In Insight, Andrei Piontkovsky has an interesting article comparing Boris Berezovsky and Leon Trotsky - both when in exile claimed undemonstrably wide support inside Russia. But there the similarity ends. Piontkovsky has always characterized Berezovsky as “acting as an extremely valuable foreign agent for Putin by trying to ‘head,’ and thereby discrediting, any opposition to Putin’s regime.”
From the article’s conclusion:
Once he was in emigration, Berezovsky began claiming, and clearly knew what he was talking about, that these explosions were the work not of Chechens but of the Russian authorities. In the process, he omitted to mention who was effectively ruling Russia in the autumn of 1999. The highest authority in the land was the team in charge of “Operation Successor,” (Berezovsky, Voloshin, Yumashev, Diachenko) who were acting on behalf of an incapable President Boris Yeltsin. By means of the incursion of Basaev and Hattab in Dagestan, the blowing up of apartments in Russian cities, and the destructive war in Chechnya, they and their television hit men ushered into the presidency a certain Vladimir Putin. At the time, Putin was totally unknown and unable to take any independent decisions. Their aim was to avert a takeover of the Kremlin by the rival clan of Luzhkov and Primakov, which threatened their business interests.
The shameful secret of how the Putin regime was conceived binds Putin and Berezovsky together with a single chain. It seems strange that they fail to understand this. Or perhaps they know it full well, and that is why they pass the ball to each other so deftly.
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