Boris Berezovsky

Boris Berezovsky is presented as a businessman whose fortune becomes political leverage and whose most consequential political maneuver backfires. The account traces his rise through the disorienting privatization of the early post-Soviet years, his role in uniting oligarchs behind Boris Yeltsin, and his promotion of Vladimir Putin as a successor expected to remain under their influence. Berezovsky helps make a new ruler; he does not control what that ruler becomes.

Rise in the privatization upheaval

The book places Berezovsky among the energetic entrepreneurs who emerged when Russia attempted to create a market economy almost overnight. Boris Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidar’s shock-therapy reforms began with price liberalization, which the account says triggered inflation of 2,600 percent. A voucher privatization program was meant to give citizens a share in the country’s collective wealth and encourage private enterprise. On September 1, 1992, vouchers worth 10,000 rubles were mailed to every Russian citizen older than one year.

By the time the vouchers arrived, inflation had made them nearly worthless. The account describes people discovering that a voucher might buy a bottle of vodka, then selling it to more astute buyers for roughly the value of a bottle and a half. Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky are named among those buyers. Within months, the three had become multibillionaires. The narrative calls them representative figures of the oligarchs: young, intelligent, and energetic men entering a field that had previously been forbidden, but now opening without settled rules, laws, a banking system, or taxation. The speed and disorder of the transition were not incidental to their rise; they shaped the conditions in which private initiative could acquire extraordinary force.

Wealth and political stakes

Berezovsky’s influence grows further through the loans-for-shares arrangement devised by the oligarchs and sold to Yeltsin. The state, short of funds, would borrow from their banks and pledge shares in major, still-unprivatized assets—including natural gas and petroleum—as collateral. If the state failed to repay the loans after a year, the lenders could take those assets. Because the deadline would arrive after the presidential election, the arrangement made the result politically consequential to the oligarchs: a new president might reject the deal before they could claim its prizes.

The account connects that financial stake to the oligarchs’ response to the possibility of a Communist victory. Gennady Zyuganov’s campaign, it notes, drew support from public anger at democracy’s perceived injustices and at the market’s consequences. The oligarchs feared a president who might undo their agreement, even though Zyuganov’s public platform was presented as cautious rather than a promise to restore the Soviet system. Berezovsky’s political calculations thus take shape at the intersection of economic exposure and the risk that electoral change could alter the rules governing newly concentrated wealth.

The Davos alarm and media campaign

According to the account, the oligarchs recognized the danger at the 1995 Davos World Economic Forum. Zyuganov’s presence there attracted journalists and advisers who treated him with the deference accorded a possible future ruler. Berezovsky, described as the most representative of the oligarchs, took the prospect seriously. After a conversation with George Soros, who warned that the oligarchs faced difficult times and possible exile, Berezovsky immediately telephoned the six most powerful oligarchs. He proposed that they set aside their rivalries and unite behind Yeltsin’s reelection.

The need to overcome those rivalries was concrete: Berezovsky’s conflict with Gusinsky had become so severe that their hired groups were killing one another. Even so, the seven oligarchs pooled their financial and media influence for the campaign. Their media reach extended across newspapers, radio, and television, which repeatedly presented the choice as Yeltsin or chaos, or a return to the past. Documentaries about the Gulag, the famine organized under Stalin in Ukraine, and the Katyn Massacre were broadcast, while films about the purges were commissioned. The campaign did more than promote a candidate: it used control of communication to frame the election as a stark choice between Yeltsin and catastrophe. Berezovsky’s role in organizing this effort shows how quickly economic power had become a means of shaping the political contest itself.

The Putin bet

As Yeltsin’s second term neared its end, the oligarchs looked for a successor who would be similarly cooperative. Berezovsky proposed Vladimir Putin, a former intelligence officer who had served in East Germany and had quietly headed the FSB for the preceding year. Berezovsky’s case rested on Putin’s record of loyalty to superiors. He presented him to the other oligarchs as a dependable subordinate rather than a political genius.

Berezovsky then flew by private jet to Biarritz, where Putin was vacationing with his wife and children at a moderately priced hotel, and offered him the job. Putin responded modestly that he was unsure he was capable of it; Berezovsky encouraged him and promised the oligarchs’ support. Six months before the presidential election, Yeltsin presented Putin to the public as his heir apparent. In retrospect, the account identifies Berezovsky’s intervention as the worst decision of his career. The man he had backed as an obedient officer proved instead to be a relentless wielder of power, removing in turn those who had helped install him.

Reversal and consequence

The reversal is given a specific political timeline. Three years after the meeting in Biarritz, Berezovsky and Gusinsky were forced into exile. Khodorkovsky, the only one of the three whom the account describes as trying to make the management of his oil empire more ethical, was arrested and sent to Siberia after what the narrative calls a rigged trial. The remaining oligarchs learned to be cautious. The men who had acted together to secure Yeltsin’s reelection and then chosen his successor had not created a durable collective authority over the state. Their wealth and media reach had helped shape the transition, but the ruler they elevated acquired the power to dismantle their position.

Berezovsky’s arc therefore turns on a distinction between influence and command. He could mobilize money, media, and personal access to steer a presidential succession; he could not ensure that the successor would remain answerable to him. His rise belongs to the same unsettled transformation that converted rapidly devalued public property into private fortunes. His fall reveals the limit of that conversion: resources that could help select a ruler did not guarantee protection from the state power that ruler came to wield.