# Boris Berezovsky The single most consequential figure of the first generation of [[Russian Oligarchy]] — the man who demonstrated that in post-Soviet Russia, media plus money could install a president, and who was then destroyed by the president he installed. Born in Moscow on **January 23, 1946**. He studied forestry and applied mathematics and spent nearly two decades in academia before founding the **Logovaz** car dealership in 1989, importing Mercedes and later distributing AvtoVAZ vehicles. From that base he moved into energy, media and airline assets through the rigged privatizations catalogued at [[Loans-for-Shares]], acquiring control of the oil company **Sibneft** with [[Roman Abramovich]] in the 1995–97 auctions. ## The kingmaker Two episodes are why he matters structurally rather than merely as a rich man. **1996 — the Yeltsin re-election.** Berezovsky and the other oligarchs pooled their money *and their television stations* behind a deeply unpopular [[Boris Yeltsin]]. He won. Berezovsky became deputy secretary of the Security Council and helped broker the settlement ending the first Chechen war. The precedent set was that concentrated media ownership could manufacture an electoral outcome — and that the people who did it would be paid in state assets. **1999 — choosing Putin.** As Yeltsin's health failed, Berezovsky was the informal head of "the Family," the Kremlin circle that selected a successor. They chose **[[Vladimir Putin]]**, an obscure security official. Yeltsin named him prime minister and heir in August 1999, and **ORT** — the main state channel Berezovsky had controlled de facto since 1994 — built his popularity. It is the cleanest case here of oligarchic media power choosing a head of state, and of that power being liquidated by its own choice within two years. ## The break and the exile Putin moved against the oligarchs and Yeltsin's court almost immediately. Berezovsky fled to Britain in late 2000 and was granted **asylum in 2003**; Russian extradition attempts failed. In 2007 he told *The Guardian* that force should be used to change the Russian regime, later clarifying that he meant a popular uprising of the Georgian and Ukrainian type. In **2012** he lost a **$5.1 billion** lawsuit against Abramovich over the Sibneft shares. The judge found him an unreliable witness and ordered him to pay $53 million in Abramovich's costs, leaving him in serious financial trouble. He was found dead at his home outside London in **March 2013**, aged 67. The cause was not clear; British police investigated and an inquest followed. Kremlin spokesman [[Dmitry Peskov]] said Berezovsky had recently written to Putin asking forgiveness and permission to return to Russia. > [!warning] The death is unresolved > No finding established the cause. He is one of several Putin critics in Britain to die in circumstances that were investigated and not conclusively explained — see [[Alexander Litvinenko]] — and this page does not assert a connection between those cases. ## Why it matters - **He is the template.** The sequence — buy media, install a leader, collect state assets, be expropriated by the leader — is the Russian oligarchic cycle in one biography. [[Mikhail Khodorkovsky]] is the other half of the lesson. - **ORT is the argument for why media capture is the decisive asset**, not the oil. The oil made him rich; the television made him a kingmaker. - **He was the subject of the reporting that got a journalist killed.** [[Paul Klebnikov]]'s *Godfather of the Kremlin* was the book-length investigation of Berezovsky; Klebnikov was shot dead in Moscow in 2004. ## See Also - [[Russian Oligarchy]] · [[Loans-for-Shares]] — the system he operated inside - [[Vladimir Putin]] · [[Boris Yeltsin]] · [[Roman Abramovich]] - [[Paul Klebnikov]] — who investigated him - [[Mikhail Khodorkovsky]] · [[Alexander Litvinenko]]