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Putin Needs an Enemy After Berezovsky’s Death

Daily Beast

After Boris Berezovsky’s death, Vladimir Putin has a problem—who will play the villain to make him look like a superhero? Peter Pomerantsev reports.

If Vladimir Putin didn’t have exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky as an enemy, the joke over the last decade in Moscow went, he would have needed to invent him. In the Kremlin narrative Berezovsky was the ideal caricature Penguin to Putin’s Batman: the evil Jewish schemer in his London palace looking to usurp good blonde Tsar Vlad. Whenever Putin had a problem state media would pin it on Berezovsky: Chechen terrorists have kidnapped a school in the Caucuses? Berezovsky is behind it. Pussy Riot? Berezovsky stooges.

Berezovsky became the symbol of the ideology Putin was presented as the antithesis of: the representative of the wild ’90s of oligarchs and Yeltsin and destitution, as opposed to the “stable” Putin era. Berezovsky was always the perfect foil, reveling in his role as the great schemer, claiming from his London exile he was behind the revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, that he would do anything to get rid of Putin. For the last half decade at least, once his last allies in the Russian parliament had been sidelined, it’s unclear whether he had much influence left in Russia at all. So both sides played along: the Kremlin pretending Berezovsky was an all-powerful master of darkness, the other continuing to act as if he were.

There were always rumors, typically conspiratorial for Moscow, that Berezovsky was in fact working with Putin, the two playing out their roles in a choreographed dance. This is hugely dubious, but there was something distinctly theatrical about their sparring, two sides of one performance. Now Berezovsky is dead the Kremlin is faced with a problem: Who will fill the role of uber-baddie to Putin’s goodie?
The easiest thing would be to pluck another exiled oligarch out of the sin bin. Vladimir Gusinsky, the exiled 1990s media magnate, is still around. Jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s allies are still at liberty in the West and make no secret of their grudge against the Kremlin. The problem for Putin is that his narrative as the brave warrior against oligarchical corruption has broken down. His rule is perceived to be just as, if not more, corrupt than the ’90s. His parliamentary party, United Russia, is nicknamed the “party of crooks and thieves.” Tales of his and his best friends’ yachts and castles are ubiquitous.