Strongman, The

possible involvement of the FSB (see Chapter 1). Gusinsky’s deputy, Igor Malashenko, was told by the information minister, Mikhail Lesin, that NTV had now ‘crossed the line and were outlaws in their eyes’.
    From this moment, it seems, NTV was doomed. Gusinsky’s business empire, Media-Most, which owned NTV, was in deep financial trouble. In the 1990s it had borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to implement extravagant plans to extend its reach. It had even launched its own satellite, at huge expense, hoping that the emerging middle classes would soon buy NTV receivers and programming. Gusinsky was preparing to float the company on the New York stock market, to raise capital to repay the debts. But after the August 1998 crisis, those plans evaporated, as did the TV advertising market in Russia, and Media-Most found itself saddled with loans it could not repay. Its main creditor was the state-owned gas monopoly, Gazprom – and this gave the Kremlin great leverage when it decided to throttle Gusinsky. According to Kiselyov, Gusinsky had been in talks with Gazprom about restructuring the debt, but when Putin became president he ordered the gas company to demand immediate repayment of the entire debt – and, if Media-Most refused, to seize NTV’s assets. On 11 May, four days after Putin’s inauguration, dozens of armed and masked tax police and FSB troops stormed Media-Most’s headquarters. By the end of the day they had carted out hundreds of boxes of documents, cassettes and equipment. Malashenko described the raid as ‘purely political in character, an act of revenge and intimidation’.
    There was, perhaps, still a slim chance to survive. At around the same time, Malashenko received an offer directly from the Kremlin: fulfil certain conditions and the reprisals would stop. The conditions, according to Shenderovich, were: to stop investigating corruption in the Kremlin, to change their coverage of Chechnya and, above all, to ‘remove the “First Person” from Kukly ’ – in other words, Putin’s latex physiognomy had to disappear from the show.
    To Shenderovich, this was a red rag to a bull. He responded by writing a hilarious episode of Kukly that lampooned the edict itself. Since they could not show Putin, they showed a burning bush instead. Moses – in the form of Putin’s chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin – receives tablets from his invisible leader with the Kremlin’s ‘ten commandments’. At the end the leader is referred to as ‘ Gospod Bog (The Lord God), GB for short’ (which for every Russian means KGB). In English it sounds convoluted. In Russian, it could not have been more direct, or more provocative.
    Two weeks later, on 13 June, Gusinsky was arrested. Putin feigned complete innocence when asked about it by a television reporter. ‘It was unexpected for me,’ he said, barely able to stop a little smile playing on his lips. ‘I hope the authorities who made this decision – I suppose it was the prosecutor’s office, yes? – have good reasons to justify their action.’
    Gusinsky was given a choice: sell his media empire to Gazprom or face prosecution for large-scale fraud. It was blackmail. He agreed and fled the country. Russia’s freest media group was now under Kremlin control.
    The other big media tycoon, Boris Berezovsky, fared no better. He had been accused of fraud under the premiership of Primakov, but the charges were dropped when Putin became prime minister, and he was seen as by far the most powerful oligarch – with a media empire as well as massive industrial and commercial assets, including the oil company Sibneft and the airline Aeroflot. As he was gradually squeezed out of Putin’s inner circle, so his media became ever more critical. In June he criticised plans announced by Putin for a recentralisation of power, and the day after Gusinsky’s arrest the public prosecutor announced he was extending an investigation into Aeroflot’s finances. Berezovsky was suspected of fraud and money-laundering on a massive scale.
    Just before his election in March, Putin had pledged to outlaw the oligarchs: ‘Those people who fuse power and capital – there will be no oligarchs of this kind as a class.’ The phrase sent a chill down many spines, as it recalled Stalin’s policy of liquidating the kulaks, or rich peasants, ‘as a class’. What he objected to was the idea that wealth (especially fabulous, ill-gotten wealth) should render political influence.