuri
Skuratov... Putin burned his bridges, taking Yeltsin’s side at a time when even
Yeltsin’s staunchest supporters were distancing themselves from the
Kremlin... The ruling Family saw that Putin could be trusted, that one could
rely on him... He had been created by the people around Yeltsin; naturally
they expected gratitude and allegiance from him.”

The Role of Spinmeister Gleb Pavlovskii

The leading Kremlin “political technologist” of this period, Gleb Pavlovskii,
also served as a key associate of the Yeltsin Family. “Gleb Pavlovskii,” one
prominent pro-democracy journalist, Andrei Piontkovskii, wrote in November
2000, “is the Kremlin’s guru and political technologies specialist, the
ideologue and designer of the whole Putin project including the [second]
Chechen war... He has read more books than hundreds of Korzhakovs and
Putins put together... He is a character stepped out of Dostoevskii, one of the

98 Lorrain, La Mystérieuse ascension, pp. 406-407.
“Vladimir Putin: Pervye otsenki issledovaniya kasset s komprometiruyushchimi Yuriya
Skuratova videozapismyami pokazali, chto oni—podlinnye,” RIA Novosti, 2 April 1999.
Yurii Skuratov, Variant drakona (Moscow: Detektiv-Press, 2000), p. 235.
Shevtsova, Putin’s Russia, p. 33. For Yeltsin’s emotional comments on the Skuratov
affair, see Midnight Diaries, pp. 221-236.
‘Devils’ of our time.”102 Pavlovskii was born in Odessa in 1951 and attended
university in Ukraine. In the 1970’s he became a political dissident and was
arrested by the KGB in 1982. He was broken in prison and then abjectly
repented of his dissident activities. Subsequently emerging as a specialist in
political disinformation and in political provocations, Pavlovskii became a
valued reelection campaign advisor to Yeltsin and his entourage in 1996. In
1999, he helped spearhead the Family’s vicious campaign directed against
Mayor Luzhkov, reportedly setting up a website containing compromising
material on the mayor, and predicting in July of 1999 that Luzhkov would
make a “weak and cruel” president.
Unlike Boris Berezovsky, who was a prodigious generator of ideas but was
generally rather inept at implementing them, Pavlovskii, also a fountainhead
of schemes, was able to foresee practical ways to put his ideas into effect. It
was Pavlovskii and not the distrusted Berezovsky who was reportedly often
included in weekly meetings of the Yeltsin Family group. If Berezovsky is
credited with coming up with the idea of the “Unity” political party,
Pavlovskii, for his part, has claimed, with reason, to be the principal author
of the “Putin Project” which resulted in an unknown former secret police
operative being elected Russian president in March of 2000.
While the
process of implementation of this project lies largely outside the scope of this
paper, it should be noted that journalist Aleksandr Budberg reported in early
July of 1999 that Pavlovskii had proposed “to the leadership of the
Presidential Administration—Voloshin, D’yachenko, Yumashev” that Yeltsin
step down from power in December 1999, three months early, and hand over
power “ahead of time” [dosrochno] to an anointed successor.
“Every Friday,” journalist Mikhail Rostovskii reported in July of 1999, “the
entire political leadership of the presidential apparatus gathers in one of the
halls of the first wing of the Yeltsin palace. There also appear in that place
two ‘secret counselors’ of the Kremlin: sociologist Aleksandr Oslon and one of the
most scandalous individuals on the Russian political scene—Gleb
Pavlovskii.” “According to some [Kremlin] courtiers,” Rostovskii added, “both
Tat’yana Borisovna and Yumashev look upon the ex-joiner Pavlovskii as a
guru.”
It will be recalled that Anatolii Chubais had in an interview cautioned that
certain of Berezovsky’s ideas could potentially be “monstrously dangerous.”
Rostovskii in his article saw significant danger in certain of Pavlovskii’s ideas:
“There can be no argument,” he wrote, “that Pavlovskii is a very talented

102 Andrei Piontkovski, “Season of Discontent,” The Russia Journal, 20 November 2000.
See “Profile: Gleb Pavlovskii,” RFE/RL Russian Political Weekly, 12 March 2001. See
also Anatolii Kostyukov and Lev Segal, “Igry provokatorov,” Obshchaya gazeta, 4
December 1997.
Pavlovskii boasted of this achievement in interviews with two foreign correspondents.
See: Paul Quinn-Judge, “No Tears for Boris,” Time.com, 2 January 2000, and Martha
Orth, “Russia’s Dark Master,” Vanity Fair, October 2000. URL:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2000/10/putin200010?print
105 Aleksandr Budberg, “Administratsiya khochet ubrat’ Yeltsina dosrochno,” MK.ru, 6 July
1999.
Mikhail Rostovskii, “Kremlevskie ‘otmorozki,’” MK.ru, 6 July 1999.
political technologist who looks at a situation from an unusual point of view.
The problem is only the fact that all of the conceptions of Gleb Olegovich are
penetrated by the idea of harsh confrontation. [My italics] And by the fact
that, in common opinion, Pavlovskii lives in his own world which has little in
common with reality.”
During the course of a July 1999 interview with the newspaper Novaya
gazeta, Pavlovskii hinted in rather elliptical fashion at a violent solution for
Russia’s political stalemate. “[Aleksandr] Korzhakov’s Chechnya [i.e., the
launching by Yeltsin of the 1994-1996 war],” he remarked, “was
unquestionably thought up as a blood-letting [krovopuskanie]
for the
strengthening of power.” “Yeltsin, like Stalin,” Pavlovskii continued his
reflections, “is the chieftain [vozhd’] of a revolution. But in order for the
Stalinist model in Russia to work, blood has to be shed. The regime must
select a victim and then triumphantly destroy it.” Yeltsin, Pavlovskii
commented ambiguously “did not want and could not do that.”
Pavlovskii then proceeded to confide: “I previously studied Russian
newspapers from the summer of 1914 containing the most detailed
descriptions of German bestial acts. Although today it is more or less well
known that the beginning of the war was a vegetarian one, people had not
yet become beasts, there were no bestial acts at all. But then in the
[Russian] civil war all those bestial acts of Russians against Russians made
themselves known in reality. That is, all of that sat in people and was being
projected by them onto the enemy. People wanted to do that which they
ascribed to their enemy.”
Could Pavlovskii have been contemplating in
such passages the unleashing of a second “bestial” war against Chechnya?

Fomenting Hatred against Chechens

In early July of 1999, David Filipov, a journalist working for the Boston
Globe, reported that on 5 July “helicopter gunships and artillery had launched
raids against a large group of gunmen in Chechnya. The attack followed a
pledge by Russia’s top police official [Vladimir Rushailo] to bring order in the
Caucasus region.” Filipov also noted that “the dark theory held by many
observers” in Moscow was that “the Kremlin plans to foment violence in the
Caucasus to create an excuse for canceling upcoming parliamentary and
presidential elections.”
He added that a document justifying the declaring
of a state of emergency in the Caucasus had been made public by “a
prominent liberal [Duma] legislator,” Yurii Shchekochikhin.
The 6 July issue of the Berezovsky-owned Nezavisimaya gazeta published the
text of this document under the heading “Concerning the Position of Ethnic
Russians in the Russian Republic.”109 “According to data from various sources
over the past years (from 1991 to 1999),” the report maintained, “on the

107 “Iz pervykh ust. Gleb Pavlovskii,” Novaya gazeta, 9 July 1999.
David Filipov, “Russia raids Chechnya as war tensions return,” Boston Globe, 6 July
1999.
“Dokument: O polozhenii russkikh v Chechenskoi Respublike,” Nezavismaya gazeta, 6
July 1999.
territory of Chechnya there have been killed (not counting those who
perished during military actions) more than 21,000 [ethnic] Russians, more
than 100,000 apartments and homes have been seized which belonged to
the ‘non-titular’ inhabitants of Chechnya (including the Ingush) and more
than 46,000 persons have been turned into slaves or used in forced labor...
Only during the period from 1991 through December of 1994 (that is, before
the introduction of federal troops), Chechnya was abandoned by more than
200,000 [ethnic] Russians.” The report referred pointedly to “ethnic terror
against Russians” and “the policy of genocide [against Russians] which has
been conducted by the Chechen leaders since 1991.” A more incendiary
document, based on flagrantly exaggerated statistics, could scarcely be
imagined. The purpose of this document appeared to be to help to provoke a
second Russo-Chechen war.

Preparing a Second Chechen War

The leaks to Western journalists Blomgren and Chiesa in June of 1999 had
concerned, it will be recalled, the use of state-sponsored terrorism to achieve
the Family’s political goals in Russia. No-one had seemingly worked harder to
destabilize Russia at this juncture than the so-called “godfather” of the Yeltsin
Family, Boris Berezovsky. While the oligarch was presumably pleased to have
two dangerous antagonists, Evgenii Primakov and Nikolai Bordyuzha,
removed, and another deadly foe, Procurator General Skuratov, largely
neutralized, he had failed in his most ambitious aim of having a protégé,
Nikolai Aksenenko, made prime minister. Instead another serious rival of
Berezovsky’s, Anatolii Chubais, had succeeded in gaining Yeltsin’s approval of
the candidacy of Sergei Stepashin. On the plus side, however, yet another
apparent Berezovsky client, Vladimir Rushailo, had been made head of the
MVD, replacing Stepashin.
Berezovsky seems to have understood as early as May of 1999 that
Stepashin enjoyed only the most lukewarm approval on the part of Yeltsin
and even less than that on the part of Yeltsin’s powerful daughter, Tat’yana,
with whom he, Berezovsky, was in regular contact.
“Berezovsky saw the world through the prism of his personal interests,”
financier George Soros, who had made the oligarch’s acquaintance in 1996,
has commented. “He had no difficulty in subordinating the fate of Russia to
his own. He genuinely believed that he and the oligarchs had bought the
government by paying for Yeltsin’s reelection [in 1996]... Berezovsky and
Yeltsin’s Family were looking for a way to perpetuate the immunity they
enjoyed under the Yeltsin administration... Berezovsky’s situation turned
desperate when the scandal broke over the laundering of Russian illegal
money in U.S. banks in 1999, for he realized that he could no longer find
refuge in the West. One way or the other he had to find a successor to Yeltsin
who would protect him. That is when the plan to promote Putin’s candidacy
was hatched.”