In 1999, the late Boris Berezovsky had lunch with the editor and senior journalists of the FT. I had already met him in Moscow on several occasions. Berezovsky had just played a role in persuading those close to Boris Yeltsin to appoint Vladimir Putin, then head of the FSB, Russia’s security service (whom Berezovsky had known when Putin was deputy mayor of St Petersburg), to be prime minister and his successor as president. “Why”, I asked, “did you trust a former KGB agent with power?” I have long remembered his reply: “Russia”, he said, was “now a capitalist country. In capitalist countries, capitalists hold power.”
My jaw metaphorically dropped. Berezovsky was an intelligent, ruthless and cynical man, who had lived much of his life in the Soviet Union. He was also a Russian, who knew Russia’s brutal history. Yet he appeared to believe Marxist claptrap about where power would lie in supposedly “capitalist” Russia. Of course, he was wrong. Power lay in the hands of the man in the Kremlin, where it always had. Perhaps I am too harsh on him. Western leaders seem to think that sanctions on Russian oligarchs might influence Putin. I have no idea why.
In any case, within a year of Putin’s accession, Berezovsky, who had become a severe critic, had been driven out of Russia to the UK. In 2013, he died, either by suicide or by murder.