Former Russian Rainmaker Tries Role of Dissident

A few years ago, he was Mr. Inside, one of Russia’s most powerful businessmen and politicians. He was at home in the thick of shadowy Kremlin deals, helping to make and break prime ministers and presidents.

Today, Boris Abramovich Berezovsky has been shorn of two media empires, is accused by Russian security services of funding Chechen terrorists and is sought for questioning by the general prosecutor’s office. The 56-year-old multimillionaire no longer feels safe in his homeland. President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, he says, is becoming a dictatorship whose leader can do anything to his enemies.

What does the consummate insider do when he is on the outside?

From an office on London’s stylish Savile Row, Berezovsky has plunged into a new and unaccustomed role: as a dissident and self-styled defender of free speech. He would like to offer himself as a rallying point for the liberal opposition, in what he says is a fight to protect the democratic values of the 1990s from being subverted by a new generation of KGB apparatchiks.

Berezovsky’s detractors--and there are many--sneer at this white-hat role. They say he is no icon of liberty but rather a former insider seeking a route back in. During a recent interview in London, where he has taken up voluntary exile, Berezovsky agreed that the majority of people in Russia dislike him, but he claimed that a small and important segment is starting to listen.

He warned of a creeping climate of fear in his homeland that he says would have been unimaginable under former President Boris N. Yeltsin.

Berezovsky cited the Kremlin’s moves since Putin’s ascent two years ago to bring to heel three privately controlled television networks, put Kremlin appointees in power over elected governors and prosecute what he called political enemies of the regime.

“Laws count for zero in Russia today because everything is controlled from the Kremlin, including the court system,” Berezovsky declared.

Berezovsky reiterated his accusation that Putin’s meteoric rise came about through a tawdry conspiracy orchestrated by the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the domestic successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB.

Berezovsky has alleged that the FSB is responsible for apartment-house bombings in 1999 that stoked public emotion and provided the reason for Putin--then prime minister and a veteran of both spy agencies--to launch a war in the separatist republic of Chechnya.

If an FSB role in the bombings can be laid bare, Berezovsky said, the scandal would dog Putin’s presidency and eventually might help pull it down.

In recent weeks, FSB operatives have fired back, accusing Berezovsky of backing anti-Russian terrorism in Chechnya and threatening to demand his extradition to Moscow to face unspecified charges.

Resented by Russians for his money, and notorious for intrigues during the Yeltsin years, Berezovsky hardly seems the ideal candidate to serve as the white knight of liberal values.

“Berezovsky is the embodiment of robber capitalism,” said Andrei A. Piontkovsky, director of the Moscow-based Independent Institute for Strategic Studies. Berezovsky was also part of the establishment at the time of many alleged misdeeds for which he now blames authorities.

“Such a person, by definition, cannot be the leader of the democratic opposition,” Piontkovsky said.

‘Healthy Opposition’

On the other hand, Berezovsky’s defenders say he is practically the only public figure to openly challenge Putin and therefore the battle could prove important for the country’s future.

“Russia needs healthy opposition very badly now. . . . It would be simplest to say that we don’t want to listen to Berezovsky because his credibility is marred,” said newspaper columnist Pavel I. Voshchanov, a onetime Yeltsin spokesman. “But if we don’t have him, we won’t have anything.”

The 1999 bombings killed more than 300 people and set off waves of panic. Chechen terrorists were blamed by the authorities, yet the bombers were never caught.

To Berezovsky, a strange silence has settled on the case and the mystery itself is damning to the authorities.

“You know the terrible explosion in Oklahoma City? All America was involved in trying to find out who did that and to put him in jail, and then finally to execute him. And at least relatives were sure that that was the person responsible,” Berezovsky said. “In Russia, to the contrary, relatives still don’t know. Those who live in Russia are afraid to even ask questions.”

Berezovsky has told the media that he has launched his own investigation into the case, the results of which will be released soon. But in the recent interview, he seemed to step back from promising to offer proof of FSB involvement.

“I will present the facts, and for me it is proof. But I don’t insist that for everybody it will be proof,” he said.

The most troubling thing about the case, he said, is that it “leads to the question of who controls Russia. And if it turns out that it is the same people who organized this terrible crime, then that is terrible for the state and for the nation.”

“I have a lot of problem for myself to understand it and what to do,” he added. “I think that it happened because the KGB was not destroyed and, moreover, Putin himself and [FSB chief Nikolai P.] Patrushev, they are proud that they continue the tradition of the KGB.”

Berezovsky said he first began to have his doubts about Putin in 1999, when the little-known FSB director was promoted by Yeltsin to prime minister. In Putin’s FSB office on Lyubyanka Street, there was a small bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of Cheka, the KGB’s predecessor. Berezovsky said he did not think much about it at the time. But when Putin moved into the prime minister’s office, the bust went with him.

“It was the first time I felt something was strange,” Berezovsky said.

Berezovsky, who was a close advisor to Yeltsin and served as deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, said he and Putin had a cordial relationship until the latter became president.

Berezovsky said he disagreed with legislation appointing representatives of the president to oversee the work of regional governors.

Chechnya Policy Clash

The two men also clashed on policy in Chechnya.

Berezovsky, who had been highly involved in the Chechen issue under Yeltsin, said he believed that Moscow should have followed up on its military operations by holding early negotiations with the separatist republic’s leaders. Putin has rejected talks, even after more than 3,000 Russian soldiers and an uncounted number of Chechen fighters and civilians have been killed.

Their break, according to Berezovsky, came when Putin complained after the August 2000 sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk about the coverage of the disaster on ORT television. The oligarch controlled the network through his 49% ownership share.

Putin suffered in public opinion when he initially did not cut short his vacation to take charge of the Kursk rescue effort. Meanwhile, ORT broadcast enraged statements by the wives and mothers of the doomed crew.

Shortly after, Berezovsky said, Putin summoned him, accused him of ordering deliberately biased coverage and announced that the state would take control of ORT. Berezovsky said he was told by a presidential aide to give up his stake in ORT or “follow Gusinsky to jail.”

It was a reference to Vladimir A. Gusinsky, another oligarch, who already had been briefly arrested. Gusinsky’s NTV television irritated the Kremlin, and a court ruling ultimately gave control of the network to Gazprom, the state-controlled gas monopoly.

A third private network, the Berezovsky-owned TV6, was stripped of its broadcast license in January.

Following the so-called media wars, Berezovsky said he is working with Gusinsky--who also has gone into exile--to broadcast television news into Russia via satellite. In addition, Berezovsky is launching a Russian-language magazine, Kolokol, that he says will be a forum for independent thinking.

Anything to break the monopoly of power, Berezovsky said, adding that he has no problem referring to Putin as a dictator.

“What do we mean by dictator? A person who concentrates power in his hand and who is able to do everything that he wants, in spite of the law,” he said. “I am sure that it is so today in Russia.”

Although polls of late have given Putin a popularity rating of between 70% and 75%, Berezovsky predicted that his foe’s career as president will be short.

Popular opinion matters little in Russia, he said; the important thing is keeping the trust of the elites, of which he named six: regional governors, mass media, oligarchs, intelligentsia, the military and part of the security services. All of them, he claimed, are growing disenchanted with Putin’s policies and the growing concentration of power.

Berezovsky acknowledges that the feud might escalate and that he might yet face extradition. Nevertheless, he said, he will press on.

“Maybe it is strange, but I enjoy what I am doing, even in this difficult position,” he said. “I don’t feel I am masochist, but I feel myself strong enough to continue on this way.”