The Last of Mohicans from the 1990s

British police, investigating the circumstances surrounding the death of Boris Berezovsky, reported that they have no reason to suspect the involvement of a third party in the death of a Russian businessman. According to the police, the body of 67-year-old tycoon was discovered by a bodyguard of Berezovsky in a house in the town of Ascot, Berkshire. The bodyguard had to break in the bathroom since the door was locked. However, the version of suicide is still under discussion.

Berezovsky was a master of myths creation. For the most part they could not withstand a collision with reality. However, some of them were so enduring that even the creator himself started to believe in them. In particular, he had the image of “kingmaker.” It was said that Berezovsky initiated and carried out the campaign of bringing Vladimir Putin to power.

In fact, the entire story about who actually promoted Putin and ensured his rise to power and Berezovsky’s role in this, is one of the many myths. Berezovsky’s influence on political and personnel processes in the upper echelons of power in Russia was, in fact, not quite of the extent Berezovsky wanted to present it for a long time. There is not much sense in looking for reasons of his hostility to Putin in that.

Berezovsky’s problem is of systematic character. We can also add to this his personal qualities because of which he had many enemies and outspoken opponents: starting from the once very close to Boris Yeltsin Aleksandr Korzhakov to Anatoly Chubais. Russia is an enormously big country but it has always been crowded at the top.

Berezovsky could make his career in a more quiet and peaceful way. It wasn’t easy for a son of a civil engineer and a nurse to fight his way to success in the USSR, but Berezovsky managed to do so. In 1967 he graduated from the Department of Electronics and Computing Machinery at Moscow Forestry Engineering Institute. From 1970 until 1987 he was a senior scientist at the Institute of Management Problems in the Academy of Sciences. At that time it was a prestigious and authoritative research institution. In 1973 he graduated from the Mechanics and Mathematics Department of Moscow State University. During this period he defended his Ph.D. thesis on “Multi-criteria optimization” and in 1983 he defended his doctoral thesis on “Development of the theoretical foundations of algorithmic decision-making and pre-application.” The theory developed in the thesis can be seen as a far reaching generalization of the popular mathematical problem of “picky bride.”

In 1989 Berezovsky helped Aleksandr Zibarev, deputy director of AvtoVAZ, with his Ph.D. thesis and started a relationship with the leadership of the Soviet automobile giant. LogoVAZ Company established by Berezovsky became a national dealer for selling “Lada” cars. At that time Lada and vodka were the main liquidity products.

In the fall of 1994 Berezovsky entered the political world when through a friend of his speech writer of Boris Yeltsin Valentin Yumashev he arranged publication of the president’s memoirs in Finnish publishing house. It was done quickly and with charm.

Soon the reorganization of the First Channel into Russia’s Public Television took place. The state retained 51 percent of the channel’s shares but did not invest a penny in it, while Berezovsky, first with the other shareholders and then almost single-handedly, took over its maintenance and asset management. Back then his media empire consisted of the newspaper Novye Izvestia and Kommersant.

By early 1996 Yeltsin’s rating went down drastically. An influential group of security officials in his entourage claimed that it would be impossible to win the elections and offered to cancel them. At a meeting in Davos, Switzerland, organized by Berezovsky in February 1996 a group of oligarchs decided to take over the presidential campaign of Boris Yeltsin. They managed to win the elections by mobilizing financial, media, and intellectual resources. The brain and the motor of the whole campaign was Berezovsky and Anatoly Chubais was its general manager.

Oligarchs are not favored in Russia and Berezovsky was a champion in being disliked the most. He tried to stand out at all times and demonstrated his importance in every possible way. Therefore, he had to face the state power at some point. It happened at the turn of the centuries.

And then it all went downhill. He had to practically flee from Russia. His assets were confiscated and all the attempts to recapture at least something failed in London court battle against Roman Abramovich. Berezovsky had to pay more than 30 million pounds in legal fees.

He did not become a new Herzen and an influential leader of the opposition for so many both objective and subjective reasons. Being an immigrant, he wasn’t viewed as an alternative to the regime of Vladimir Putin, but as a looser tycoon.

Forbes website published an interview with Berezovsky that was made a few hours before his death. Great disappointment can be felt in it: “I have changed many of my views, including those about myself, and concerning what is Russia and what is the West. I had an absolutely idealistic idea about the possibilities for building democracy in Russia. And an idealistic idea about what democracy is in the center of Europe. I underestimated the inertia of Russia and overestimated the West. I should not have left Russia…”

In 2000 Berezovsky learned on his own experience how Russian government operates and in what relation it is with Russian capitalism. All supports that he built for himself were, as the Englishmen say, feet of clay. Money not backed by administrative levers did not let him achieve the set goals. The main mistake of Berezovsky’s math, the illogical character of everything he tried to do was the overestimation of the role of money and underestimation of power of the administrative apparatus. This is the ground for a common myth that the oligarchs both in Russia or Ukraine have a determining influence on the government.

It is senseless to deny the connection between oligarchs and the state authorities, but there is no sense in exaggerating it either. In Ukrainian reality there was Pavlo Lazarenko, who thought that money determined everything. But things don’t work that way and soon he had a chance to learn it on his own.

Berezovsky tried to influence Putin’s Russia through neighbors. He supported Mikheil Saakashvili and Viktor Yushchenko, but he did not realize that no one would want to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for him. As a result, he became persona non grata in Tbilisi, Kyiv, and Riga.

Oligarchs are strong as long as they act in unison with the government. If their paths diverge, more often oligarchs lose a lot. And if, like Berezovsky, they try to resist the authorities, they lose everything.

The result of all the activities of Berezovsky was a letter he wrote to Putin. With apologies and requests. Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov told “Russia 24” TV channel that Berezovsky asked Putin for forgiveness and possible return to the country.

And it is not so important in terms of political life whether Berezovsky killed himself of died naturally. His death marked the end of the whole period in the history of Russia and, in a sense, a period in the history of its neighbors in CIS. He was the last of the Mohicans of the period of initial accumulation of capital, if you will, the wild capitalism.

Winston Churchill said that you can lose all the battles except the last and, thus, win the war. Boris Berezovsky won virtually every battle he fought in but lost the war.