BORIS BEREZOVSKY

By Paul Quinn-Judge

There are Russian businessmen richer than Boris Berezovsky but few with more political clout. More than anyone else in Russia today, Berezovsky personifies the way two dark spheres--the often violent world of Big Business and the secretive nature of Kremlin politics--intersect. Confidants of President Boris Yeltsin have come and gone, but Berezovsky's influence has not waned.

Since late last year, Berezovsky has been deputy secretary of Russia's security council, the top-level body that coordinates defense and security issues. He will play a major role if Yeltsin's continuing ill health leads to a political crisis. If the Russian political establishment ever concludes that the President is too infirm to remain in office, Berezovsky will be intimately involved in that decision.

A mathematician by training, Berezovsky, 51, entered private enterprise in the late 1980s by founding Logovaz, now Russia's largest car dealer. Today his interests include banking, oil, TV broadcasting and airlines. More than his peers, Berezovsky has used his now considerable wealth to make friends in high places: his financial support was crucial to Yeltsin's against-the-odds re-election last year.

Berezovsky made his fortune fast in a dangerous world--where cars explode (his own car blew up in 1994 with him in it), where business associates, friendly or otherwise, are assassinated by hired killers. A Westerner who gave a dinner for Berezovsky says his bodyguards were posted on each floor of her nine-story apartment block. Berezovsky has publicly been accused of complicity in several murders; he denies all this and claims that in murder plots, he is always the target, not the villain.

Diplomats say in private that he questions the prevailing wisdom in the Russian leadership, which holds that the main challenge to Russia comes from the West and nato's enlargement. Berezovsky is said to argue that the real long-term threat to Russia comes from the Islamic world.

--By Paul Quinn-Judge