Vladimir Gusinsky

Vladimir Gusinsky is presented as both a beneficiary of Russia’s abrupt transition to private enterprise and a political power broker whose influence could not protect him from the successor he helped install. The book traces his rise from the devalued privatization vouchers of the early 1990s to a role in the oligarchs’ campaign for Boris Yeltsin, then ends his Russian trajectory with forced exile under Vladimir Putin.

From vouchers to oligarchic wealth

Gusinsky is introduced alongside Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky as one of three figures who stand in for the oligarchs. Their fortunes took shape amid the gap between the promise of privatization and the insecurity of ordinary Russians. On September 1, 1992, vouchers worth ten thousand rubles were mailed to every Russian citizen over one year old, representing a share in national wealth. But price liberalization had already triggered inflation of 2,600 percent. By the time the vouchers arrived, they were nearly worthless: at most, one could buy a bottle of vodka. People sold them in large numbers to buyers willing to pay roughly the value of a bottle and a half.

The account says that Gusinsky, Berezovsky, and Khodorkovsky became multibillionaires within months. It places their ascent in a society suddenly told to conduct business after decades in which private enterprise had been forbidden, but without rules, laws, a banking system, or taxation to organize the new economy. The trio is described collectively as young, intelligent, and energetic, not dishonest by nature, but newly free to pursue the very activity their talents suited. Gusinsky’s wealth is thus tied not to a gradual, stable market order but to the rapid conversion of economic opportunity into private fortunes while public institutions remained unsettled.

Business, protection, and rivalry

The book depicts the commercial world in which Gusinsky operated as one where violence accompanied competition at every scale. Major players fought over industrial combines and mineral deposits; smaller operators fought over kiosks and market stalls. Businesses needed a roof, a term for security that often meant a protection racket: refusing the service could bring a shooting. The holdings of oligarchs such as Gusinsky and Berezovsky employed large security forces, commanded by former high-level KGB officers who had privatized their skills. Lower down, businesses turned to protection providers drawn from criminal groups and the police.

Gusinsky’s rivalry with Berezovsky is especially stark. Their goon squads were killing one another while the two men competed for power and influence. The conflict is not portrayed as a private disagreement detached from the economy: it belongs to a system in which coercion guarded property and could itself be organized as a commercial service. Their later political cooperation therefore represents a tactical suspension of a violent feud, not evidence that it had disappeared.

Media power and Yeltsin’s reelection

When polls suggested that voters might turn to the Communist Party under Gennady Zyuganov, the oligarchs had a direct financial stake in the outcome. They had arranged a loans-for-shares scheme: their banks would lend money to a cash-strapped state, with shares in major assets such as natural gas and petroleum serving as collateral. If the state failed to repay the loans after a year, the lenders could take the shares. Because the deadline fell after the presidential election, a Yeltsin victory mattered to the oligarchs; a new president might repudiate the arrangement.

At Davos in 1995, concern about Zyuganov’s growing standing among journalists and advisers helped galvanize Berezovsky. He called the six most powerful oligarchs and proposed that they set aside their differences to get Yeltsin reelected. Gusinsky was among the seven who joined the effort, despite the lethal rivalry between his forces and Berezovsky’s. They pooled financial and media influence in support of Yeltsin. The campaign’s message, repeated across newspapers, radio, and television, presented the choice as Yeltsin or chaos, while broadcasts about the Gulag, the famine in Ukraine organized under Stalin, and the Katyn Massacre warned against idealizing communism. Gusinsky’s role is described as part of this collective mobilization: the evidence establishes his participation among the oligarchs, rather than detailing a separate campaign operation of his own.

Putin and forced exile

As Yeltsin’s second term neared its end, the oligarchs sought a successor who would remain cooperative. Berezovsky promoted Vladimir Putin, then a little-known former intelligence officer who had headed the FSB for the previous year, to the other oligarchs. The book’s account later makes the cost of that choice clear. Three years after Berezovsky’s meeting with Putin in Biarritz, Berezovsky and Gusinsky were forced into exile. Khodorkovsky was arrested and sent to Siberia after a trial the narrator calls rigged; the other oligarchs became more cautious.

Gusinsky’s ending reverses the apparent security of his ascent. The oligarchs had been able to turn newly acquired wealth into media influence and political leverage, and to join forces when their interests were threatened. But their support for a successor did not ensure their continued place in Russia. Gusinsky appears in this account chiefly as a representative of that larger reversal: a fortune built in the unsettled aftermath of privatization, power exercised through an oligarchic alliance, and eventual expulsion from the country under the leader that alliance had helped bring forward.