I. A Divorce

The Rolls Building, a new concrete-and-glass super-courthouse, opened off Fetter Lane, in London, on October 3 of last year. At nine that morning, a dozen and a half clerks began wheeling boxes of pre-trial testimony and other documents into Courtroom 26, where the first case in the building’s history was to be heard. About 30 computer monitors had been set up, each readied for one of the participating lawyers who began to fill the room. In the back, a few rows of chairs were reserved for the press and public. There were not nearly enough, and many reporters scrambled unsuccessfully for a seat. The case in Courtroom 26 fell under the jurisdiction of the commercial court, and the combatants were two of the world’s most controversial Russian oligarchs, both now living in Britain.

At 10:05 a.m. the younger of the two men walked in, causing a small commotion. Roman Abramovich, 46, is the third-wealthiest man in the United Kingdom. He was wearing a blue suit, a white shirt, and a light-blue tie; his gray beard was neatly trimmed to a length that just barely made it a beard, rather than an oversight. Abramovich, whose fortune is estimated at $12.1 billion, leads a heavily guarded life in every sense. British tabloids have placed the size of his security force at 40. He is secretive and shy. At the same time, his taste for ostentation makes him impossible not to notice. He owns the world’s largest yacht, the nearly 560-foot *Eclipse,*which is equipped with two helipads, a submarine, and, reportedly, a missile-defense system. He also owns a Boeing 767 and the Chelsea football club. Ever since buying Chelsea, in 2003, Abramovich has spent most of his time in Britain, living on an estate in West Sussex (formerly owned by the Australian media baron Kerry Packer and Jordan’s King Hussein) and in various homes around London. He has been married and divorced twice. His current girlfriend, the socialite and fashion designer Darya (Dasha) Zhukova, who bore him a son in 2009, runs Moscow’s largest and most prominent private art gallery.

At 10:08 a.m., Abramovich’s former business associate Boris Berezovsky, 66, entered the courtroom. There was speculation that he had been waiting in a car around the corner to make sure he did not arrive first. Berezovsky was wearing a blue suit, almost identical to Abramovich’s, and a white shirt with its collar open. His pate was shiny, and what was left of the salt-and-pepper hair on the sides of his head begged to be cropped. Berezovsky is one of London’s most inconvenient residents. He fled here from Russia in 2000 and was granted political asylum in 2003. Over the years, an extensive circle of business and political associates has formed around him. The most prominent of these was former secret-police agent Alexander Litvinenko, who died of polonium poisoning in London in November 2006. It has long been believed that his death was ordered by the Kremlin. London police foiled an assassination plot against Berezovsky himself. Even so, he keeps a high profile in the city, which he uses as his base for a campaign against the regime of his onetime protégé Vladimir Putin. He has called for an overthrow of Putin, has funded anti-Putin efforts, and has meddled in the politics of neighboring countries, such as Ukraine and Belarus, in the hopes of causing Putin trouble. Moscow has responded by filing criminal charges against Berezovsky and demanding his extradition, which means he cannot risk traveling either to continental Europe or to the United States for fear of being arrested. Berezovsky maintains an office in London, but he has had few business dealings in the last 10 years. His fortune, once estimated at $3 billion, has shrunk precipitously and is desperately in need of replenishment. Berezovsky’s personal life is also messy: he has six children by three different women, two of whom used to be his wives, and his romantic involvements are varied and often overlapping.

The two oligarchs and their retainers took seats on either side of the courtroom. At root, the case about to be heard was a divorce proceeding. Berezovsky was the one seeking justice. He had been, in his telling, as wronged as a man could be. He had lost money, social status, and, in Abramovich, one of his most trusted friends. As is often the case in divorce proceedings, he was seeking to be compensated for his losses—though money could not possibly salve the hurt he felt. And, as is also the case in many divorce cases, the respondent, Abramovich, claimed that he owed nothing and had never done anything to violate the terms of the relationship. Indeed, he denied that the relationship had ever been a marriage.

Both the claimant and the respondent, and their respective entourages, had driven up to the Rolls Building in small fleets of Bentleys and Maybachs; Abramovich had been denied permission to come by helicopter and land on the roof. Both men maintain lavish living arrangements, and each has recently had to pay unfathomable amounts of money to end marriages. (Berezovsky set a record for a court-ordered divorce settlement in Britain by paying his ex-wife Galina a sum estimated to be between $150 million and $300 million; Abramovich appears to have matched that sum, agreeing to pay some $300 million to his ex-wife Irina.) But Berezovsky today is not the powerhouse he was. Starting a decade ago, he divested himself of his lucrative Russian businesses, and he has spent far too much money bankrolling opposition groups in the former Soviet Union. The financial crisis hit him hard—and so did that divorce payment. This year, Berezovsky fell off *The Sunday Times’*s list of the thousand richest people in Britain. Unless he receives an infusion of capital, he will not be able to afford his lifestyle much longer and will be a very poor excuse for an oligarch. He is asking his ex for billions.

On a Sunday evening, the day before the trial began, I visited Berezovsky at his office in Westminster. By oligarch standards, it is modest and tasteful: small and relatively subdued, with soft beige walls and furniture to match. But it is extraordinarily well secured. One needs a code to ride the elevator to his floor, where instead of a receptionist, one is met by a burly young Israeli. Berezovsky’s office is separated from the rest of the suite by an entry chamber with a keypad; the set of doors in front of a visitor will not open until the doors behind wheeze shut. Berezovsky, dressed in a Diesel polo shirt, dark jeans, and canvas sneakers, was pacing his office. Pictures of his former wives and his children are displayed alongside photographs of the murdered Litvinenko. The most prominent picture of all is a framed photograph of Berezovsky with the late Russian president Boris Yeltsin.

Berezovsky sounded out of breath, as if his words could not keep pace with his thoughts. The topic was the future of Russia, and his commentary poured forth as a stream of consciousness, except for a declarative pause every five minutes to remind me that the particulars of what he was saying were off the record. The overarching message was clear: his lawsuit was intended not only to restore his own fortunes but also to expose Vladimir Putin as the mastermind behind the criminal operation that is Russia today. This claim may or may not have been an attempt to frame a personal mission as a noble crusade. Berezovsky is no saint. But the trial has indeed exposed the workings of Russian corruption, and done so in an especially personal and vivid way.

II. “Beyond the Wildest Dreams”

At 10:40 on the first day of the proceedings, Berezovsky’s lawyer, Laurence Rabinowitz, stood before the court. A native of South Africa, he is considered one of London’s most influential commercial lawyers. Berezovsky’s case, Rabinowitz began, consists of two claims: a more than $5 billion claim for damages from the sale of the Sibneft oil company, and a $564 million claim stemming from the sale of the Rusal metals company. “As Your Ladyship will no doubt have observed from the very long written opening documents,” Rabinowitz said, addressing Judge Elizabeth Gloster, “those claims, both the Sibneft and the Rusal claims, have given rise to an enormous number of issues, both issues of fact and issues of law. At bottom, however, my lady, this is a case about two men who—and this is common ground—worked together to acquire an asset—that is, Sibneft—that would make them wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of most people, and who in the process, we say, became and remained good friends; until, that is, Mr. Berezovsky, who had adopted a high political profile in Russia, not least through his control of certain media outlets, fell out with those in power in the Kremlin and was forced to leave his home and create a new life abroad, leaving Mr. Abramovich in a position where he was in effect required to make a choice: to remain loyal to Mr. Berezovsky, his friend and mentor and the person to whom he owed his newly acquired great fortune, or instead, as we submit, to betray Mr. Berezovsky and to seek to profit from his difficulties. As Your Ladyship knows, it is our case that Mr. Abramovich at that point demonstrated that he was a man to whom wealth and influence mattered more than friendship and loyalty, and this has led him, finally, to go so far as to even deny, as he does before Your Ladyship, that he and Mr. Berezovsky were actually ever friends.” Rabinowitz would use the rest of the day to lay the groundwork for the claim that the relationship between Berezovsky and Abramovich was indeed one “of friends and partners.”

As I left the courtroom late in the afternoon, Berezovsky grabbed me by the elbow. “What do you think?” he demanded.

I said something noncommittal.

“You’ve read the book Married Life, haven’t you?” he asked.

I had not.

“Some Frenchman wrote it,” he explained. “The entire first half of the book is the story of marriage from her point of view, the second from his point of view. The exact same events.” (The plot rang a bell—but perhaps Berezovsky was thinking of the 1964 movie La Vie Conjugale.) Listening to this exchange was Yuli Dubov, Berezovsky’s longtime right-hand man. “Married life,” he interjected, “is a long supper in which the dessert is served first.”

Berezovsky and Abramovich first met in late 1994—it was a blind date arranged by a politician turned banker and took place on a sailboat in the Caribbean. The two men encountered each other at a time when they were actively re-inventing themselves and had almost settled on new personas—each needing the help of someone else to complete the makeover.

Berezovsky was a former academic, a mathematician who in 1989 had started exporting Soviet-made cars and, by leveraging credit against hyperinflation, had done very well—unlike his creditors. He had then expanded into car imports and service, and into banking. He bought a building in central Moscow, closed off the street on both ends—illegally claiming it as a private alley—and turned the building into a private club for the aspiring rich and powerful. In June 1994 he was leaving the building when a bomb went off in front of his Mercedes, killing the driver and injuring eight passersby but sparing Berezovsky. The assassination attempt mobilized him to shore up his influence with the politicians and, especially, the police and the secret police.

Abramovich’s lawyer, Jonathan Sumption, is arguably London’s most famous barrister. He has now joined the Supreme Court, an appointment postponed in order to be able to complete his work in Berezovskyv.*Abramovich.*He is also a prominent historian, the author of a highly acclaimed narrative history of the Hundred Years War. “You were one of the most politically influential oligarchs in Russia,” said Sumption, during his cross-examination of Berezovsky on the fourth day of the trial.

“I agree with that,” the claimant replied.

“You had no official position and had not been elected to any office,” Sumption went on. He feigned incredulity at this state of affairs and proceeded to cite some explanations of Berezovsky’s influence: that Berezovsky cultivated close relationships with President Boris Yeltsin’s family and advisers; that he maintained intimate relationships with several other oligarchs; and that he gained control over major media outlets, including the country’s most important television channel.

“The main reason that you did not mention is my intellectual capacity,” objected Berezovsky, without a hint of irony.

Abramovich was—and remains—Berezovsky’s opposite in many ways. Twenty years younger, he was just 28 at the time of their first meeting. Both of his parents died when he was a toddler, and Abramovich was raised by a series of relatives in various Soviet towns. In the 1980s he served his mandatory two years in the military, attended an obscure provincial university, and then, reportedly, dropped out. He started in business in the late 1980s, like Berezovsky, but his companies—there were many—were opaque. He imported this and that; he made plastic toys; he eventually got into trading in oil. He discovered that he liked everything about business and success except the publicity. The Russian people would not learn about him until late 1998, when a report circulated regarding a mysterious oligarch in Yeltsin’s inner circle. Abramovich became something of a sensation: an oligarch no one had ever heard of and no one had ever seen. A single, out-of-focus picture of him circulated for years. Eventually, he assumed a very circumscribed public persona, serving as governor of Chukotka, a region in Russia’s northeasternmost extremity, but—as his opponent’s lawyers would discover in preparing for trial—there was no record of his ever speaking in public.

Now, in court, recalling their first meeting, each man was dismissive of the other. When Sumption asked Berezovsky whether it was possible for Abramovich to get ahead in business without political connections, Berezovsky sneered, “It depends how smart he is and how much leverage he has. To get leverage, you need to be smart. He is not so [smart].” Abramovich, for his part, testifying later, affirmed his earlier written testimony—unlike his opponent, he strove not to ad-lib in court, and he spoke through a translator—which stated that Berezovsky “was not a ‘businessman’ in the sense that I understand the term. I never knew him to be interested in actually establishing and managing a business.”

Berezovsky and Abramovich may have been opposites, but they were united by a desire to make money. In Russia in the mid-1990s no one possessed inherited wealth; virtually no one was making anything for people to buy; a few individuals had done well by importing foreign goods. But the big money lay in taking over foundering state-owned companies, especially those involved in extractive industries such as oil, gas, and minerals. And to do that, one had to ask the right people the right way—personal connections and an unparalleled gift for negotiation were what Berezovsky brought to the table. Abramovich’s contribution was also non-monetary: he brought the idea, a way of moving forward. And when Berezovsky got to describing that idea on the sixth day of the trial, he seemed to forget that he had impugned his former partner’s intelligence just the day before.

“When I met Abramovich on the first time on the boat,” he recalled, “I was really excited how young man is so clever that he create very complicated condition, very complicated . . . I didn’t know the size of his business—is it big or is it not? But everybody were new on the market; you didn’t understand who is who. It is only from experience you could recognize what is that. And Abramovich produce impression that he’s capable person.”

Abramovich’s idea was to persuade the government to sell off several chunks of a state oil conglomerate that could be combined into a comprehensive oil company with its own reserves, an oil-refining plant, and sales companies. He had identified the slices of the state-oil pie that he wanted; it would be up to Berezovsky to make sure the slices were served.

The two men came to an arrangement, but that is where their common ground ends. They cannot agree on what the arrangement was.

III. The Rise of the Oligarchs

Where Berezovsky and Abramovich do agree is on their goal: to create that comprehensive company and gain control of it. The necessary steps were equally clear: Berezovsky would manipulate the bureaucracy into packaging the business and putting it up for auction; Abramovich and Berezovsky would secure a line of credit—and then Berezovsky would make sure theirs was the winning bid. Abramovich would then run the company—Berezovsky had no interest in management—and they would both profit from it.

“Loans for shares,” the scheme through which Abramovich and Berezovsky realized their plan, remains one of the most controversial episodes in recent Russian history. Some call it the robbery of the century. Others say it jump-started the Russian economy. Not unusually for Russia, the facts support both interpretations.

In 1995, the Russian economy and the Russian state were in disarray. The government legally owned most big industries but had lost the ability to manage them. Soviet-era executives known as “the red directors” had seized effective possession of the companies and were running them into the ground. The government lacked the human and financial resources to intervene. The loans-for-shares scheme was devised to solve both problems: Russian banks would lend the government money and, in exchange, would be handed temporary possession of majority stakes in key state-owned businesses. If the government defaulted, the lender would take possession of the shares, and thus of the companies.

It might seem like a win-win proposition: the government got a much-needed infusion of cash, and the firms got a dose of management. There were two problems, however: the auctions in which lenders competed were fixed—and so was the aftermath of the auctions, because the government had planned to default on the loans all along. “Loans for shares” was cover for selling off state companies to well-connected businessmen at rock-bottom prices and without parliamentary approval. The buyers would soon become the group of super-rich and ultra-influential Russians known as the oligarchs.

In court, Berezovsky’s side spun all this as a benign story: a business arrangement conducted in accordance with the freewheeling and yet not-really-so-bad mores of the time, and one to which each party brought a unique set of skills. Abramovich’s side painted the picture differently. In its view, Berezovsky was Abramovich’s krysha—the man who provided protection. The difference between a krysha and a mere “fixer” is crucial. Abramovich argued that he had been, in essence, a victim of coercion—that his affiliation with Berezovsky was hardly voluntary. His attorney, Jonathan Sumption, warned the judge in his opening statement that the situation would be hard to understand. “In our own national experience we have to go back to the 15th century to find anything remotely comparable,” he said, referring to the social and economic upheaval at the end of that century, when a group called the Merchant Adventurers monopolized the principal source of England’s income, the export of woolen clothing.

“I hope I’m not going to be having any expert evidence about life in the 15th century,” the judge cautioned.

“Not from me,” Sumption assured her, “but Your Ladyship has read Shakespeare, I have no doubt.”

The first question Sumption asked Berezovsky was a simple one: “In 1995, what was your opinion of corruption?”

“Definitely there was corruption in Russia,” Berezovsky replied, taken aback by the direction his testimony was about to take. “Much less than now, but there was.”

Berezovsky’s side had been worried that Sumption would try to badger him into losing his composure—a remarkably easy task. To aid in keeping his wits about him, Berezovsky imported several minders who referred to themselves collectively as “the Smart Jews”—they came from the U.S., Latvia, Ukraine, and Israel—and put them up at the Athenaeum hotel, in Mayfair. The Smart Jews all looked exactly the same—of indeterminate age, short in stature, with close-cropped hair, wearing expensive jeans and dark T-shirts—in a courtroom that otherwise sparkled with cuff links and wire-rimmed glasses. They sat with the press and often doodled during the proceedings. I took to identifying them mentally by the different brands of their eyeglasses—Armani, Wagner, GF Ferré.

“You’ve denied you were corrupt,” continued Sumption. But as for corruption itself, “do you disapprove of it?”

“I’ve never bribed anyone,” said Berezovsky, looking and sounding lost.

“Were you for it or against it?”

“Against it.”

“When a businessman approaches an elected official and says, ‘I will support your election campaign and you act favorably toward my business,’ is that corruption?”

Berezovsky paused. The Smart Jews stopped doodling. Berezovsky asked the interpreter—on hand even though Berezovsky had chosen to testify in English—for clarification. “Yes,” he finally said. “It is corrupt. Correct.”

Sumption proceeded to walk Berezovsky through the story of the initial creation of Sibneft, the company he and Abramovich had conjured into existence. The building blocks seemed to fit the definition of corruption on which Sumption and Berezovsky had just agreed. The Russian prime minister at the time, Victor Chernomyrdin, had been opposed to creating Sibneft, having intended to place its composite parts within the state oil conglomerate. Berezovsky had used his influence and his connections to go over Chernomyrdin’s head, to Yeltsin himself. Yeltsin would be up for re-election the following year and was worried about losing to the Communists—and support for his re-election campaign was an integral part of all of his relationships with the new rich. Berezovsky struck a deal: he would take over the main federal television channel, which reached 98 percent of Russian households, and would run it to bolster Yeltsin’s campaign. In exchange he would get 49 percent of the channel’s stock and the go-ahead on Sibneft, which would provide him with the money to invest in the television channel in the first place.

The channel was called Public Russian Television, or O.R.T. “O.R.T. was $200 million in debt,” Berezovsky testified. “And I thought we should help President Yeltsin fight against the Communists. It is impossible to capitalize O.R.T. or Sibneft without understanding there is stability in the country. I was the first to understand this.”

“But your witness statement says, ‘For me, O.R.T. is not only the first step into mass media, it is also good business,’” objected Sumption. “Is that wrong?”

“It’s correct.”

“So you used connections for business?”

“No. I want to stress it was not for business at all.”

“You needed $200 million for funding O.R.T. And you thought that an oil company would be a good source?”

“I took O.R.T. under control only to help with election coming 1996. I don’t want to give the impression that I was not interested in business. I was very interested. But I was interested to make money only to create political stability.”

It went on. Berezovsky was trying to show he was a force for good in Russia—and this is indeed something he fervently believes about himself. He had wanted to help Yeltsin, to make Russia and its businesses safe from the Communists, and he was interested in making money only insofar as he was able to use that money for a good cause. Sumption was trying to show that he was thoroughly corrupt: incapable of telling politics from business, business from friendship, and right from wrong.

“Summary,” said Sumption after about 15 minutes of back-and-forth. “‘You, Mr. President, get support from my television station, and I get put in a position where I stand to extract large sums of money from these two companies.’”

“Yes,” said Berezovsky at last. He was worn out.

“And that would increase your political influence.”

“I was not interested in that, just in the 1996 election.”

“Return to my first question, with which I began cross-examination: Would it be fair to describe that as a corrupt bargain?”

Berezovsky gathered himself. “Definitely not!” he replied.

IV. “I Shake Him Hand”

Obtaining financing proved to be the hardest part—and Berezovsky described it as a heroic feat: “Abramovich said, ‘Boris, we need money,’ and I said, ‘O.K., fine.’ . . . And I start to travel all over the world, including Soros, including Deutsche Bank, including German banks, including Japanese, including Japan, including . . . South Korea, trying to find funds. No one give me even one dollar, and Mr. Soros told, ‘Boris, you are crazy. Next day Communists will take power, they take everything from you. Take your family and leave Russia. You have already enough money.’” The search for money proved fruitless through most of 1995—and at the end of the year, the presidential decree allowing the loans-for-shares scheme would expire. The possibility of the Communists’ coming back in 1996 seemed very real.

The Smart Jews had surely heard Berezovsky rehearse this part of the story many times; they listened with studied uninterest. The one in GF Ferré drew an elaborate design on his hotel notepad; the design was either the logo of an obscure company or the Russian transcription of Sumption’s name. The man in Wagner was taking notes in Hebrew with an expensive pen.

In the fall of 1995, Berezovsky finally brokered a financing deal with a Russian bank that belonged to another oligarch-in-the-making, Alexander Smolensky. It extended credit in excess of $100 million, Berezovsky testified, and was made without collateral. “I shake him hand, and he said, ‘Boris, you are person who I trust,’” recalled Berezovsky. Sumption, for the benefit of the court, indulged in a Dickensian pantomime of extreme disbelief.

Now Berezovsky needed to secure a decree establishing the auction itself. As time was running out, he paid a midnight visit to Alfred Kokh, an official who could arrange for it. Kokh described the visit in an interview with the Russian edition of Forbes: “‘Please excuse the disturbance but we are ready to go for a loans-for-shares auction on Sibneft and there is so little time left.’ . . . And why should I object? We needed the money. We needed to get money into the budget. All we said to anybody before these auctions was, Do what you want with these companies, just make sure you pay taxes.”

The next step was ensuring that theirs would be the winning bid. The Abramovich-Berezovsky team was putting up $100 million. There had been three other potential contestants, as Sumption reminded Berezovsky. One was disqualified because of poorly prepared documents, a fact that Berezovsky remembered bringing to the auction organizers’ attention. Another, it appears, promised Berezovsky to bid low. And the third, a company called Seneco, withdrew its bid when the auction was already under way, as a result of prolonged negotiations.

“So would it be fair to say the auction had been stitched up in advance?” asked Sumption.

“No,” said Berezovsky, “because I had in my pocket two proposals, which I used depending on Seneco’s decision.”

“But . . . it was impossible for any other outcome other than [Abramovich’s company] winning?”

“Yes.”

Sumption looked triumphant: he had demonstrated, as he saw it, that Berezovsky was thoroughly corrupt. Berezovsky looked perplexed: he had simply detailed his very ingenious plan. The Smart Jews looked concerned: Sumption had shown Berezovsky to be fidgety and inconsistent and saturated in a worldview that the judge would find foreign in every way.

Sibneft was auctioned off on December 28, 1995, and Abramovich’s company, called NFK, was the winner. In June 1996, Boris Yeltsin, backed by the oligarchs and by O.R.T., won re-election, beating back the Communists. In May 1997, the Russian state defaulted on its debt to Sibneft as planned, and Abramovich took control of the company.

Which brings us to the question at the heart of the trial: Who were the official owners of Sibneft? Berezovsky maintains that the agreement was simple: 50 percent of the shares would belong to Abramovich; Berezovsky and his closest business partner, Badri Patarkatsishvili, would hold 25 percent each. Abramovich claims that he always planned to take sole possession of the company and would reward Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili handsomely for their help.

No document shows that either Berezovsky or Patarkatsishvili owned any part of Sibneft. Abramovich says that this is because they did not in fact own any part, while Berezovsky says that this is because, given how deep his own involvement in politics was, an off-the-books arrangement was necessary. Abramovich made annual payments to Berezovsky and his partner, but this clarifies nothing: Berezovsky claims that these were dividends, while Abramovich objects that Sibneft never showed a profit in the 1990s, so there would have been no basis for dividends. In Abramovich’s account, these were essentially payments to Berezovsky for his political influence. All parties agree that the arrangement, whatever it was, ended in 2001 with a lump-sum payment of $1.3 billion. In Berezovsky’s version, this was a buyout at a heavy discount. In Abramovich’s version, it was a generous last payment to a godfather who had outlived his usefulness.

V. The Inner Circle

In 1999, a virtual unknown became prime minister of Russia. Secret-police colonel Vladimir Putin had been plucked from bureaucratic obscurity by Berezovsky as Yeltsin’s successor—or so Berezovsky likes to believe. Berezovsky certainly ran much of Putin’s presidential campaign, using his television channel and other media assets, just as he had done four years earlier with Yeltsin’s campaign; this time he went even further, creating a new political party for the candidate, organizing the speedy publication of an official biography, and virtually inventing Putin’s public image from scratch. But soon after Putin was elected president, in March 2000, their relationship began to sour. In May, Berezovsky used a newspaper he owned, the leading business daily, *Kommersant,*to publish a scathing critique of Putin’s proposed reforms of Russia’s federal and electoral structures.

In August, a Russian nuclear submarine, the Kursk, sank off Russia’s Arctic coast; 118 men died, 28 of them likely as a result of bungled rescue efforts that the country watched unfold in real time. The tragedy became a public-relations disaster, in part because Berezovsky’s O.R.T. aired an audio recording of the president’s meeting with victims’ families, during which Putin lost his temper, lashing out at the families and at unnamed enemies. By this time, another oligarch and media magnate, Vladimir Gusinsky, had been jailed briefly and forced to leave the country—but only after signing his media assets over to a state-owned company. The same fate now seemed likely to befall Berezovsky.

In October 2000, the French newspaper Le Figaro published an interview with Putin in which he held forth on the oligarchs: “Generally, I don’t think that the State and the oligarchs are irreconcilable enemies. Rather, I think that the state is holding a big club in its hands, which it will use only once. To deliver a crushing blow on the head. We haven’t yet resorted to that club. We just picked it up—and that was enough to attract public attention. But if we get really angry, we will not hesitate to use it.”

Berezovsky read this interview at his vacation home in Cap d’Antibes, France. He took it as a direct threat—confirmed by a summons to present himself for interrogation—and decided not to return to Moscow. He has lived in exile ever since. Speaking at the trial, Abramovich suggested that Berezovsky interpreted the interview correctly: “If I’d wanted to blackmail the state, I’d also fear getting hit over the head with a club.”

Somewhere along the way, Berezovsky and Abramovich had traded places—and Berezovsky seems to have been late to notice. Abramovich was in the inner circle now; he was the one with the connections and the political influence—and in a position to decide the fate of Berezovsky’s businesses.

If the proceedings in Courtroom 26 had been a movie, the critics would have ripped it to shreds for presenting characters whose differences were so exaggerated. When Berezovsky was on the stand, he was emotional to the point of being overwrought—articulate yet ridiculous in his broken English, which seemed oddly suited to the broken reality he was attempting to describe. Abramovich spoke Russian—he claims not to speak or understand English—and the presence of an interpreter increased the already great formal distance between Abramovich and his audience. But even when speaking Russian, he was quiet and somewhat stilted. The only similarity between the two men was how profusely they perspired on the stand.

On December 6, 2000, Abramovich, Berezovsky, and Patarkatsishvili met at Le Bourget, a business-aviation airport outside Paris. Patarkatsishvili secretly recorded the conversation, and the transcript would become one of the very few actual documents that could be examined at this trial. The three men discussed Abramovich’s offer to buy O.R.T. from Berezovsky; they also talked about Berezovsky’s and Patarkatsishvili’s fears that their business associate and one of Berezovsky’s closest friends, Nikolai Glushkov, might be arrested in connection with a corruption probe. Still, the transcript is open to interpretation: Berezovsky claimed that Abramovich was blackmailing him into selling O.R.T. and that he had refused; Abramovich maintained that they reached an agreement on the sale.

Why did Abramovich, who had never had the least interest in the limelight, suddenly want to buy O.R.T.? Questioned by Rabinowitz, he denied repeatedly that he was doing Putin’s bidding. Rather, he said, he was merely interested in self-protection. “I had two reasons. Number one, I was associated closely with Mr. Berezovsky, I was like a shadow of Mr. Berezovsky, so if at some point he wouldn’t calm down and if he didn’t stop using O.R.T. in his fight with the government, I would suffer personally; and most importantly, Sibneft as a company would not be stable. Secondly, Badri understood that very well: he understood that sooner or later this would come to a sorry end.” Badri Patarkatsishvili died in England in 2008, so it remains Abramovich’s word against Berezovsky’s. But in defending himself, Abramovich had made an important admission: that being in opposition to Putin was dangerous to businesses and the people who ran them, and had been from the earliest days of Putin’s rule.

The day after the Le Bourget meeting, Nikolai Glushkov was arrested in Moscow. Berezovsky believes this was in direct retaliation for his refusal to sell O.R.T.—Glushkov had been essentially taken hostage. Abramovich maintains that Berezovsky had already agreed to sell the television channel, so there could be no cause-and-effect relationship. In Berezovsky’s version of events, his agreement to sell came only two weeks later, during a meeting in Cap d’Antibes; Abramovich says no such meeting ever took place. Both sides agree that Abramovich bought 49 percent of O.R.T. from Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili for $150 million.

And that, according to Berezovsky, was the end of the friendship: at the conclusion of the Cap d’Antibes meeting, he says, he told Abramovich he never wanted to see him again. Abramovich denies there was such a meeting but acknowledges the end of the relationship. Why, Berezovsky’s lawyer, Laurence Rabinowitz, asked him, would they part ways if things were as amicable as Abramovich had described them?

“This is the question about the nature of our friendship,” Abramovich replied. “Our friendship was based on my payouts. That wasn’t a friendship when—as, for example, it’s me, my friends, we are friends for many years and it doesn’t matter for me what the position is, where they work; we simply are friends. And with Mr. Berezovsky, our friendship was based on my payoffs. Each time when he would invite me, obviously I would arrive, if I had such opportunity. But this word, the word ‘friendship’ that we are discussing here, big friendship, strong friendship, friendship between men, this is not quite the same. Moreover, after the situation with Kursk submarine, I started looking at Mr. Berezovsky in a completely different way. For me, it was a turning point in our relationship. I think that he took a completely dishonorable position. It was a large tragedy for Russia and he used that, you know, to demonstrate to the president who is boss, who has to be listened to, whose recommendations have to be adhered to. And from that moment on, I started treating him somewhat differently.”

Divorce court again: one party recalls a dramatic break; the other remembers a gradual tapering off and a swell of disappointment. Once communication between Abramovich and Berezovsky ceased, Patarkatsishvili became the go-between. What happened next, according to Berezovsky, was that Abramovich began blackmailing him into selling his shares in Sibneft. “In early 2001, Badri reported to me that Mr. Abramovich had told him he was being squeezed by the Kremlin to stop his relations with us, and that if we did not sell our interest in Sibneft, President Putin would expropriate it,” Berezovsky said in his prepared witness statement before the trial. “I understood Mr. Abramovich to be threatening that Badri and I could either sell our interest in Sibneft and receive some money (albeit at a gross undervalue), or he would ensure that we would lose our interest in any event.”

Abramovich’s version is different. He says that Patarkatsishvili approached him in January 2001, demanding a final payment that would serve to close the long-running relationship between Abramovich, the owner of Sibneft, and Berezovsky, the godfather. Whatever the truth, Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili received $1.3 billion. Two years later, Sibneft merged with the oil giant Yukos; at that time Yukos paid $3 billion for 20 percent of Sibneft’s shares.

In April 2001, Nikolai Glushkov unsuccessfully tried to escape. In May, Patarkatsishvili left Russia, going into exile. In 2004, a Moscow court cleared Glushkov of fraud charges but found him guilty of the escape attempt, sentencing him to time served. He was released and left for London immediately. In July 2006, he applied for political asylum in Great Britain. It was only then that Berezovsky finally felt free to challenge the terms of his parting from Abramovich, he said, and began preparing to mount a legal action. Glushkov was present in Courtroom 26 every day, always wearing a different bow tie.

On his last day of testimony, Abramovich tried to explain that his instincts had always been to operate openly, but that the reality of post-Soviet Russia simply would not allow it. “I wanted to show everyone that life is different,” he said. “It’s new kind of life, we are earning this money, we wanted to pay taxes and live honestly. And while I was thinking about that, a person, I think his surname was Tarasov [Artem Tarasov, the first self-identified millionaire in the U.S.S.R.], he declared that he had earned three million rubles, that he had paid all the taxes. He was a member of the Communist Party, he paid party contributions, he did everything completely honestly and above board. You can’t imagine what happened in the country: people were saying that he should be put in custody, to prison, this is unbearable, this is shameful, nobody has the right to earn so much; and in the end he left for the U.K. And I remember that very well and I decided that I was not going to stick my neck out. The next person who decided to declare his earnings, his shares, and that he was such an open person, was Mr. Khodorkovsky [oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, arrested in 2003 and still in prison]. Well, at that time I had the desire to declare everything and to show everything and to make it all obvious, but then I decided it won’t lead to anything good; it would only create problems for myself. So I decided: sit quietly and do business and don’t stick your neck.”

Again, this is exactly what Berezovsky wanted Abramovich to admit: that doing business in Putin’s Russia today is as dangerous as doing business back in the Soviet era. The fact that this is so explains why virtually no claim on either side is documented, and why the basic facts of the case are nearly impossible to establish. Ultimately, as often happens when love fails, both men’s stories must be to some extent true. Did Berezovsky own shares of Sibneft? In his telling, ownership is a function of care, identification, and public perception—and in his mind there is no doubt that he was an owner. In Abramovich’s version, ownership is a function of hands-on management and explicit agreements—and in his mind, Berezovsky was always an intermediary and never an owner. In the end, neither side told a fully convincing story. Abramovich’s lawyer relied on the lack of documentation to dispute Berezovsky’s ownership—but his own client’s testimony explained why there would be no such documentation. Berezovsky’s lawyer stressed the nature and logic of the two men’s relationship, but he succeeded in showing only that his interpretation was plausible, not that it was true.

I asked the Smart Jews what they thought and came away having to admit that they were indeed very smart. You can think about this trial in two ways, they said. One way is narrow: it’s about ascertaining the technical nature of a business relationship. The other way is broad: it’s about righting the pathological ways in which a particular society has organized itself. “I think the two sides are in different courts,” the one in the Wagner eyeglasses told me. “Sumption is in the Commercial Court of London, and Rabinowitz is in the International Tribunal in The Hague.”

Judge Gloster, it turns out, was in the Commercial Court. On August 31, she finally issued a decision, rejecting all of Berezovsky’s claims. She stated that he “had deluded himself into believing his own version of events.” The two men were left with what they had before the trial—minus the expenses of the actual court battle, which were said to have beaten all previous British records. Whether one chooses to accept Berezovsky’s version of events or Abramovich’s, Russia was put on display as a Mafia state in which only those who maintain good relations with Putin can hope to keep their money and their freedom. The difference between Berezovsky and Abramovich is only this: Berezovsky claims it was not always so, that Russia was once a place where at least some rules applied—until Putin came to power. Abramovich believes he has been doing business in a Mafia state all along, and that Berezovsky was part of it.

By the time Judge Gloster rendered her decision, another, not dissimilar battle of the oligarchs was under way in a London courtroom, this time between the metal moguls Michael Cherney and Oleg Deripaska. (It has since been settled out of court.) The term krysha was by now familiar.