Tycoon who Punctured the President:
New Kremlin Regime Takes Its 'First Political Prisoner'
Ian Traynor in Moscow

The Guardian
June 15, 2000

The buff-coloured walls of the 18th-century fortress that is Moscow's notorious Butyrka prison have harboured many a celebrated inmate down the centuries. The rebel poet Vladimir Mayakovsky did time there alongside other old insurrectionary Bolsheviks.

The tsar also incarcerated Lenin's sidekick, Felix Dzerzhinsky, in Butyrka. Dzerzhinsky went on to found what became the KGB, which then put Alexander Solzhenitsyn behind Butyrka's barbed wire and iron bars. The overcrowding in the prison is such that the inmates take turns to sleep. And yesterday, sharing a cell with a counterfeiter and a suspected embezzler - "decent people", said a justice ministry spokesman - Vladimir Gusinsky became the latest high-profile inmate of Butyrka and, in the words of a Moscow journalist, "the first political prisoner of Putin's Russia".

Wheeling and dealing his way to a colossal fortune during the past decade through the real estate business, banking, and the building of Russia's only independent media empire, Vladimir Gusinsky seems an unlikely candidate for political martyrdom.

Nonetheless, his fate is now intimately bound up with the prospects for media freedom and civil liberties in a Russia which is at a crossroads. Mr Gusinsky's detention is a defining moment for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, only a month after he was inaugurated in the Kremlin.

"Putin has to decide where Russia belongs. Most Russians believe our natural allies are in the west," Mr Gusinsky told a small group of foreign reporters earlier this month at the lavish headquarters of his Media-Most empire, which had recently been raided by paramilitary "tax police" in black balaclavas.

In the past decade, Mr Gusinsky has been a central player in building the new Russia that has now turned against him. He is an "oligarch", one of the notorious band of fabulously wealthy businessmen who are loathed by ordinary Russians for plundering national assets during the lawless Yeltsin years.

He started small, as a provin cial theatre director in the early 1980s, then as an illegal commercial taxi driver in Moscow before starting a small metal-working firm. In the early 90s, he moved into banking and property.

He used his fortune to found NTV, Russia's biggest private television channel, and the hard-hitting daily newspaper, Segodnya, in 1993. He also launched a glossy weekly news magazine, Itogi, in partnership with Newsweek.

In contrast to the fortunes of other Russian oligarchs, Mr Gusinsky's is based not on manipulation of Russia's natural resources and heavy industry, but on the forward-looking industries of media, electronics, satellite broadcasting and the internet. He attracts and employs the brightest and the best in Russian journalism.

Deploying his media resources, he helped Boris Yeltsin win a second presidential term - against the odds - in 1996. But the 47-year-old media mogul has been a thorn in the flesh of the ruling clan throughout Mr Putin's rapid rise to power in the past year. Every Sunday night his NTV channel lampoons Mr Putin, Kremlin bigshots, the entire political class with the silicone puppets and absurd escapades of Kukly - Russia's "Spitting Images". It's popular, it's hilarious and it annoys Mr Putin no end.

The government had been pressing the channel for the past month to remove the Putin puppet from the show.

Every night NTV's news punctures the anodyne claims of Russian triumphs in Chechnya and queries the official version of casualty figures. Every week Mr Gusinsky's Itogi magazine and Segodnya newspaper purvey more revelations of sleaze and corruption among the high and mighty.

When the US president, Bill Clinton, came to Moscow last week for his first summit with Mr Putin, he made a point of going on Mr Gusinsky's radio station for a phone-in. The Kremlin was outraged - but Mr Gusinsky has many friends in the west. He is also an Israeli citizen and a powerful figure in the World Jewish Congress, heading its Russian wing.

Mr Putin yesterday denied there was any "political aspect" to the case, insisting that the law would take its course. If he believes that, he is the only person in Moscow who does.

"Revenge," said ex-president Mikhail Gorbachev. "An attempt to frighten the public and the media." Even Sergei Dorenko, TV star, Putin propagandist and Gusinsky enemy, said the case was "exclusively political".

Mr Gusinsky is the sole oligarch to oppose Mr Putin publicly and consistently. And he is the only one to have ended up in the overcrowded squalor of the jail commissioned by Catherine the Great in 1771.