Russia Tycoon Raises Questions by Accepting Government Post

One of the richest, most powerful and least trusted men in Russia has jumped from the capitalist juggernaut that crushed two of his marriages and dozens of his rivals to devote himself to government service.

But few would mistake Boris S. Berezovsky’s latest career change--to become deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council--for a selfless act of patriotic duty.

By his own admission, the 51-year-old multimillionaire has abdicated his role as head of the “Big Seven” industrialist clique controlling half of Russia’s wealth out of concern that personal property will never be safe in a country rife with corruption and resistant to the rule of law.

That Berezovsky considers himself suited to closing the loopholes that allowed a few men like himself to get very rich is cause for bemused resentment among many Russians.

In a country where success more often inspires envy than emulation, most of the struggling masses take for granted that Berezovsky could not have come into such fortune without bending a few laws.

Indeed, the man who muscled to the top of Russia’s business oligarchy in a mere five years argues that the transformation from communist disaster to a functioning, if frenzied, market economy had to occur too fast to be pretty.

“It’s true we have a lot of corruption and crime in Russia, but I think the level of corruption corresponds with the level of the transformations,” says the man whose soft voice and steel-bladed stare create an aura of aggressive sincerity. “I think the risk-profit ratio in Russia today is acceptable.”

While he nominally acknowledges his public credibility problem, Berezovsky insists that it was hard work and commitment that earned him his fortune.

An obscure and impoverished mathematician for the first 25 years of his working life, Berezovsky left the world of academia on a hunch that newly liberated Russian consumers would be more eager to buy cars than the industrial software on which he had been working.

“In the Soviet Union, a car was just a dream for most men and women,” says the impeccably dressed Berezovsky.

Using old connections with Russian auto makers and acquiring new ones abroad, his Logovaz enterprise obtained monopoly marketing rights for both domestic and foreign cars.

Logovaz partners rocketed to wealth and influence by acting as the middlemen in virtually every sale during the biggest boom in car sales Europe has known since the automobile was invented.

Much of that profit, Berezovsky says, was used to buy into other exponentially expanding industries such as television, magazines, advertising, oil and air travel.

Although critics insist that he exploited connections and collaborated with mafia gangs to secure his powerful position, Berezovsky bridles when asked if any part of his gains might have been ill-gotten.

“I never had important parents. I’m Jewish, which doesn’t help in Russia. All my life I worked no less than 18 hours a day,” he says with control over a hint of anger. “People who are successful in business here today--real business--have one thing in common: They work like horses, they like what they are doing, and they believe in the future of Russia.”

It is the faith that today’s ruthless business frontier will eventually give way to a more just and predictable environment that motivated Berezovsky to put his stock holdings in trust and see what could be done with the rotten inner workings of officialdom.

The reelection of President Boris N. Yeltsin in July, he says, proved that Russians have already made the mental break with communism and begun accepting--even appreciating--that the future is in their own hands.

“The crucial distinction of the system we have today is that you have the possibility to realize yourself,” Berezovsky says with evangelistic ardor. “We had a lot of restrictions in the past, and although we have a lot of problems today, you know you are responsible for yourself.”

While Berezovsky’s portfolio with the Security Council specifies his duties as restoring peace and order to war-ravaged Chechnya, he makes clear that his objectives in joining the government extend far beyond that one task.

The magnate has come in through the most convenient open window as he seeks to stay the course of a meandering revolution.

Russia’s leading industrialists first sought to call the shots in the Kremlin a year ago, when they banded together to back Yeltsin in his bid for reelection out of fear that a victory by Communist Party leader Gennady A. Zyuganov--then the leading candidate--would end market reforms and personal wealth in Russia.

Bankrolled by the businessmen, Yeltsin pulled off a come-from-behind victory and heeded his financiers’ wishes in reinstating Anatoly B. Chubais in the hierarchy as presidential chief of staff.

Chubais, who oversaw Russia’s sell-off of state assets as a former first deputy prime minister, is considered one of Russia’s best economic strategists.

But he is widely disliked by those who blame him for a privatization program that benefited so few.

Berezovsky’s October appointment to the Security Council was seen as a repayment by Chubais of a political debt to those who financed Yeltsin’s--and his own--resurrection.

Along with other tycoons who have tried to legitimize the system from within--Vladimir O. Potanin, another of the Big Seven, was named last summer as a first deputy prime minister--Berezovsky regards as a priority the bolstering of public trust in those who govern.

He declines to assess his own public standing, but tacitly acknowledges his image problems by pointing out a local newspaper contention that he suffers “one of the most unsavory reputations of any man in Russia.”

“I’m not saying I agree with it,” he offers in a rare display of humor. “But I’m not able to express an opinion about myself.”

His unflinching belief in himself and his disregard for the low esteem in which he is held exacerbate an already shaky public standing.

“For sure, there are many people who don’t like what I’m doing,” he says. “But I have experience of people not liking what I did at first, then after two, three, four months realizing what I realized earlier”--that he was right.

He is direct in denying both whispered and printed allegations that he is part of Russia’s murderous gangland network.

“I stand absolutely clean before God,” insists Berezovsky, who has been the target of character assassinations and physical assassination attempts. “Certainly I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, and I’m very ashamed of some of them. But I’ve never wanted to turn back and undo something.”

Among his regrets, he says, was divorcing his first wife, the mother of his two eldest daughters. He has since twice remarried and fathered three more children.

With a jet-set lifestyle and an unapologetic preference for quality trappings that are seldom Russian, Berezovsky has indulged himself with such luxuries as a top-line Mercedes-Benz and medical care at Swiss clinics while recuperating from injuries sustained in a 1993 car-bomb attack.

Russian media, still feeling their way to fairness in the new age of independence, routinely allude to Berezovsky’s criminal contacts. Nationalist newspapers devoted much space to accusations by ousted Yeltsin bodyguard Alexander V. Korzhakov that Berezovsky and another prominent tycoon had tried to take out a contract to kill him.

He is suing Forbes magazine for libel after a December article headlined, “Godfather of the Kremlin?” The publication concluded: “It sure looks that way.”

In a statement issued after the Forbes article was published, Berezovsky accused the magazine of “falling victim to a disinformation campaign which is being carried out purposefully by Communist circles with the aim of discrediting the administration of President Yeltsin.”

While he parts ways with many in the Yeltsin government, Berezovsky holds most of the president’s political rivals in open contempt, first among them brash retired Gen. Alexander I. Lebed, who is already campaigning to succeed Yeltsin.

His ultra-cautious words about Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov make clear that he has significant doubts about the only other figure now given a chance of winning the next presidential election.

Berezovsky pays lip service to the suitability of Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin to lead the country, but few outside the cloistered Kremlin believe that the government chief would stand a chance of popular election.

All this focuses the spotlight ever brighter on the magnate’s motives for freezing his wealth to join a political world in turmoil.

“I really believe in the future of Russia,” Berezovsky answers cryptically to questions about his ultimate political objectives. “My main ambition is to move Russia forward. This is what I did in science and business, and it is what I will do in government in whatever way it takes.”