For years, Pugachev had developed his own network within the Russian prosecutor’s office. Like any powerful Russian institution, it was a den of vipers, where deputies jostled for position and collected kompromat on each other. Pugachev’s particular ally was Nazir Khapsirokov, the wily head of the prosecutor’s own property department, a sort of miniature version of the Kremlin department overseen by Borodin. With the power to issue apartments and other benefits to prosecutors, Khapsirokov, who was a master of intrigue, wielded the same ability to help make or break careers within the prosecutor’s office as Borodin and Pugachev did in the Kremlin. ‘In essence he was my guy in the prosecutor’s office,’ said Pugachev. ‘He brought me all the information. He told me an uprising was being organised against Yeltsin. Then he brought me a tape. He told me, “Skuratov is on it with girls.”’[49] Pugachev said that at first he didn’t believe Khapsirokov: such a tape would be the ultimate kompromat, powerful enough to cost Skuratov his job and close down the Mabetex case.
Pugachev took the tape back to his office, but, unused to handling technology himself, he was unable to get it to play on his video recorder – he fumbled and fumbled with the settings, trying to find the right channel. Eventually he had to enlist his secretaries’ help. As soon as they managed to switch it on, he regretted that they’d become involved. The grainy footage of the rotund prosecutor general cavorting naked on a bed with what appeared to be two prostitutes made for grim viewing. Pugachev cleared his throat, red-faced. But his secretaries made a copy of the tape nevertheless. Pugachev believes it was a decisive moment. ‘If we hadn’t made a copy, then none of this would have happened,’ he said. ‘History would have been different. Putin would not have been in power.’
He said he gave the original tape to Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s son-in-law and former chief of staff, who essentially still occupied the same position behind the scenes.[50] Yumashev was to take it to Nikolai Bordyuzha, a former general from the Russian border guards who’d recently been appointed official Kremlin chief of staff in Yumashev’s place. Bordyuzha was then to call in Skuratov and tell him about the tape, and that his behaviour did not befit the office of prosecutor general.
Always prone to overstating his role, Pugachev said that no one else knew how to act: ‘They were all still shaking.’ Bordyuzha awkwardly held the meeting with Skuratov, who agreed on the spot to resign. Bordyuzha then handed the tape to him, as if to indicate that it should all be forgotten among friends.
Instead of securing Skuratov’s removal, that Kremlin meeting on the evening of February 1 led to an endless standoff. The position of prosecutor general had been protected under special laws seeking to enshrine its independence. For Skuratov’s resignation to come into force, it had to be accepted by the Federation Council, the upper chamber of parliament. But many of the senators in the Council at that time were already aligning themselves with Primakov and Moscow’s mayor Yury Luzhkov against the Kremlin. They were intent on protecting Skuratov. While he disappeared from sight for weeks, apparently to receive treatment at the Central Clinical Hospital, the Council stalled on putting his resignation up for a vote.
By that time the Yeltsin Family was dealing with the beginnings of a potential coup. Just a few days after the January raid on Mabetex, Primakov had laid down the gauntlet with a public challenge to Yeltsin’s hold on power. With the backing of parliament he announced a political non-aggression pact, ostensibly to end the mounting tension between the Communist-led Russian Duma and the Kremlin.[51] The Duma was to agree to drop its impeachment hearings and set aside its constitutional right to topple the government with a no-confidence vote, at least until the parliamentary elections at the end of the year. In return, Yeltsin would give up his right to dismiss both the Duma and the Primakov government. Yeltsin was scandalised by the proposal, which had been agreed and announced without his being informed at all. ‘Because this all happened behind his back he was absolutely flabbergasted,’ said Yumashev, who was still Yeltsin’s most trusted envoy in those days.[52] ‘The main thing was that Primakov was already not hiding from the people who worked with Yeltsin that he intended to be the next president.’ Making matters worse, Primakov had also proposed that Yeltsin should be granted immunity from future prosecution for any illegal deeds he might have committed during his eight-year rule. It was as if he believed Yeltsin had already agreed to step down.
The friction between Primakov and the Yeltsin Family was immediate. Primakov had sent shivers down their spines when, hours before Skuratov was summoned to the Kremlin and told to consider resigning over the kompromat tape, Primakov had called for space to be freed in Russia’s prisons for businessmen and corrupt officials.[53] ‘We understood that if he really did come to power that he had in his head a totally different construct for the country,’ said Yumashev.[54] And when the next day, in a final show of defiance just hours before his resignation was announced, Skuratov had sent prosecutors to raid the oil major Sibneft, it was a move clearly directed at them.[55] Suspicions had long circulated that relations between Sibneft and the Yeltsin Family were too close, that the company had been the basis for its owner, Boris Berezovsky, to become the consummate insider oligarch. Sibneft had sold oil through two trading companies: one of them, Runicom, was owned by Berezovsky’s business partner Roman Abramovich; the other, a more obscure outfit known as Belka Trading, was owned and run by Tatyana’s then husband, Leonid Dyachenko.[56] ‘The raid on Sibneft was deadly dangerous for the Yeltsin Family,’ said one close Berezovsky associate.[57] Clearly trying to contain the damage, they began trying to distance themselves from Berezovsky, who had become politically toxic for them.
Yumashev had already stepped down from his post as chief of staff in December.[58] He said he’d done so when he first realised that Primakov was aiming for the presidency, which went far beyond the bounds of their agreement when Yeltsin first forwarded him as prime minister. They’d intended for Primakov to be a caretaker prime minister while Yumashev and Yeltsin searched for a suitable successor to take over the presidency. ‘It was my personal responsibility that Primakov was brought in,’ said Yumashev. ‘Now he was behaving in violation of all our agreements.’[59] There was also a suggestion that Yumashev’s replacement as chief of staff with a security man, Nikolai Bordyuzha, an officer from the border guards, was part of an effort to remove the taint of the Family from Yeltsin’s rule.
Sergei Pugachev claimed that he took it upon himself to try to reach a deal behind the scenes with the Federation Council, to make sure Skuratov was eliminated from view.[60] But the politically powerful regional governors on the Council were consolidating around Primakov and Luzhkov against the Kremlin. In the meantime, the ever-rising tension over Skuratov’s investigation was starting to reach the top layers of Yeltsin’s Kremlin. Horrified at where it might lead, they began to drop away one by one. First, Yeltsin was hospitalised again, for a bleeding ulcer. Then Nikolai Bordyuzha wound up in the Central Clinical Hospital after apparently suffering a heart attack shortly to be joined there by Pavel Borodin, the earthy head of the Kremlin property department and the focus of the Mabetex probe.[61] The Kremlin was rapidly emptying, and in the apparent vacuum Skuratov slipped back to work.[62]
On March 9, more than a month after Skuratov was supposed to have departed, the Federation Council finally scheduled the vote on his resignation.[63] Yet still Pugachev’s efforts to secure the governors’ votes for his removal failed. On the day of the vote, March 17, Skuratov arrived unexpectedly to address the Council, and gave a blistering speech claiming he was under attack from powerful enemies close to the Russian president, and calling on the senators to reject his resignation.[64] They voted down his resignation almost unanimously.
Rumours of a tape compromising Skuratov had already wafted through the media. But, stung by the collapse of the vote, Yumashev and the still