Fragments of this image had cropped up before. Ruslan Khasbulatov, remember, had attacked Yeltsin in 1993 for surrounding himself with a “collective Rasputin.” Other fragments did not necessarily have sinister connotations. It was no revelation that the president would take counsel from his chief of staff, which Yumashev was until the end of 1998, or from a daughter whom he had appointed a Kremlin adviser and who lived under the same roof as he. The economic and non-economic ties that purportedly bound the Family together vary from one story to another; the evidence for them is uneven and in some cases missing entirely.58 Leonid Dyachenko, the then-husband of Tatyana, took up oil trading in the mid-1990s for a firm called Belka; a Belka specialty was the sale of products from a Siberian refinery run by Sibneft, the petroleum company owned by Berezovskii and his partner Roman Abramovich. But the information about his business operations is inconclusive, and no one has suggested that Yeltsin knew much about them or that Leonid had any great affinity for or competence in politics. 59 Meanwhile, in the spring of 1997, Valerii Okulov, Yeltsin’s other son-in-law, was made director general of Aeroflot, a blue-chip company in which Berezovskii also had a stake. Within a year, he started to purge Berezovskii allies from the board and to cut the financial apron strings to the oligarch—for which Berezovskii sharply criticized him.
Narratives of the Family in action exaggerate the power and unity of its putative members, including Berezovskii—who missed no chance to toot his own horn. Sibneft, Berezovskii’s acquisition through loans-for-shares, was Russia’s sixth or seventh largest oil company. Some of the other oligarchs got choicer industrial assets, and Berezovskii lost out to Vladimir Potanin on Norilsk Nickel, which he very much wanted to take over in 1995. Berezovskii and Vladimir Gusinskii were bested in the Svyazinvest battle of 1997; in May 1998 Berezovskii was prevented from merging Sibneft with fellow oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovskii’s company, Yukos. In the political sphere, Berezovskii after the 1996 election had his ups and downs. Yeltsin took away his position in the Security Council in November 1997. In April 1998 Berezovskii bounced back as executive secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States, for which he had lobbied extensively with the CIS presidents; Yeltsin had him stripped of that post in March 1999, following a criminal inquiry into embezzlement at Aeroflot. On some questions on which he took a position, Berezovskii came out on the winning side; on others, he found himself on the losing side.60
As for Yeltsin, it is apparent that he had not the slightest fondness for Berezovskii. “I never liked and I do not like Boris Abramovich,” he wrote in
In people’s eyes, Berezovskii was my constant shadow. “The hand of Berezovskii” was seen behind the Kremlin’s every decision. Whatever I did and whomever I appointed or dismissed, they always said the same thing: “Berezovskii!” And who was creating this mysterious halo, this reputation of the éminence grise? Why, it was Berezovskii himself. . . . Every time the situation heated up, Berezovskii would go on television and say, “For my part, I am dead set against this. . . . I believe that . . . I am certain that . . .” He always got a lot of airtime. And the people would think: This is who is really governing the country.61
