Berezovsky backing Putin before being driven into exile

Boris Berezovsky’s backing of Vladimir Putin is presented as a defining miscalculation of post-Soviet power: an oligarch who helped choose a pliable successor instead raised a ruler who would dismantle the influence of his sponsors. Their relationship was not an alliance between equals. Berezovsky treated Putin as a candidate whose loyalty could secure the oligarchs’ interests; the later reversal made that confidence look less like political foresight than a fatal misreading of the power he was helping to install.

The oligarchs’ political leverage

The relationship grew out of an upheaval that converted economic advantage into political influence. Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidar liberalized prices as part of shock therapy, triggering inflation of 2,600 percent. A voucher privatization program was meant to give citizens a share in national wealth: on September 1, 1992, vouchers worth ten thousand rubles were mailed to every Russian citizen over one year old. By the time they arrived, inflation had made them virtually worthless; some recipients could exchange them for little more than a bottle of vodka. Buyers who accumulated vouchers included Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who became multibillionaires within months. The book portrays their wealth as the product of a sudden opening in a country where private business had long been prohibited and the rules, laws, banking system, and taxation needed to govern it were absent.

This economic concentration became political leverage when the oligarchs faced the prospect of a Communist return. The proposed loans-for-shares arrangement would have their banks lend money to an almost empty state, with shares in valuable natural-gas and petroleum assets serving as collateral. If the state failed to repay the loans after a year, the lenders could claim those assets. Because the deadline fell after the presidential election, the oligarchs needed Yeltsin—not a possible successor such as Gennady Zyuganov, who might reject the deal—to remain in power. Berezovsky’s later choice of Putin belongs to this larger effort to protect a political and economic order in which private fortunes could shape public outcomes.

From campaign organizer to kingmaker

At the 1995 Davos World Economic Forum, Zyuganov’s reception alarmed the oligarchs. Though Berezovsky regarded him as a ridiculous politician, journalists and advisers were treating him with the deference due a possible future Russian ruler. After George Soros warned Berezovsky that the oligarchs might face difficult times or even exile, Berezovsky called the six most powerful oligarchs and urged them to set aside their disputes. He and the other six then poured their financial resources and media influence into Yeltsin’s reelection campaign. Newspapers, radio stations, and television channels repeated the stark message that the choice was either Yeltsin or chaos. The campaign also broadcast documentaries about the Gulag, the famine organized by Stalin in Ukraine, and the Katyn Massacre, turning fear of a return to the Soviet past into a political instrument.

As Yeltsin’s second term neared its end, Berezovsky again acted as a political organizer, this time by proposing a successor. He identified Putin, a former intelligence officer who had served in East Germany, endured difficult circumstances after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then found a place in the FSB, which he had quietly headed for the previous year. Berezovsky’s sales pitch to the other oligarchs rested on Putin’s record of loyalty to superiors. He acknowledged that Putin was no genius but asserted that he would eat out of their hands. The judgment reduced the candidate to a dependable instrument: his usefulness, in Berezovsky’s account, lay in obedience rather than independent ambition.

Berezovsky then made the approach himself. He flew by private jet to the airfield at Biarritz, where Putin was vacationing with his wife and children at a midpriced hotel, and offered him the job. Putin modestly said he was unsure he had what it took. Berezovsky answered by encouraging him to act and promising that the oligarchs would help. The exchange captures the relationship at its point of apparent intimacy: Berezovsky behaves as the recruiter and sponsor, while Putin appears to be the hesitant appointee. Yet the offer also places Berezovsky inside the process that converts private wealth into control over political succession.

Reversal and consequence

The narrator directly identifies the Biarritz maneuver as the worst decision of Berezovsky’s career. The modest, obsequious officer, the book says, would emerge as a remorseless power broker and take down, one by one, the people who had made him king. The metaphor reverses the arrangement Berezovsky believed he had created: the patron who thought he was selecting and supporting a subordinate instead helped elevate someone capable of subordinating the patrons themselves.

The reversal becomes concrete three years after the meeting. Berezovsky and Gusinsky were forced into exile; Khodorkovsky, after trying to make the management of his oil empire more ethical, was arrested and sent to Siberia following what the narrator calls a rigged trial. The other oligarchs watched their step, having understood who was now in charge. The passage does not describe Berezovsky’s later personal dealings with Putin in detail; its emphasis is on the chain of political selection and its outcome. Berezovsky helped create the conditions for Yeltsin’s continuation and then personally promoted Putin as the next guarantor of the oligarchs’ position. The new ruler’s consolidation of power instead made Berezovsky’s sponsorship the prelude to his exile.

Significance of the relationship

Berezovsky and Putin’s connection makes the book’s account of post-Soviet politics a story not simply of elected leaders and competing parties, but of concentrated money, media control, and elite bargaining. The oligarchs could coordinate newspapers, broadcasters, and political finance to shape an election; Berezovsky could use a private jet to make a direct offer to a prospective successor. Such access made him appear to be a maker of rulers. But the relationship also exposes the limits of that power: selecting a candidate and financing a political order did not ensure that the resulting leader would remain answerable to those who enabled his rise.

The central irony is therefore built into the sequence itself. Berezovsky valued Putin for his loyalty upward, interpreting a subordinate’s service to superiors as proof that he would serve the oligarchs in turn. The later account separates that observable past behavior from the future Berezovsky failed to anticipate. Putin’s ascent did not preserve the sponsor’s position; it helped bring about the sponsor’s removal. In this telling, their relationship is a compact illustration of political sponsorship turning into political dispossession.