Moscow Times October 16, 2002 The Busy Specter of Berezovsky By Yulia Latynina
Boris Berezovsky can't catch a break. First he had to hotfoot it to London to escape the very regime that he brought to power. Now he has been drummed out of his own political party, Liberal Russia, for giving an interview to the ultra-right newspaper Zavtra and proposing to fund the nationalist opposition.
Berezovsky summed up his intention to support the nationalists by saying: "I don't know of anyone ever having turned down an offer of money."
Alexander Prokhanov, editor of Zavtra and co-chairman of the Popular Patriotic Union of Russia, summed up his intention to take money from the cursed oligarch Berezovsky by saying: "Berezovsky's money is not his own. It's your money. You should thank us for seeing to it that this money will once more be used to benefit you and our movement. We are merely expropriating this money by means of a complicated political scheme."
>From a liberal standpoint, Berezovsky has the right to give money to
whomever
he likes, even the Gay Slavs movement. But Russian liberals have their own
notion of liberalism, especially when they sense that their sponsor is ready
to abandon them in favor of a more promising competitor.
Russia deserves not only its rulers. It also deserves its political opposition. Berezovsky's party brought together some truly unique personalities. The late co-chairman of Liberal Russia, Vladimir Golovlyov, was known in the political beau monde for turning a criminal investigation into his activities as regional privatization chief in Chelyabinsk in 1991-92 into an instrument for blackmail. For the last year and a half of his life, Golovlyov made the rounds of the high and mighty, from Yegor Gaidar to Anatoly Chubais, demanding a job here, a power plant there. "If you refuse," he would say, "I will testify that you were my accomplice."
Golovlyov was Liberal Russia's last pragmatist.
What comes next is no mystery. You're not likely to find many people in Russia eager to use something that Berezovsky has used already, be it a handkerchief, a condom or the Liberal Russia party.
In the end, the party will die off and Berezovsky will survive. In fact, everything is playing into Berezovsky's hands. After Golovlyov was murdered and the Justice Ministry blocked Liberal Russia's registration, there was really only one thing left to do -- drop the party outside the Kremlin gates and shout: "They've killed democracy!"
Everything's coming up roses for the Kremlin as well. Berezovsky still hadn't given the Communists a kopeck when die-hard pro-government deputies in the State Duma started saying that the Communists were now in Berezovsky's pocket.
Berezovsky is seen in Russia as the devil incarnate. This helps to explain why, on the day his party's registration was blocked, the State Duma was rife with rumors that the oligarch was not only in Moscow, but in the building. A similar rumor had it that Berezovsky would attend the Russian premiere of the movie "Oligarch."
Berezovsky is in London, but his specter roams across Russia. It is indispensible to the Kremlin, just as the ghost of Hamlet's father was indispensible to Shakespeare for the proper structure of his plot.
Berezovsky's ghost cannot be seen leading some miniature liberal pug dog around on a leash. That would be unseemly. Berezovsky's ghost merits nothing less than a hound of the Baskervilles --the national-patriotic opposition. The two will find one another in the end. Berezovsky needs the nationalists to shore up his own demonic reputation. And Kremlin political operatives want this marriage to happen in order to frighten the president with a political Molotov cocktail, an explosive mixture of Berezovsky and the Communists.
Yulia Latynina is author and host of "Yest Mneniye" on TVS.
_________________________________________________________________ Surf the Web without missing calls! Get MSN Broadband. http://resourcecenter.msn.com/access/plans/freeactivation.asp