In spring 2024, the Navalny Team released its first investigative film since the death of its founder, Alexey Navalny. Titled The Traitors, the film focused on the history of privatizing Soviet industry and natural resources in the 1990s. At its center was an alliance formed during this privatization by liberal economists in the government, senior officials, advisors to the presidential administration (including the informal ones), and newly minted “oligarchs”. Each of the three episodes of the film, released on YouTube, was watched by millions. The film faced many accusations in the Russian public arena: of being incomplete, untimely, and politically imprudent. Is reassessment of the 1990s relevant today, when the spirit of liberal reformism has been replaced by imperial militarism, and most of the film’s protagonists have emigrated or retired?
This question is inextricably followed by another one: who and in what way did Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich, or Mikhail Khodorkovsky betray, having amassed billion-dollar fortunes through privatization in Russia? At what point and in what context could these individuals, referred to as oligarchs for a reason, find themselves on the same side as opposition politicians or ordinary viewers of Russian YouTube? This shared context of “betrayal” embodies the myth of the tragic defeat of the liberating revolution of the 1990s. According to this myth, the victors are state officials, notably emphasizing the siloviks (security officers) and nomenklatura (Soviet bureaucratic elite). The losers in this case are not only the citizens of the Russian Federation, who lost their democratic freedoms, but also major entrepreneurs who were demonstratively coerced into subordination in the early 2000s.
In subsequent decades, these entrepreneurs would finance non-governmental projects: from opposition mass media and academic publishing to contemporary art museums and filmmaking. Then, as the Kremlin took control over all branches of power–newspapers, TV channels, and industrial corporations–liberal criticism of government inefficiency would subsequently merge with the poignancy of lost civil liberties.
The myth of the political failure of the liberal project of the 1990s is primarily upheld by the representatives of the Yeltsin-era elite themselves. One needs to read their texts to gauge the strength of this ideological construct. In their writing, there is the bitterness of defeat, attempts to learn from mistakes, and of course, searches for scapegoats—primarily traitors within their own ranks. From their memoirs, manifestos and even novels, one can also gain insight into which political project businessmen, reformers, and officials of the 1990s were leaning towards.
Napoleon, Berezovsky and Soviet Scholars
In the first part of Traitors, Maria Pevchikh, one of the film’s coauthors, quotes from the book The Time of Berezovsky. The book is an ambitious attempt by billionaire Petr Aven to summarize the first two decades of Russian history in dialogue with 20 witnesses and prominent actors of that era. The book, mostly compiled from confidential conversations among old acquaintances, includes two narratives. On one hand, it is a biographical narrative about Boris Berezovsky, who embodied the anomalous vertical mobility of the early post-Soviet entrepreneurs; on the other hand, it reflects Aven’s own thoughts on privatization and maneuvers that ensured continuity of power for then-President Boris Yeltsin, his circle, and the loyal business elite.
Berezovsky’s biography is put together from scattered anecdotes from his former partners, subordinates, or opponents. Elisabeth Schimpfössl noted that representatives of the Russian bourgeoisie prefer to think of themselves as talented and strong-willed self-made men, yet their incredible enrichment after the collapse of the USSR was aided by their level of education, symbolic capital, and the connections of their privileged families. Berezovsky turns out to be a typical example. He was born in Moscow into the family of the chief engineer of the Butovo gas-silicate plant and a researcher at the Pediatrics Institute, the Academy of Sciences. He graduated from a school with advanced studies in English and the Mechanics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow State University. The future oligarch managed to seize control of the largest automobile plant, AvtoVAZ, thanks to his connections with the plant’s management and the Moscow Institute of Management Issues, where he wrote his doctoral thesis. Incidentally, Oleg Aven, the father of the book’s author, headed a laboratory at this same Institute.
However, Petr Aven and his interlocutors do not put enough emphasis on the social circumstances of Berezovsky’s rise or his class, preferring to focus on his character traits. They frequently recall his energy, courage, persuasion skills, irresponsible audacity, and emotional deafness combined with limitless sociability. Aven even arrives at the classic definition of entrepreneurial virtue, seemingly borrowed from classical works on economic sociology into the neoliberal common sense of the Russian oligarchy: “[Berezovsky] possessed the qualities of a charismatic leader … The same was true for Napoleon.” There are numerous such comparisons in the book. However, fragmentary testimonies portray the businessman’s self-assurance in a comic, rather than heroic way. For instance, his falling asleep during a meeting with the mayor of St. Petersburg or giving an interview to the Guardian about preparing for a military coup.
Classical academic studies of entrepreneurship acknowledged that the necessity to quickly manage people and resources (notably, people as resources) inevitably distances entrepreneurs from common ethical norms. The neoliberal theory hinges on this compromise in the name of efficiency. Aven interprets the demand for such moral autonomy not economically, but philosophically—as the zeitgeist that resonated well with Berezovsky’s amorality: “There was something in that era that encouraged the absence of scruples, giving totally unscrupulous individuals the opportunity to thrive.”
The author attempts to trace the reasons for Berezovsky’s lack of principles in a dialogue with another former employee of the Institute of Management Issues, billionaire investor Leonid Boguslavsky. Aven talks about the late Soviet academic circles from which Berezovsky emerged. According to Aven, Soviet academics fostered “double standards,” “incongruity of a career with perseverance and talent,” “respect for brute force,” and a peculiar entrepreneurial spirit. Having to compete for scarce resources, such as quotas for trips to university health resorts and foreign business trips, and advancement on the career ladder in the absence of an academic market, corrupted Soviet scientists. Instead of focusing solely on science, many of them learned how to network and exchange resources to their advantage. One could proudly argue that the Soviet Academy trained personnel for future transition to a market economy. Paradoxically, Petr Aven, one of the architects of market reforms, gives a negative assessment of this process. Without developing moral immunity, it was precisely the scientific researchers, whose youth coincided with the era of stagnation, who later engaged in, as Aven puts it, “cynical dismantling of the country.”
In this, Aven sharply disagrees with Yuliy Dubov, another former research fellow, Berezovsky’s deputy at LogoVAZ. In 1999, Dubov published The Large Share, a novel, based on the establishment of LogoVAZ. Later, director Pavel Lungin would film the drama Tycoon based on it with Berezovsky’s money. A lively analysis of Berezovsky’s enrichment schemes and action scenes in the book only underscore the author’s melancholic tone. For him, the growth of Berezovsky’s empire is coupled with the inevitable breakup of a friendly circle of academic colleagues. The novel opens with a prequel scene from a university countryside school in the late 1970s. The unsuitability of Soviet scientists to manage large businesses episode by episode turns into personal tragedies. In the book’s finale, Platon, Berezovsky’s character, who has lost all his friends and partners, is being lectured “on politics and business” by a KGB officer who helps him. The key but rambling monologue of the politically astute silovik can be reduced to one idea: both in politics and in business, only a vertical management model seems to work. But the intellectuals with their independent thinking and lack of knowledge of street smarts are completely unsuited to it.
Several decades after the publication of the book, Dubov admitted that he considered the conversation scene between the KGB officer and the entrepreneur key: “[T]he book is about how this business camaraderie, which seemed so carefree, turns out to be … not very viable. And it gives way to a menacing era, with independence and initiative not overly encouraged.” Such a dismal interpretation fits well into the myth of the Soviet nomenklatura’s defeat over democratic idealists in the 1990s and siloviks over independent business elites in the 2000s. This version of post-Soviet history glorifies its first decade nostalgically as a time of freedom, “albeit reckless and even dangerous”: the age of cultural discoveries, and “incredible energy.”
Moral revision against statist pragmatism
Unlike Dubov, who had to emigrate to London in the 2000s, equally successful in the Putin era, Aven avoids both dismal and triumphal tones. Rather, he offers a cautious moral revision of the 1990s period, inviting his subjects to revisit their mistakes—mistakes made not out of ignorance but out of haste to reform the country as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Berezovsky’s figure fits well here, allowing the chronicler to acknowledge a certain collective guilt of the business elite but leaving the most despicable actions on the conscience of the deceased entrepreneur. Aven repeatedly points out Berezovsky’s enduring immorality, irrationality, and flamboyance (“Berezovsky took after Sakharov, who had taken after Nietzsche”). These personal qualities, combined with a disdain for democracy, repeatedly led him to excesses—thus, during privatization, he tried to seize too much at too low a price; he did not hesitate to resort to outright manipulations to preserve Yeltsin’s regime in the 1996 and 1999 elections. “It was a profound delusion thinking that the end justifies the means,” laments Aven.
Not all of Aven’s interlocutors eagerly support him in the revision of means and ends. Billionaire Yuri Shefler, who in the 1990s acquired the rights to vodka Stolichnaya and Moskovskaya brands, recalls in a conversation with the author that only the boldest ones were not afraid to “take over” enterprises in the absence of a functioning market. “It was a positive situation for the country, as the people capable of making tough decisions came together at that time,” says Andrey Vasilyev, then deputy general producer of ORT TV channel. He refers to the sudden alliance between Berezovsky and media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky, who fought for assets of the state and competed for influence on the political elite (the former actually owned the main state television channel, ORT; the latter owned another popular television channel, NTV). Despite their rivalry, they joined forces before the 1996 presidential elections to prevent the victory of Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. At the time of his nomination for the elections, Zyuganov was already outstripping the unpopular Yeltsin in polls. Like the coordinated campaign by the owners of the two main federal television channels in support of Yeltsin, the loans-for-shares auctions of 1995, which resulted in a narrow circle of entrepreneurs getting hold of major industrial, oil and gas, and infrastructure companies from the state at non-market prices with notional participation of the population, were a tactical move to prevent power from going to Zyuganov, recalls Anatoly Chubais.
Chubais, who oversaw privatization as part of Yegor Gaidar’s reform team and headed Yeltsin’s election campaign headquarters in the 1996 elections, emerges as the main antagonist in the book. Toward the end of the book, Aven engages Chubais in a dialogue about goals and means, accusing him of the wrongdoings during the 90s—privatization deliberately done wrongly and unfairly, gaining centralized control of the media and being ready to limit political freedom. Chubais, at that time the head of the state corporation Rusnano Group, responds from the standpoint of a statesman. In response, Chubais suggests essentially abandoning the universal formulas of liberalism ‘done in the right way.’
Anatoly Chubais was never known for public charm, but compared to his opponent, his version of 1990s history does not differ greatly from his way of living. Drawing on almost 30 years of experience in government, the reformer states to his former colleague that the task of building a market economy was successfully achieved. However, according to him, “25 intellectual boys” were not up to the job of “the political and spiritual transformation of the country”; it would take much more time. Having served as head of the presidential administration under both Yeltsin and Putin, Alexander Voloshin echoes Chubais. From his perspective, it was Putin who managed, for instance, to complete what his predecessor lacked public support for: the market reform of agricultural land use in 2002 (“What could be more significant than changing land relations?”). A year earlier, he had also adopted a new up-to-date Labor Code.
The political imagination of reformers and oligarchs
The Time of Berezovsky does not propose an alternative to the corrupt morals of the characters, who would achieve their goals by dirty means. Perhaps auctions should have been conducted more fairly, preventing buyers from undervaluing assets? Perhaps freedom of speech, which fell victim to oligarchic wars through their media, could have been preserved by handing over all major media to a consortium of prominent entrepreneurs? The author considers “political and economic freedoms” the only correct direction and at the same time finds the idea of introducing qualifications for voters rather “practical”.
Interestingly, Augusto Pinochet appears in the book more frequently than any other political reference. The infamous Chilean general overthrew a democratically elected government and suspended elections for the sake of an efficient transition to a market economy. He also sanctioned the repression of politically unreliable Chileans. During Pinochet’s rule, at least 3,000 people were killed, and another 40,000 were imprisoned, with torture widely used by police and security services against them. Aven uses the past tense when admiring Pinochet, yet frequently emphasizes the principled stance of the captain-general in fighting corruption. By the way, Berezovsky was never a fan of Pinochet, according to his acquaintances. He was more inspired by the example of Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who won the Polish elections as a social democrat but completed neoliberal reforms in the country.
Aven described a much more expansive program of liberal development for Russia in his article for the Kommersant newspaper on 29 February 2000. The issue came out just under a month before the presidential elections, in which Vladimir Putin would garner 51.95% of the votes. In the article, however, the businessman already referred to him as the new president and posed several questions to him about transforming the country. Aven’s advice boils down to Russia’s chronically lacking morality, without which no reforms will ensure sustainable economic growth. Relying on the Church is too late; the intellectuals have failed miserably, and businessmen have played a detrimental role as “tempter snakes” in post-Soviet history. Therefore, Aven writes, “If anything could be a moral authority in modern Russian society, it would be supreme power.”
According to Aven, the main mission of the president is to set a “moral standard” for a disturbed society, which can be done by demonstrating firm principles, primarily in the economic domain. Among these, the author, a former academic economist and Minister of Foreign Economic Relations in Gaidar’s government, includes an austerity policy, that is renouncing deficit financing of the state budget through issuing additional money, ideally preventing such deficits altogether. Thus, Aven calls on the future leader to abandon salary indexation, the average level of which in the country in 1999 hovered around $60 per month, and to cease obstructing capital movements abroad. Here, Pinochet also features—as an example of how governments in “young democracies” sometimes must “walk a fine line” to protect “basic institutions.” This is quite logical, considering that the economic principles described by the author were most fully formulated by representatives of the Chicago School of Economics, whose graduates led reforms in Chile under military rule.
The article by Aven was published in a newspaper owned by Berezovsky when the latter was at the peak of his power. Within a few months of the new president’s inauguration, Berezovsky began publicly criticizing his decisions. In 2002, stripped of ORT TV Channel and Sibneft shares, he released his Manifesto on Russian Liberalism. The text differs from Aven‘s in style (a small manifesto filled with eclectic epigraphs and permissive theological hypotheses). Moreover, it focuses on the political rather than the economic structure of the country and offers a specific understanding of the balance of power in a liberal society.
Addressing the “liberals of Russia” seeking “common ground,” Berezovsky first criticized Vladimir Putin’s decree on the creation of seven federal districts. He also became critical of senior officials, who suddenly voiced concepts such as “dictatorship of law” and “the power vertical.” However, in the main text of the manifesto, the author engaged in a dialogue with the authorities and set forth his proposal—to rely on “liberal patriots” who understood the difference between true freedom, based on internal ethical constraints, and irresponsible “license.” The state should not hinder these strong individuals, as “the strong will help the weak.” In addition to this call, Berezovsky proposed Russia’s transition to a confederation, a renunciation of wars of aggression, and gradual replacement of representative power with direct democracy through referendums.
The Manifesto turned out to be the swan song of Russian liberalism in the 1990s. Shortly after its publication, Berezovsky was expelled from the party Liberal Russia which he had funded. Later, Berezovsky’s opponents in the party leadership, Vladimir Golovlev and Sergei Yushenkov, were killed. The liberal parliamentary faction Union of Right Forces failed to achieve the five percent threshold in the elections to the Fourth State Duma, Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested as part of the Yukos case. In 2003, the book History of Liberalism in Russia was published privately. It included Berezovsky‘s Manifesto, Khodorkovsky’s prison message on the crisis of liberalism, and a conservative response from Alexander Prokhanov. The collection, unseen by anyone, was supposedly published as a gift edition with a print run of 300 copies, translated into English, Old Slavonic, and Hebrew, “referring to the idea of the Tower of Babel as the first liberal experience in the world.”
Khodorkovsky‘s text on the crisis of liberalism was not publicly available until March 2004, when it was published in the Vedomosti newspaper. In it, Khodorkovsky, who was under investigation at the time, notes the surrender of liberals who “deceived 90% of the people” and ignored the necessity of “social peace.” He proposes that similarly socially active actors with liberal views acknowledge their “moral and historical” guilt and reflect on their mistakes. Khodorkovsky also takes responsibility for large businessmen, who aided “liberal rulers” in their mistakes and lies, fostering bureaucratic lawlessness and suppressing judicial autonomy.
Speaking of his departure from the world of business, he roguishly exposes the ideology of the entrepreneurial elite: “Business … is not drawn to the idea of freedom, it always puts up with the current regime. And it primarily desires protection—from civil society and hired employees.” However, Khodorkovsky does not abandon his liberal views; he simply calls for accepting the fact that the liberal project in Russia can only succeed with national interests in mind. He also urges an end to doubts about the legitimacy of the president, and a final affirmation of the results of privatization via taxes and other instruments, “possibly not so agreeable for major business owners”.
After Boris Berezovsky’s death, his biographer Yuri Felshtinsky published in Russian Notes by the Hanged Man—the result of nearly 15 years of conversations with the entrepreneur, presented as the late man’s self-portrait. The text combines cynical frankness with the same melancholic idealism. Berezovsky insists that since purchasing ORT TV Channel shares in 1994, he abandoned business for politics, taking on the role of representing the elite’s interests, which determined the country’s political direction: “Capital hires power to work. This is precisely what elections are.”
The businessman fulfilled his political mission: by 1998, a “real revolution” had taken place in the country. As in any revolution, according to Berezovsky, in essence, it was about the redistribution of property. The problem was the reformers’ inability to develop a national idea and cease the “further transformations of Russia”. Berezovsky’s own options for the idea and the steps for its implementation vary greatly, but he clearly saw the narrow-mindedness of the elites who conducted the liberal revolution: “The return could be made to an imperial ideology, which would be based on Russian nationalism. But not to communism.” The only alternative was to continue the liberal path. The author sometimes is confused in specific directions of this path, at times calling for abandonment of the idea of a multipolar world, then urging “finding faith” and engaging in enlightenment to re-educate “free” people into “liberated” ones. The Notes by the Hanged Man also touches upon Russia’s transition to a confederal model. Apparently, this idea came to Berezovsky’s mind before his Manifesto was published. Ironically, his political thinking turns out to be richer than that of banker and economist Aven, who dedicated a book to him. These political ideas, however, could have been driven by Berezovsky’s pragmatic needs. For years he had been building a network of relationships with regional elites and once persuaded those governors he knew to support Putin at his first elections. The newly minted president, however, jeopardized Berezovsky’s position as a negotiator by almost immediately proclaiming a course to build a “vertical of power.”
After revolution
The post-revolutionary melancholy is a common tone in the texts of the 1990s figures, whether written in a Chita prison, London exile, French resort, or a Moscow business center. Neither Khodorkovsky, nor Aven, Berezovsky, nor even Chubais. denies the abuses characterizing privatization or the 1996 presidential elections. However, they prefer to consider them as partial mistakes on an overall correct path. The anti-democratic alliance of large capital and the presidential administration is either a reason for pride or moral reflection for its architects. In this sense, the Navalny Team’s film hardly conveyed anything new, as most of the facts presented in it have long been publicly acknowledged, even by those whose reputations the film purportedly attacks. Yet why has the critical reflection of insiders not shattered the myth of liberals’ defeat in the battle with the state?
Perhaps the answer lies in the decades-long colossal dependence of the Russian public sphere on the beneficiaries of the 1990s. While from Putin’s first term onwards, the state focused on consolidating traditional mass media (TV channels, radio stations, newspapers), businessmen and their related holdings and foundations created new digital media (for instance, Alexander Mamut and his Afisha-Rambler, Alexander Vinokurov and the TV Rain channel, Mikhail Prokhorov and the Snob project), substantial intellectual journals (Irina Prokhorova and New Literary Observer), contemporary art museums (Roman Abramovich and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Leonid Mikhelson and V-A-C), supported universities, launched scientific awards (Boris Zimin and his Dynasty foundation), educational projects (Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the Open University), sponsored academic publishing (the Gaidar Institute publishing house), cinema (Kinoprime by Roman Abramovich), and many other intellectual domains. Whether due to regime evolution or inertia, this autonomous public sphere managed to exist for over 20 years, during which intellectual workers grew accustomed to their interests aligning with those of large capital.
The problem with the myth of the failure of the 1990s lies in the fact that there was no defeat. On the contrary, there was a resounding victory for a specific political-economic project. Its key principles were succinctly outlined by Aven in his text on economic growth and societal morality: no budget deficits regardless of citizens’ needs, freedom of capital movement, (mostly towards offshore destinations), and adherence to international debt obligations. The list should further include privatization of state enterprises, protection of employers’ rights over workers’, reduction of social benefits, and normalization of inequality—fundamental tools of the neoliberal governance model. Russia embraced this model in the 1990s and kept following it into the protracted Putin era, introducing a flat income tax rate of 13%, balancing a deficit-free budget no matter the lowest minimum wage in Europe, and deferring oil windfalls to avoid inflation from investments in obsolete infrastructure. It completely quelled labor protests and encouraged citizens to prioritize personal interests and disdain politics. The Kremlin eventually realized that in order to maintain any democratic legitimacy for this undemocratic project, it made sense to abandon the general glamorization of global capitalism in favor of social conservatism and geopolitical hostility. Russia was hardly the first to come up with it; here, Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher come to mind as paradigmatic “liberal revolutionaries.”
In the journalism that has long perpetuated the myth of liberalism’s defeat, the “conservative turn” of the Russian state is firmly linked to Putin. However, novels, memoirs, and manifestos from the elites of the 1990s rightly indicate the arbitrariness of this figure, picked from a pool of non-public bureaucrats and confirmed in office by its representatives. In all the aforementioned texts, the state inevitably emerges as the sole guarantor of revolutionary gains—with its vertical management and the occasional need to act “brazenly” in order to “defend basic institutions.” Bitterness over suppressed civil liberties along the way is expressed solely in moral terms—some oligarchs, reformers, and most certainly, the “people” lacked integrity. The political horizon of the slightly disillusioned actors of the 1990s hinges on finding a “national idea,” observing “national interests,” teaching personal responsibility and financial discipline, and other techniques of the state’s choosing. Sadly, there are no third parties in this protracted dialogue between the owners’ class and the state apparatus.
Discussing the abuse of reformers and oligarchs offers a chance to escape the mythological deadlock in which the Russian public sphere has languished for decades. To seize this opportunity, one must resist the temptation offered by the Traitors film’s authors. A detective story exposing the main actors of the era, their selfish motives, and backroom agreements, is engaging. However, it leaves us locked in moral-legal discourse, where the protagonists of the film have long been settled. Truly understanding the liberal revolution of the 1990s and its ramifications for today’s Russia can only occur through a political review of its principles and foundations. To do so, opposition politicians and commentators as well as the rest of us must make a determined effort to part with the flattering illusion of comradeship with the billionaire class.
