But although Berezovsky was undoubtedly to play an enormous role in helping secure the defeat of Primakov later that year, he had never known or worked as closely with Putin as Pugachev had. And according to one of his closest associates, Alex Goldfarb, he never claimed to have been the one to introduce Putin to Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, or to suggest him as a replacement for Stepashin, or as Yeltsin’s successor.[105]
*
The moment everything changed came in the middle of July, in the dog days of the Moscow summer, when the Kremlin was emptying and many, including Yeltsin, were away on vacation. It was then that the Swiss prosecutors presented the Yeltsin Family with another shock. They’d thought the Mabetex case had been dealt with – Skuratov had been suspended from his position for several months by then, as a result of the criminal case Pugachev had helped open. But the Swiss were still active – and so were Skuratov’s deputies. On July 14, the Swiss prosecutors announced that they’d opened a criminal case into money laundering through Swiss bank accounts by twenty-four Russians, including Pavel Borodin and other senior Kremlin officials, and alleged that the funds may have been obtained through ‘corruption or abuse of power’. When asked whether the list included Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, one of the Swiss investigating magistrates answered, ‘Not yet.’[106] It was clear that they were circling, and according to Pugachev, a fresh sense of panic set in.
The Geneva prosecutors said their Russian partners were still conducting a parallel inquiry. It was then, Pugachev said, that he decided to act: ‘We needed someone who would be able to deal with it all. Stepashin wasn’t going to do it. But there was Putin with the FSB, the Security Council, Patrushev. There was an entire team.’[107] Pugachev remembered Putin’s coolness when he handled the Skuratov tape, and said he decided to introduce him to Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, who in those days was still the main channel to the president. As if on cue, a day later Putin’s FSB had taken action, opening a criminal investigation into the construction business owned by the wife of the Yeltsins’ political opponent, the Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov.[108] Pugachev had first sought to undermine Tatyana’s view of Stepashin, demonstrating to her how, unlike Putin, he had failed to vigorously defend the tape of Skuratov and the prostitutes after it had been aired on TV. ‘I told her, “Tanya, look. You need a person who will save you. Stepashin will make compromises with the Communists. He will compromise us in front of our eyes. Look at how he is now.”’[109] Then he said he’d taken Putin from his office in the Kremlin’s Security Council to her. ‘I told her Putin was a much clearer person. He is young and listens attentively. Stepashin doesn’t listen any more.’ Pugachev claimed that Yumashev later persuaded her to go to her father and convince him to make the switch.
Yumashev insisted, however, that Pugachev played no role in Putin’s rise, while the criminal case in Switzerland and the investigation in the US had never posed a threat at all: ‘Of course, it was total rubbish that this was dangerous,’ Yumashev said. ‘The only thought I had – and Voloshin shared this view, and Yeltsin too – was that power was being given to a person who mentally, ideologically and politically was exactly the same as us. We’d worked together in the Kremlin as one team. There was an absolutely common understanding with Putin on how the world should work and how Russia should work.’[110]
But these were the days when everything was decided. Stepashin’s world – and the chances for a more liberal administration – were to be swept away. There was no pressing reason to risk replacing Stepashin with Putin, a relatively unknown official, unless the Yeltsin Family needed someone they considered more loyal – and more ruthless – because of the risk presented by the escalating Mabetex probe. Yumashev tried to explain the switch with lame-sounding reasons, for instance that Stepashin was under the thumb of his wife. He liked to tell long, contorted tales of the many arguments he’d made in those days for why they had to act quickly, before it was too late to replace Stepashin, who just was not the right fit. But no explanation other than the rising panic over the Swiss probe made any sense. This was the motive the Yeltsin Family never wanted told, for it revealed how the Family’s rush to save itself was the inadvertent cause of Putin’s rise and its world’s demise. They needed a tough guy to protect their interests, and got more than they bargained for. In his authorised narrative, Yumashev didn’t want to give credence to any of this. Pugachev was the narrator who strayed from the Kremlin’s official version, and appears to have told the truth.[111]
At first Yeltsin had hesitated. But in the last week of July, Chechen rebels began to mount armed attacks on the border with Dagestan, the mountainous region neighbouring the breakaway Chechen republic, and, Yumashev claimed, Stepashin appeared to struggle to deal with it.[112] Before he made his first trip as prime minister to Washington, DC, on July 27, he’d publicly vowed that there would be no new war against Chechnya. But almost every day in the week that followed his return, clashes on the border broke out. At the weekend, on August 8, there was a massive escalation in fighting as two to three hundred armed Chechen insurgents seized control of two villages in Dagestan. Yeltsin’s efforts to retain him as prime minister were running out. Even then, at the last minute Anatoly Chubais, who worked closely with Stepashin, had nearly derailed Pugachev and the Yeltsin Family’s plans when he’d got wind that a replacement was being lined up. Chubais tried to reach Yeltsin at his dacha the weekend before the announcement was to be made, and to talk him out of it. But he only reached the security guard, who promptly relayed his request to Pugachev.
Furious at this attempt to undermine his plans, Pugachev said he made sure the security guard never told Yeltsin about Chubais’ call: ‘I’d worked constantly for the last eight months to get Putin into power. I turned Putin from being a total nobody who’d been head of the FSB into this, a real pretender for power. I’d monitored and checked ceaselessly. And where was Chubais when we had to deal with the Mabetex scandal?’ he raged. ‘Where was he? What did he do? He’d completely disappeared.’[113]
Even then, when they all met in Yeltsin’s office early that Monday, August 9, Yeltsin had still hesitated, said Pugachev. Stepashin refused to step down without a vote by parliament, and Yeltsin had left his office to think again. ‘I remember the whole story,’ said Pugachev. ‘Stepashin told Yeltsin Putin was no one, that he would not stand for it. But everything had already been decided. It was a rare case when Yeltsin decided nothing himself. It was a matter of life and death.’[114]
When Yeltsin finally made the announcement later that day, the nation was stunned by the identity of their new prime minister. Putin was a little-known bureaucrat, a grey figure who rarely appeared on the news. The country’s news outlets scrambled to put together biographies of him. What shocked the nation most of all was that Yeltsin openly named him as the man he hoped would succeed him as president, announcing in a televised address: ‘I decided to name the person who in my opinion will be able to consolidate society based on the broadest political forces, to ensure the continuation of reforms in Russia. He will be able to unite those around him who, in the twenty-first century, have the task of renewing Russia as a great nation. This person is the secretary of the Security Council, the director of the Federal Security Service, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.’[115]
Putin had accomplished the most vertiginous leap of his dizzying career. The Russian parliament was in shock, although